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PARTISAN REVIEW
a view calls into question, again, the reality of multiculturalism in
Bosnia, even in its cosmopolitan capital of Sarajevo.
Bringa notes another changing custom in the Bosnian village that
relates to the question of why Sarajevo was singled out for destruction.
Mention has already been made of the firebombing of the National and
University Library and the obvious attempt to destroy documents and
artifacts of Bosnian Muslim culture. However, some Bosnian intellectu–
als, such as Gojko Beric, consider the siege an assault by Serbian "peas–
ants" (or in the case of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, by a
Montenegran "peasant") on the high culture of Sarajevo that remained
outside their reach (Beric asserts that Karadzic, a psychiatrist practicing
in Sarajevo, was never accepted by the city's intellectual elite) . Bringa
observed that in village life, those with a modern outlook considered
"Muslim" customs primitive or "of the village." Thus, although every–
one in the village had previously eaten on the floor from a single pot,
inhabitants of the newer neighborhoods now all ate at the table.
Catholics considered the old practice a Muslim one, but everyone who
now ate at the table viewed the custom as more urban or modern .
If
in
Yugoslavia Muslims were (erroneously) associated with the village and
the "primitive," Sarajevo must have represented to the provincial mind
a double affront-a cosmopolitan and seemingly exclusionary center
where the majority of citizens were both "modern" and (ethnically)
Muslim.
Like Karahasan, other writers have pondered the reality of multieth–
nic integration in Sarajevo and beyond . In his essay "The Intellectual
and the Creative Conscience of the Writer"
(Forgotten Country
2:
War
Prose in Bosnia-Hercegovina,
I997),
the Sarajevan writer Mirko Mar–
janovic observes that multiculturalism in the region can succeed only on
the foundation of a
genuine
mutual understanding and experience of
cultural differences among all citizens. He speaks of the
writer's
need to
experience cultural differences among all citizens, for the artistic com–
munity can serve as a progressive force for change: "The writer must
know well all the organisms, culture, religion, ethnos, history above all,
everything that is in common and what is not, to make the body and
himself healthy and his intellectual and creative conscience." Experience
in Sarajevo and the rest of ex-Yugoslavia has shown, of course, that the
experience of other cultures that Marjanovic recommends for writers
should be the goal of everyone in multiethnic communities .
While examining the reality of multiculturalism in Sarajevo, we
should also consider the long-range historical experience of various eth–
nicities. Despite the recent catastrophe, and a similar besieging and
