0 I, Heba Al-Adawy, give permission for public access to my thesis and for any copying to be done at the discretion of the archives librarian and/or the College librarian. 1 “Religious” and “Secular” in Socialist Bosnia-Herzegovina 1945-1980s By Heba Al-Adawy An Undergraduate Thesis Submitted In Partial Fulfillment For the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with High Honors Department of History Mount Holyoke College‟ 2010 2 To Prof. Jeremy King for being the most wonderful professor and advisor; and for being like family to me during my time at Mount Holyoke College 3 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to study this region in some depth, and with some understanding. While all mistakes in this work are mine, I am deeply grateful to everyone who has helped make this project possible. I thank the women of Bosfam in Tuzla (Bosnia-Herzegovina), for giving me the inspiration to start this project, and Iain Guest for his work with the survivors of Srebrenica. It was through his campaigns that I became interested in the history of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Alison Sluiter for handing me some of my first books on Bosnia. Elmina Kulasic and Amila Merdzanovic for all the inspiring conversations. I am also grateful to Audrey Helfant Budding for pointing me to relevant secondary sources. I am indebted to my friends, for supporting me through thick and thin. I am immensely grateful to Mehwash for her support till the very last minute, and for the long hours of conversation. To Kruts, Arts, Jiggie, May, Iryna and Nina for being simply wonderful. I would like to thank my readers, Professor McGinness, Professor Weber and Professor Harold Goodyear. I am much obliged to them for their time and dedication. A special thank you to Professor Goodyear for his support over junior year and the summer of 2009. For Professor Jeremy King, words cannot do enough justice. I am honored and privileged to have known such a wonderful person. Working with him has made my senior year truly memorable. I thank him for his unwavering faith and investment. He has been a major source of motivation over the years, and it is to him that I dedicate my work. Finally, I owe everything to my parents, my sister Nadia, and my grandmother, Nanima. Their prayers and unquestioning faith have kept me afloat through all the ups and downs. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………6 SECTION I A Prelude: Community and its Limits in Ordinary Bosnian Life ……………………………………………22 Chapter 1: The Creation of a ―Secular‖ State Narrative…35 Conclusion: Narrowing of Parameters….57 SECTION II A Prelude: The New Socialist Community……………63 Chapter 2: ―The voice of thy brother‘s blood crieth unto me‖……70 Conclusion: Turning the Tables…………………95 SECTION III A Prelude: The ―Bascarsija:‖ An Ottoman City in the Socialist Era…106 Chapter 3: Who were the Bosnian Muslims….112 Conclusion: The aftermath……………………………………149 EPILOGUE….162 WORKS CITED. ……………………………………………………165 5 Map taken from Jozo Tomasevich, ―War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941 – 1945,‖ (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 480 6 Introduction The Families of the victims ask the hardest… of questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?1 ―This is the only life that there is,‖ concluded an anguished survivor of political conflict in J.M Coetzee‘s Disgrace.2 At the heart of her statement was a rejection of particularistic morality, whether ―secular‖ or ―religious,‖ and an acceptance of a single life shared by all humanity. And yet the problem of defining the peripheries of co-existence and tolerance in heterogeneous societies retracts deep into the annals of time. It questions how the ―self‖ constitutes itself in relation to perceptions of alterity; how human interactions within a shared space can escalate into instances of cruelest brutality, expelling any possibility of heterogeneity from the idea of ―freedom.‖ This study looks towards the essence of the secular, i.e. the idea of pertaining to the temporal world as opposed to any religious after-world, as an ideal of co-existence, a negotiation of different sensibilities in a common space. Often in the tragedies and travesties of human life, the ideal fades, leaving only an empty shell to be invoked and reified in political processes. This narrative by no means provides an answer to the realization of this ideal. But I hope that it does encourage some reflection on how to understand the scope and limits of communal boundaries, whilst keeping the ideal alive. This narrative picks up from a particular time and place in Southeastern Europe. It begins amidst the ravages of the Second World War in the former Yugoslavia, from the fascist and totalitarian mechanisms that had splintered various 1 Antije Krog, Country of my Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa (Random House Inc, 2000), 67 2 J.M Coetzee, Disgrace (Penguin, 2000). 7 communities, enveloping them in a web of perpetrators, victims, collaborators and bystanders. It stops forty years later, towards the end of Titoist regime, when multi-national Yugoslavia was on the brink of collapse. The intermediary phase was that of Communist Yugoslavia. This relatively stable time was characterized not simply by the coercion of the Communist state, but also by a strong, often idealistic, commitment to cultural diversity, the ―brotherhood and unity‖ of the various ―nationalities‖ in Yugoslavia. The territories that once constituted Yugoslavia included Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia and Montenegro, the borders of which were drawn in accordance with ―ethnic‖ and historical principles. This project focuses on Bosnia-Herzegovina within the broader context of Socialist Yugoslavia. The territories that once constituted Yugoslavia carried a deep confessional legacy. They were a battleground for Catholicism and Orthodoxy in the medieval period, the Anatolian jewel of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period, and a constitutional experiment of ―nationalities‖ by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy during the modern period. The term ―South Slavs,‖ here, refers particularly to the inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina, conjoined by a common regional identity and a language, and divided into three confessional communities: Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims. To the east of Bosnia-Herzegovina was the Republic of Serbia, dominated by ―Serbian‖ Orthodox Christians, identifying with the patron St. Sava. To the North and West was the republic of Croatia, inhabited by Catholic Christians who looked towards the Apostles Cyril and Methodius, who had preached Christianity in the Balkans in the 9th century. Despite being 8 linguistically identical, Serbian and Croatian are now considered separate national languages based on the varying ekavian (eastern/Cyrillic) and ijekavian (western/Latin) dialects. Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina speak Serbo-Croatian, but have created a different dialect, Bosanski, incorporating Turkish words. Once inhabited collectively by members of the different confessional communities, Bosnia-Herzegovina now stands shattered in the wake of ethnic cleansing, and with little possibility of change. Why and how did social interactions take such a dramatic turn, dissolving into an abyss of violence? What were the contradictions in the efforts to forge an integrated ―civic‖ Yugoslav unity? How could the celebration of cultural diversity unleash such antagonisms at the collapse of Yugoslavia? A famous Yugoslav novelist and Nobel Peace Winner, Ivo Andric, characterized the spirit of Bosnia in fictionalized chronicles published after the Second World War. Amidst political upheavals and even natural disasters, he found that the only sense of permanence in Bosnia was the constancy of human interactions within a common territory. In Bosnian towns, different confessional communities were deeply intermingled; each confession recognized the other, but lived in its own compartmentalized world, and held a separate historical consciousness. Andric‘s writings, which later served as a sort of Bible in Communist Yugoslavia, were marked with contempt for the public expression of religious difference. In the aftermath of the Second World War, many Communist intellectuals and idealists shared Andric‘s contempt for ultra-nationalist as well as confessional divisions. Andric‘s writings, nonetheless, evoke what can often be a 9 reality in heterogeneous societies; individuals may live side by side and affirm their separate customs, but with little real empathy. Even now, instances of brutal ‗ethnic‘ cleansing and social exclusion call to mind the danger of exclusionary social perspectives. This essay explores the Communist period in Yugoslavia, and seeks to complicate the dilemma of identity and difference. It raises the following questions: how can differences be accommodated? Which ones? And more importantly, to what end? In contrast to Andric‘s picture, the Communist period can, perhaps, be characterized as intimate integration and socialist homogeneity, but without empathy. Communist Yugoslavia sought to restructure society through secular and socialist reforms, and to simultaneously instill values of ―civic‖ patriotism in people. Religious institutions were significantly marginalized, and religious expression forbidden in public and political life. The new regime attempted to achieve considerable social integration through state institutions such as public schools, factories, and village councils. New property laws restricted