By Asim Zubcevic

A Bosnian Muslim scholar examines the challenges facing the restoration of the country’s historic sites

“All over the country, mosques and minarets have been demolished, including some of the finest examples of 16th-century Ottoman architecture in the western Balkans. These buildings were not caught in the cross-fire of military engagements—in towns such as Bijeljina and Banja Luka, the demolitions had nothing to do with fighting at all—but were blown up with explosives in the night, and bulldozed the following day. The people who planned and ordered these actions like to say that history is on their side. What they show by their deeds is that they are waging a war against the history of their country.”1

Thus wrote a British historian in 1994. When one year later the war against Bosnia ended with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), the country could survey its losses: over 250,000 dead, more than two million refugees, tens of thousands of raped women and girls, and over 3,000 architectural monuments destroyed or damaged.2

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD: SCHOLARS PREPARE THE GROUND

It is an indisputable fact that Bosnia’s cultural heritage was destroyed in a systematic and methodical fashion: religious monuments, libraries and other landmarks identified with various communities. The destruction of Bosnian Muslim heritage in particular was not a by-product of the war, but a deliberate policy that went hand in hand with an attempt to exterminate them. It does not come as a surprise then that the largest destruction occurred in areas outside military activity.3

Historical precedence for dynamiting mosques and razing Muslim graveyards in the Balkans may be traced back to the 19th century when the nascent Balkan states went about obliterating their Muslim communities and their cultural heritage, as expressed in one of the most highly regarded pieces of Serbian poetry:

And all their houses we did see ablaze;

Of all their mosques both great and small

We left but one accursed heap

For passing folk to cast their glance of scorn.4

More recently those who launched the genocidal assault on Bosnia drew inspiration from Serbian intellectuals including Serbian orientalists whose contribution to portraying Muslims and their heritage as alien, inferior, and threatening can only be described as significant. In their articles and books in the 1980s, they deliberately distorted Islam, dehumanized and delegitimized Muslims as a community, providing “scholarly” justification and intellectual respectability to ethnic cleansing.5 This term refers to the removal of an undesirable population; it generally went hand in hand with destroying physical traces of that population’s presence. Thus a leading “expert” on Islam wrote that “trying to conquer the world … they use their birth-rate, the construction of mosques and pressure against non-Muslims.”6