The region of Sandzak—a land strip at the crossroads connecting Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo—has been described as “the last piece of the Yugoslav puzzle.” That description refers to the inexorable process of disintegration of former Yugoslavia’s multiethnic, multiconfessional social tissue that began in the early 1990s. Along with its main city, Novi Pazar, Sandzak thus remains something of an exception in having avoided identity-politics-fueled violent conflict between its two main ethnic communities, the Serbs and the Bosniaks.1 In 1991–1995, parts of Sandzak in Serbia, which include the city of Novi Pazar, became active sites of a brutal regional conflict. Yet despite years of armed violence pursued to recast the political geography of former Yugoslavia by creating new states in Sandzak’s proximity, including a partition of Sandzak between Serbia and Montenegro and extended military presence of Serb forces in and around Novi Pazar, the city was spared from becoming a battlefield and the site of human and physical devastation to which its Bosnian and Kosovar neighbors had succumbed. Rather, and somewhat counterintuitively, Novi Pazar thrived economically amid regional conflict and was able to preserve interethnic peace.
Some fifteen years since the end of Yugoslavia’s succession wars, Novi Pazar is a peaceful but unsettled place. Interethnic tensions, which exist alongside deep rifts within the Bosniak community and occasional overt violence fueled by cultural radicalization and divisive politics, have become prominent features of everyday life in Novi Pazar. Although the city is suffused with widespread poverty and marked by forms of everyday insecurity, the precarious balance sustained by Novi Pazar is also a testament to its resilience and remaining civic capabilities.
In attempting to explain the manifestations of insecurity in postwar Novi Pazar, as well as its causes and how the city dwellers cope with it, it is worth recalling an episode from the wartime years. This serves to demonstrate the city’s urban capabilities at the time and provides insight that animates the investigation in this chapter of why and how the city’s security predicament has changed.
During the Serbian armed forces’ siege of Novi Pazar, local businessmen, irrespective of their ethnic backgrounds and despite rising tensions in interethnic relations, joined forces to negotiate with the commanding officers and prevent the onslaught on the city that would have decimated their businesses and endangered their livelihoods.2 Local residents, in a similar show of solidarity, made huge efforts to assist Serbian military personnel by furnishing their every request3 in exchange for protecting the city from attacks. This kind of solidarity in the face of adversity has long faded in the people’s daily experience; their everyday concerns revolve around a lack of stable livelihoods and welfare protection, which are the main source of everyday insecurity in Novi Pazar.
The argument I make in this chapter is that although civic capabilities are critical in explaining the relative absence of violence, they are difficult to sustain in the long term in the context of broader interrelated dynamics of economic decline, war-induced demographic change, and political and religious radicalization. The emergence of new actors as well as changing norms and identities triggered by the multiple transitions from war and a Socialist-era development model have affected and disturbed urban relationships and processes and engendered widening social and spatial divisions in the city. In the search for security, citizens have turned to various authorities—following their ethnic, party, or religious affiliation—or resorted to the private sphere. The ability to mount a joint response to resolve common issues of concern, as captured by the foregoing example of businessmen and citizens acting together for a common good during the city’s worst moments in recent history, has shrunk as a consequence. However, they have by no means vanished.
This chapter is an attempt to capture local people’s understanding of the social processes in the city and how those processes relate to specific manifestations of insecurity as articulated by Novi Pazar residents. It draws on sixteen interviews conducted in Novi Pazar in spring 2015 with a cross-section of local businessmen, civil society activists, experts, journalists, and city government officials and informal follow-up interviews with a number of respondents over the Internet. It opens with a description of Novi Pazar’s transition from war and a Socialist-era development model that traces economic, political, demographic, and cultural changes that have shaped the particular ways in which the city transformed socially.
The following section focuses on how physical and social spaces have been transformed in response to the processes of social change that accompanied transition from war and the Socialist regime. I also discuss those transformations in relation to specific manifestations of insecurity. The penultimate section looks at why maintaining the city’s urban capabilities has been difficult, and I offer examples of remaining civic capacities that illustrate the city’s resilience. Finally, in the conclusion I reflect on the dual dynamics of disintegration and reconstitution of Novi Pazar urbanity.
Transitions and Social Transformation in Novi Pazar
Novi Pazar was established by the Ottomans in the fifteen century and was the second-largest city after Sarajevo, the present capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina and a point of reference in the redefinition of contemporary identity among Novi Pazar’s Muslims. Historically, Novi Pazar (meaning “new market”) was the administrative and commercial hub in that part of the Ottoman Empire. During Socialist times in former Yugoslavia, Novi Pazar underwent a process of modernization through a state-coordinated industrialization policy. This ushered in an era of relative economic progress in the 1970s based on an industry dominated by labor-intensive textiles and leather processing. This type of industry would both spur the city’s economic boom during the wars in the region and become its economic “death bed” during the transition to a market economy.
In retrospect, those were the golden days in the recent history of the city and its local economy. Its dynamism attracted an influx of workers—low-skilled and educated alike—from various parts of Serbia, alongside significant rural-urban migration, giving the city its distinct urban profile (Lyon 2008; Interview with Nusret Nicevic 2015).
The relative economic prosperity in a city that was still classified as one of Serbia’s less developed municipalities was reflected in the change in the urban landscape and sociocultural processes in the city. The Socialist era saw the construction of several of the city’s urban landmarks, including the Vrbnik Hotel—known locally as “Novi Pazar’s beauty” and perched above the Raska river, which traverses the city center—and lucna zgrada, the sprawling building consisting of block housing for workers from local factories and overlooking one of the city’s main thoroughfares. The high-rise apartment blocks mix with the Ottoman-style architecture that is typical of much of the old town and other cultural and religious landmarks, such as the St. Peter and Paul orthodox church. Taken together, these buildings were visible signs of the city’s ethnic and cultural diversity (ICG 2005). This diversity was also manifested in a thriving cultural and sporting scene, which was maintained despite the remnants of conservative structures that the Socialist promotion of modern, secular ways of life had failed to completely erase and which, arguably, provided a fertile ground for the upsurge in religious radicalism in the 1990s.
The city’s economic demise began in earnest during former Yugoslavia’s final decade and at the onset of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina—a milestone event in Sandzak’s recent history. In 1992, the city was facing economic meltdown. Yugoslavia’s descent into war was inextricably linked to Serbia’s increasingly hostile attitude toward Islam and Muslims, including those living within its own borders in the Muslim-majority Sandzak (Biserko 2010; ICG 2005; Morrison and Roberts 2013). The Milosevic regime implemented a systematic policy of repression and fear in Sandzak in response to the 1991 political initiative hatched in Novi Pazar to pursue an agenda of self-determination for Sandzak that was linked to the broader Muslim (Bosniak) “question”.4
During the war in its neighborhood, Novi Pazar experienced a change in economic fortunes due to the imposition of international sanctions on the rump state of Yugoslavia (then a Serbia-Montenegro union), which came into effect in May 1992. The production of jeans and footwear (including counterfeit items) boomed, benefiting from the exploitation of local entrepreneurs’ transnational connections with the Sandzak diaspora in Turkey. Truckloads of goods were transported across the Balkan war zones and their (supposedly) internationally policed borders throughout the Serbian interior and farther afield (Kostovicova 2003; ICG 2005; Muminovic 2005). In many factories, the production cycle continued uninterrupted during the NATO shelling of the city.5
In a fluid legal context created by the absence of an effective state presence at the local level, much of the illegal business relied on trust and existing social bonds nurtured within the confines of this small city, which often crisscrossed ethnic demarcation lines, as well as local and transnational space.6 The city hosted a bustling foreign exchange market fueled by illegal trade, including weapons, drugs, and people. Conducted by organized crime groups, the trade flourished under the war economy, which was thriving in this border region (Morrison and Roberts 2013, 162). Amid a hubbub of thriving informal commerce, the Socialist-era factories—once the pride of the city and its economic lifeline—lay idle and neglected, their former skills base repurposed for the needs of a booming (privately owned) informal economy that connected Novi Pazar with the global flows of commerce.
The illegal commerce benefited Bosniak and Serb entrepreneurs alike, many of whom were former employees of state-owned company who had lost their livelihoods with the collapse of the city’s formal economy. The economic boom helped to foster wartime intergroup relations in the city, which had begun to strain under the regime’s targeting of Bosniaks.7 Meanwhile, the Serbian regime turned a blind eye to the illegal flows that involved breaches of the state-sanctioned regulations and international embargoes because the proceeds were needed to replenish empty government coffers. For the regime, keeping Sandzak peaceful was also instrumental in deflecting international criticism over its support to the Bosnian Serbs in their anti-Muslim agenda (Biserko 2010).
Local political dynamics, however, pulled in the opposite direction. The Bosniak political leadership pressed on with its self-determination agenda to redefine Sandzak’s status and demanded greater autonomy in the form of more decentralized and regionalized governance. The leading political figures at the time aligned themselves with the Bosniak leadership in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which they formally endorsed as the Sandzak Bosniaks’ kin state. The range of actors influencing the city’s trajectory in a struggle for a different position in new, post-Yugoslav Serbia consequently expanded beyond city and national borders. The plight of Sandzak’s Bosniaks with regard to political autonomy was perceived, and discursively framed, in the Serbian media and political circles as part of an Islamic resurgence in this part of Europe, which allegedly carried the risk of Sandzak’s secession (ICG 2005; Lyon 2018; Morrison and Roberts).
Meanwhile, on the ground, the self-determination agenda resonated with incidents of discrimination and oppression toward those Bosniaks whom the Serbian regime perceived as disloyal. Furthermore, the regime’s use of force to stem the Bosniak political movement fed the regime’s fear and resentment. In an ICG account (2005, 13), for Bosniaks the message of the 1990s was that, owing to “state-sanctioned crimes and official legalized discrimination,” they were now “second-class citizens, who no longer enjoyed the protection of the state; an unwanted and harmful foreign organism whose life and property had no value before the law.”
Although this discrimination might have served the purpose of legitimizing the Bosniak political elites’ fight for self-determination, the agenda was not endorsed unequivocally by either Sandzak’s Bosniaks or the citizens of Novi Pazar, and resistance against the tide of resurgent nationalism continued throughout the war. Many Bosniak residents of Novi Pazar cherished the idea of brotherhood and shared identity with their Serbian neighbors, which was forged following the antifascist struggles during World War II, and resented the political agendas being pursued in their name. At the same time, Novi Pazar’s Serbs, caught between Belgrade propaganda and aggressive Bosniak politics, pledged allegiance to the main Serbian political parties and to the Serbian regime as the protector of their security. The ensuing rift among Novi Pazar residents allowed for the emergence of a new form of authority and new allegiances which would only deepen over time (Morrison and Roberts, 2013).
Besides this changing economic and political context, the city’s wartime patterns of migration were another potent factor in shaping social transformation during this period. Novi Pazar experienced major population movements starting in the first half of the 1990s. An outpouring of the local population—Bosniak along the traditional migratory routes toward Bosnia-Herzegovina and Turkey, and Serb toward Belgrade—was counteracted by inflows of mostly refugees of Muslim faith from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo and an influx of the Muslim populations from neighboring villages seeking refuge among the city’s ethnic kin population.
The city received some ten thousand people over the ten years between 1992 and 2002, including some six thousand refugees (Joksimovic et al. 2012). These demographic changes had a huge impact on the cultural and urban fabric already disrupted by the strains of post-Socialist transition, as newcomers to the city often embraced different worldviews and espoused more aggressive ways of communicating and interacting.8 This new kind of migration was different from the economically motivated migrations of the 1970s in that it was a part of a pattern of ethnic homogenization triggered by the dissolution of Yugoslavia; by default, it was aggressive, exclusionary, and antagonistic in asserting its presence in the city.
The transition to peace following Kosovo’s independence was, in equal measures, economically, politically, and socially turbulent in Novi Pazar. Reassertion of the state’s oversight of the economy, coupled with the enforcement of regional borders, mostly brought to an end the informal market in textiles and footwear.9 However, for a number of years the transport sector continued to exploit the unregulated border between Serbia and Kosovo and benefited from a buoyant informal trade in that area (Bjelic et al. 2012).
According to some accounts, during this time Novi Pazar became an important drug-smuggling point on the route from Turkey to Western Europe. The wealth generated in the process was subsequently used in corrupt business activities that dominate the city’s toxic political economy (Morrison and Roberts 2013). Meanwhile, the ailing Socialist-era economy continued to flounder. Many workers, the majority of whom were women, lost their jobs, businesses closed, and an economic recession set in, pushing most Novi Pazar residents into poverty.10
The political gap between the Bosniak political leadership and the Belgrade regime has since centered on the issue of minority protection in the context of Serbia’s European Union accession. The Party of Democratic Action’s (SDA) wartime monopoly over Bosniaks’ political representation has been challenged not only by other majority Bosniak parties, principally the Sandzak Democratic Party (SDP),11 but also by the party established by the Sandzak mufti Muamer Zukorlic,12 which has caused further divisions among Novi Pazar residents. As well as being a religious leader, Zukorlic has become one of the most influential political and economic actors in Novi Pazar, adding to the panoply of new actors that has emerged over the course of the city’s changing moral, economic, and normative orders. At the same time, the contribution of national authorities to Novi Pazar’s economic and welfare needs has been negligible. The city has remained on the margins of development, deprived of much-needed infrastructural and other investment. Out of sight of the national state—except for the purpose of consolidating Serbian nationhood—many Novi Pazar residents have been forced to rely on their own devices in the search for security.
Manifestations of Insecurity in Novi Pazar and the City’s Urban Reconfiguration
Novi Pazar is surrounded by mountains and resembles a cauldron at whose base are clusters of tightly packed buildings in irregular patterns, crisscrossed by narrow streets that lead in and out of the city via the mountain slopes. Entering the city from any direction involves a long journey through the mountains, which amplifies a sense of the city’s physical isolation and distance from Serbia’s capital, where political and economic power is concentrated. The overcrowding resulting from a city built to meet the needs of some ten thousand people—now home to more than ten times that number—is visible on its streets (Joksimovic et al. 2012). Standoffs of cars and pedestrians are frequent due to the sheer volume of traffic and poor road signage. Other physical infrastructure is similarly strained; only the city center benefits from regular water and electricity supply. Outlying neighborhoods, many of which were built illegally during the 1990s waves of immigration, experience frequent electricity and water shortages and poor waste disposal services; many of these settlements are connected to the city by unpaved or only partly paved roads.13 In some of the refugee settlements, living conditions are particularly dire; except for sporadic assistance mostly from nongovernmental organizations, these communities have seen little by way of local government engagement. 14
The failures of governance also are reflected in the fact that illegal construction is not exclusive to refugees and rural immigrants in the city’s purlieus. Some of the most elegant homes of Novi Pazar’s new elites, and some business premises in the city’s prime locations, have been built without following the planning process.15 In some cases the buildings have no water pipelines or electricity connections, which results in electricity theft, a practice that largely goes unsanctioned. In other cases, apartment buildings with no car-parking facilities have been inserted into city center neighborhoods.
Contributing to this sense of disorderly urbanization—a consequence of demographic pressure, weak legal enforcement, tax evasion, corrupt practices, and a sluggish economy against which liberal market transitions have continued apace—are numerous unfinished facades scattered throughout the city.16 They are often situated next to rundown houses whose owners cannot afford maintenance costs, or next to Socialist-era housing blocks, which no longer enjoy the maintenance once provided by the state. This is the fate that has befallen Hotel Vrbnik, the “Novi Pazar beauty,” left to dereliction by its new owners. These physical markers on the city’s landscape are vivid reminders of its troubled and uncertain transition. They also draw the invisible social lines of division that crisscross the city.
The city’s economic decay, reflected in its physical landscape, is especially glaring in what used to be its industrial zone. This is now a quiet place with empty business premises still covered in faded advertisements of the fashionable clothes once produced there for foreign markets, a poignant image of the times when the lives of local residents were more secure and protected. It is a landscape of so-called dead capital trapped in buildings and idle equipment, a somber addition to a vast stock accumulated through the unsuccessful privatization of state-owned companies,17 which is in large part responsible for the city’s economic downfall. Most of the former female workforce (some 70 percent of total registered unemployment) now belongs to Novi Pazar’s army of unemployed; many live in the outlying city suburbs with no alternative employment opportunities and no regulated welfare provision. Not just poverty but physical violence has been on the rise18 in the local community, making women one of the most vulnerable groups in Novi Pazar.
For company owners who are still in business, keeping afloat is arduous in an unstable local and regional political and economic context, and in the absence of supportive state policies, including infrastructure investment.19 Even among successful entrepreneurs, there is a sense of concern and sometimes desperation and a fear that years of investment in developing their business ultimately could count for nothing.20 The squeeze produced by the transition to a liberalized economy is palpable in the many shops that are clustered in the main market in the city center a stone’s throw from Hotel Vrbnik and the main city square, which see little business these days and no longer act as the city’s gathering places.
Poverty is widespread: Novi Pazar has been described by the World Bank as an “actively impoverished area”(Korisnici prava za socijalnu zastitu 2014). One-third of Novi Pazar’s citizens cannot afford a telephone connection fee; this contributes to a general sense of vulnerability and deprivation among certain sections of the population, particularly among the elderly and infirm, who are dependent on outside help.21 In the remote suburbs and the neighboring villages, the lack of infrastructure limits the economic activity of their residents and is an obstacle to access to the city for other needs. This creates additional incentives for rural-urban migration, with all its problems in a malfunctioning city.
Security in Novi Pazar has been punctuated by occasional episodes of physical violence, foremost connected to the power contestation among the two majority Bosniak political parties (the SDA and the SDP) and Mufti Zukorlic, whose supporters have clashed on the city streets. The vitriolic anti-Serb rhetoric served up for years by the leaders of the two Bosniak parties, accompanied by unprincipled collaboration with subsequent Serbian governments, have strengthened the religious pull and Zukorlic’s standing.
The consequence is a perception of an increasing “Islamization” of the city encouraged by the Wahhabi and Salafi supporters alongside more moderate local variants of Islam. Salafis, in particular, practice outside the mosque, in private houses fringing the narrow streets in the old city center, which have become virtual exclusion zones for those opposed to this kind of worship, including both Bosniaks and Serbs. Likewise, the biggest mosque in the old city hosts a religious school and a kindergarten, where the pupils’ dress code is in stark contrast to that of the nearby secular school. After school, even in the case of the secular school, children no longer hang around with their schoolmates but instead hurry to their homes and neighborhoods—a telling sign of an unyielding border that is separating the Bosniak and Serb communities in their quest for security. 22
There has never been pronounced spatial polarization in Novi Pazar. There were only a couple of fairly ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods. The Socialist-era housing blocks were a microcosm of former Yugoslavia’s multicultural tradition whereby difference and diversity were managed through a tradition of maintaining good neighborly relations. But over the years, many non-Muslim residents either have left the city or relocated to so-called ethnic neighborhoods; in fact, there are very few Serbs still living in the city center.23 Similarly, a process of gradual ghettoization operates in public spaces.24 Novi Pazar, like many cities in the former Yugoslavia, always had a central city promenade where youths in particular used to gather for an evening stroll. The city promenade no longer exists, but an alternative one opened in the Serb-majority Varos mahala (neighborhood), frequented primarily by Serb youth.25 This is only one example of the two communities’ increasingly socializing in isolation from each other.
In a symbolic encroachment of public space, with a similarly divisive effect among Novi Pazar’s ethnic communities, the central city square is dominated by a building in which the university—whose president is Mufti Zukorlic—has its offices. The building includes a ground-floor bookstore displaying in its windows both religious works and books on the subject of al-Qaeda, jihad, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the like. Success in recruiting fighters for those wars, including the top student from Novi Pazar grammar school, who was killed in Syria in 2014, 26 has been a source of apprehension among residents who do not share the ideology behind such recruitment. The Serbian regime has used the information on Wahhabi activities in Novi Pazar and the recruitment of local youth to reinforce its stance toward the Bosniak political leadership.
On the Broken City Contract and Civic Capabilities
In March 2015 a newborn baby on the journey from Novi Pazar to Belgrade to receive life-saving treatment died when a helicopter carrying the baby and all members of the crew crashed near Belgrade airport. The helicopter was sent to the rescue because a mudslide had blocked the main road connecting the two cities. There was a hospital and an airport close to the site where the ambulance was stopped, but the helicopter was not permitted to use the airport.
In the local commentaries following this incident, bitter remarks were made about Serbia’s world-champion tennis player having access to that airport for his private jet. If the helicopter had been allowed to use the airport, perhaps the baby could have been saved. There was also condemnation of Novi Pazar’s hospital director, who was perceived as prioritizing his political career over the needs of the local community through his neglect of the already poor local health care facilities, which had necessitated the 290-km trip to Belgrade to try to save the infant.27 My interviewee said: “In this city, no one is safe.”28 The story poignantly sums up the broken city contract.29
Since the overthrow of Milosevic’s regime in 2000, Novi Pazar’s city government has consisted of various coalitions led by one of the two major Bosniak parties, as noted earlier: the SDA and the SDP. Historically, the Serbs have been represented disproportionately in the local public administration and government institutions such as the courts, police force, and health and education services. Given Novi Pazar’s scarce job opportunities,30 this pattern has been difficult to break. The main parties’ revisiting of the ethnic makeup of official institutions—the police in particular—has contributed to local mistrust of the state.31
Even more disturbing is the inability of the Bosniak political elites to formulate a shared vision for the city because of their different positions regarding the solution to the so-called Bosniak minority question in Serbia. The official focus on high-level politics and the struggle for power have resulted in the total neglect of the needs of Novi Pazar’s residents, as evidenced in the city’s dilapidated physical infrastructure, inadequate health care facilities, social welfare, and so on.32 As one of my informants articulated, underlining the state-society distance as manifested in Novi Pazar: the “elite agenda is about autonomy, motorway, the airport—in contrast, citizens’ concerns are water, electricity, and sewage.” 33
In a void created by the absence of local and national state welfare and public goods provision, Novi Pazar, over the years, has experienced the ascendancy of a new type of welfare provision from Wahhabi followers.34 The Wahhabis organize the city’s street cleaning, provide allegedly superior education and childcare compared with those provided by mainstream institutions, and help ordinary people with tasks such as house painting, wood cutting for fuel, and other assistance.35 However, these services come at a price, which may be the requirement for women to cover their heads in the Islamic tradition or to refuse help from mainstream nongovernmental organizations, or maybe a less explicit demand for non-Bosniak residents to refrain from objecting to an increasing Wahhabi presence in the city.
Ultimately, the effect of these new allegiances attributed to the city’s creeping Islamization is to reinforce social polarization among Novi Pazar’s citizens. As many of my informants argued, the Wahhabi presence is disconcerting not least because it goes beyond simply religious influence. One argued that Wahhabism in Novi Pazar “is also a lifestyle.”36 Its members, very few of whom hold jobs, show visible signs of wealth; they drive top-of-the-line cars, sport the latest mobile phone models, and can afford sophisticated electronic equipment in their homes—a far cry from the reality of most impoverished Novi Pazar residents.
Speculation is rife that this wealth comes from foreign donations and murky business deals involving land acquisition, linking those actors who seemingly embrace tradition and local life with broader regional and transnational actors and processes. Their appeal, particularly among the poorer sections of Novi Pazar youth, is strong; many Wahhabi followers hail from the city’s immigrant communities, the display of wealth transmits a message of success and social ascendance that is not necessarily underpinned by a strong work ethic.
Among the local businessmen and a number of other respondents in this study, there is a concern about the changing business culture promoted by a new type of unscrupulous businessmen—labeled “the wrong kind of entrepreneurs” by one of my interviewees—seeking quick profits, often involving money-laundering schemes and privatization of state-owned enterprises. This kind of entrepreneur shies away from legal means of trading and instead opts for informal and often criminal channels. These means and practices find fertile ground in the messy reality of local governance based on the zero-sum politics of the local political and religious leaders, which thrives on divisions and embraces patronage and clientelism (Cvejic 2016) while undermining the social cohesion of local communities.
Local governance has been permeated by clientelistic relations and allegations of corruption and crime surrounding local government officials. Loyalty to political and religious leaders prevails over all other criteria for access to business and other opportunities, which, arguably, is one of the main reasons for Mufti Zukorlic’s strong standing in the local community. The political divisions among the city’s Bosniak political elites (Zukorlic included) also can be understood in terms of competition about control over resources and the private logics and personal profit-seeking agendas of the elites. It is an open secret that the mufti’s business affairs involve breaches of law, but they go unsanctioned because of his power and influence and the protection from the sections of the Belgrade political establishment that he allegedly enjoys.37 One of my interlocutors commented on this changing moral universe that has suffocated Novi Pazar’s commercial zeal, citing the old local saying that the “mufti can only hail from the city thoroughfares and not the village mud.”38 This alludes both to the moral decay and the greed of those responsible for the local community’s well-being as well as to the pernicious impact that war-induced rural immigration has had on the city’s urban reconfiguration.
Commercial actors who are interested in investing in legally regulated production have been a victim of this toxic political economy, which is entwined with the identity politics in a kind of double helix pattern. They are routinely subjected to discrimination in accessing business funding, securing urban locations, or receiving other types of services that might improve their commercial prospects39 and the economic fortunes of the city to the benefit of wider public. Local government officials are an important active part of this toxic local political economy, as excessive government inspections of the legally registered businesses often serve to extort bribes.40
The provision of symbolic goods also has been affected by the way in which city governance operates. The choice of public holidays, for example, has been a contentious local governance issue. There was a strong push against retaining secular tradition, such as New Year’s Eve celebrations, which in the past were marked by citywide parties hosted by Hotel Vrbnik and other venues. Instead, the marking of the Islamic tradition of boys’ circumcision is a public holiday in Novi Pazar, as is the Muslim holiday of Bajram, when the streets are emptied of Bosniaks, who celebrate in their own homes, and Serbs, who consider it inappropriate to go out. Many public sporting events are timed to coincide with important dates in the Islamic calendar and have been named appropriately; for example, a Ramadan athletic race and a month-long Ramadan football tournament. This applies also to cultural events, such as the Islamic music and Islamic poetry and fiction festivals, which tend to receive much more prominent media coverage than other cultural manifestations that traditionally attracted regional and international participants and a mostly urban audience. Multicultural manifestations with a long tradition in Novi Pazar have been affected by the changing politics as well as by lack of funding from impoverished former donors.
At the same time, there is evidence of resistance to aggressive assertion of particular worldviews, practices, cultures, and values that underwrite the perception of growing social distance among Novi Pazar’s citizens amid failures of the city governance to work in their common interest. In January 2015 a local youth theater staged a play entitled Beton mahala,41 in which six Bosniak and two Serb actors took part. Although the play was closed down after only two nights, allegedly because the local political establishment did not like the content dealing with the city’s problems, including interethnic relations,42 it is a testament to the city’s resilience. Because local (like national) media is politically controlled—Mufti Zukorlic, for example, owns two TV stations, a newspaper, and a weekly magazine, and a number of other outlets are controlled by the SDP leadership—the play incident was portrayed in ways that accentuate differences and tensions among the city’s residents. Yet despite one of the actors being threatened by a lawsuit, the group did not give in and searched for alternative performing venues outside the city.
There are other innate aspects of the city’s urbanity that work as a counterforce to the divisive effect imparted by the city’s governance. Novi Pazar is a city of youth; 15–25-year-olds account for 33 percent of its population, and its three universities enroll some six thousand first-year students annually. However, its youth are increasingly inhabiting parallel city spaces.43 The insistence on minority rights protection resulted in the introduction of the Bosnian language in schools in 2013, an action that has not only separated children into different classrooms but represents a step toward the reshaping of their respective identities.
The enforcement of an alcohol ban in the city center has been one of the factors contributing to changing the city’s street life and has driven many non-Bosniak young people away from that area. However, this measure has been only partly successful. Occasional visits to bars in the Serb neighborhoods by Bosniak youths for a round of drinks still happen, in a display of urban defiance against the attempted imposition of new rules.
The remnants of the city’s civic capability to pursue its own methods of social ordering can be gleaned in other ways, too. Under a shop window of a jewelry store in the old city is a graffito that publicly shames a couple for not repaying the shop owner the money they borrowed and bans them from entering the shop. For those Novi Pazar citizens who consider themselves “true” urban subjects, this is a way to compensate for weak provision of justice to address the city’s changing moral universe that resonates with their experience and knowledge of the city.
The nongovernmental sector in Novi Pazar is feeble and has received far less international support than elsewhere in Serbia. It suffers from strong political interference with some of the newly established nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are funded by the political parties and the Islamic community. Nevertheless, a handful of long-standing NGOs remain active and maintain relations with other civil society organizations in Serbia and in the region. Some of their work focuses on issues that are at the core of residents’ sense of insecurity in the context of the social change that local communities have undergone. This work concerns, for example, advocacy on gender rights and, more broadly, human rights, particularly for the most marginalized groups, such as the Roma.
Those organizations do not shy away from tackling the issues of interethnic relations and human security; organizations such as Damad have reached out to all local groups, including the local representatives of the two Serbian Islamic communities, to open dialogue on the common interests of the city and its inhabitants.44 According to Damad’s head, the inability to define what is in the common interest of the city is slowly eating into the essence of Novi Pazar’s urban spirit and contributing to its slow extinction. This is acknowledged by the owners of small businesses, who try to find ways to circumvent the barriers created as a result of control of the local economy by networks of political and economic entrepreneurs who are driven by private and sectarian agendas. There have been examples of local business owners joining forces to lobby for services, such as the organization of and attendance at business meetings and trade fairs, as a way to create openings for businesses that would not require allegiance to any of the local power brokers.45
During the war, Novi Pazar was able to prosper economically and to preserve interethnic peace amid violent regional conflict fueled by exclusive identity politics. Since then, much has changed, and the city is now home to an exhausted community on the edge economically, politically, and psychologically whose residents fearful that life can only become more difficult. The economic dynamism of the 1990s is long gone. Although violent interethnic conflict seems unlikely—especially since two of the three main Bosniak political protagonists joined the incumbent government of Aleksandar Vucic—some locals poignantly say that because intercommunity life no longer exists in the city, multiple lines divide its residents. Most are living insecure lives, dependent on remittances from families living abroad.
The Bosniak majority’s aggressive reconstruction of an ethnic identity in response to the Serbian regime’s intrusive nation-state-building that privileges the Serbian majority has set in motion processes that are challenging the city’s internal community cohesion. Many of the institutions of daily life, such as the work environment and Socialist-era work-related housing, traditionally facilitated the mixing of people and enabled a common experience of living together and managing differences. These no longer exist. The gradual erosion of the city’s civic capabilities is being exacerbated by its weakened role as the provider of a public good in the context of a weak economy and weak governance.
At the core of this transformation is a fragmented local political economy, which developed at the interface of the 1990s war economy and the liberalized marketization mandated by national and local government (and their international collocutors), and its capture by various alliances of political, religious, business, and criminal actors. The victim is the city’s collective interests, which have given way to various actors’ power-driven private and political agendas. In this context, civic-minded individuals faced the choice of siding with those actors or withdrawing from the public sphere and leaving the city vulnerable to the disintegrative effect of this toxic political economy.
Nevertheless, the city has—however feebly—demonstrated its resilience and avoided slipping into an interethnic conflict despite the odds. Novi Pazar citizens believe that if only the economy could turn around, it would be possible to reverse some of the damage caused by intertwining dynamics of new wars and liberal marketization. For this to happen, as one of my informants suggests, political energy needs to be rechanneled toward nurturing the city’s legacy of living together. A recognition that no one is safe in the city as it functions at present, shared by many of my interlocutors, is a somber reminder of the consequences of divisive politics that has been pursued by its elites.
Notes
“On the margins of all margins” is the expression my local host, Ms. Bisera Seceragic, uses to describe the socioeconomic reality of Novi Pazar. I owe her a debt of gratitude for sharing her knowledge and insight with me.
1. The name “Bosniaks,” denoting the Islamic faith group, entered official use in Sandzak in 1993 following its adoption in Bosnia-Herzegovina to replace the word “Muslims.” According to the 2011 census, Bosniaks represent an absolute majority in Novi Pazar, accounting for 77.1 percent of the total population. Another 4.9 percent of citizens declared themselves to be Muslims. http://publikacije.stat.gov.rs/G2013/Pdf/G20134002.pdf.
2. They used bribes and even raised money to build a holiday home for the acting army commander. The officer in question eventually sold the house. Interview with confidential source.
3. Interview with confidential source.
4. In 1992, a local branch of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s main Bosniak political party, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), was established in Novi Pazar under the leadership of Sulejman Ugljanin, a Sarajevo-educated dentist. To this day, SDA remains one of the main political forces in Novi Pazar.
5. Interview with Esad Hamzagic.
6. Interview with Esad Hamzagi and Bisera Seceragic.
7. In addition to official rhetoric from the Serbian political leadership, the regime began a systematic purge of so-called disloyal Bosniaks from public institutions in Novi Pazar (ICG 2005).
8. Interview with Enes Niksic.
9. They include international sanctions on Serbia, an arms embargo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia’s blockade of Kosovo, and the Greek embargo on the FYR Macedonia.
10. Novi Pazar is officially classified as a city with an “actively poor population” (Evropski pokret Srbije Lokalno vece Novi Pazar 2009).
11. The SDA and SDP have participated in all Serbian governments since 2000.
12. There are two rival Islamic communities in Serbia: Islamic Community of Serbia, led by effendi Adem Zilkic, whose seat is in Belgrade; and Islamic Community in Serbia, led by Muamer Zukorlic, whose seat is in Novi Pazar.
13. Often road building in these neighborhoods is timed to coincide with the election campaign, only to be left unfinished once the election is over. According to some sources, one of Novi Pazar’s Bosniak political leaders has initiated the building of some one hundred local roads. Interview with confidential source.
14. Interview with Semiha Kacar.
15. It is estimated that there are some ten thousand illegally built houses in Novi Pazar (Biserko 2010).
16. Houses with finished facades are subject to an additional tax (Lyon 2008).
17. Of some fourteen cases of privatization sales in Novi Pazar, only two have been successfully completed: the construction company Putevi and the city’s bakery (interview with Bisera Seceragic).
18. Interview with Semiha Kacar.
19. Interview with Esad Hamzagic, Ramiz Paljevac, and Nusret Nicevic; also see Evropski pokret Srbije Lokalno Vece Novi Pazar 2009.
20. Interview with Esad Hamzagic.
21. Interview with Semiha Kacar.
22. Interview with Zibija Sarenkapic; see also Damad 2008, 2015.
23. Interview with Bisera Seceragic.
24. Interview with Zibija Sarenkapic.
25. Interview with Zibija Sarenkapic.
26. Interview with confidential source.
27. Interview with Semiha Kacar.
28. Interview with Sladjana Novosel, Bisera Seceragic, and Semiha Kacar.
29. The phrase “broken city contract” is borrowed from Oberschall 2007, 16. See also Gupta 2016.
30. Rate of unemployment in Novi Pazar stood at 53.7 percent compared with 27.6 percent for Serbia as a whole. (Korisnici prava za socijalna zastitu … 2014).
31. Interview with confidential source. The police office’s top brass are appointed by the central government in Belgrade.
32. Interview with Easd Hamzagic, Semija Kacar, and Sladjana Novosel.
33. Interview with Zibija Sarenkapic.
34. Other types of nonstate provision from NGOs exist but are inadequate.
35. Interview with confidential source; also see Lyon 2008.
36. Interview with confidential source.
37. Interview with confidential source.
38. My source used the Turkish word kaldrma, which means a cobbled road rather than dusty, unpaved rural lanes. Interview with confidential source.
39. Interview with confidential source.
40. Interview with confidential source; also see European movement, ibid.
41. Mahala is the Turkish word to describe a suburb harboring a culture of gossip; beton is the local name for concrete.
42. Interview with Zibija Sarenkapic. The play is critical of the local politics of division in Novi Pazar.
43. In my interviews I heard stories of Novi Pazar’s culture of tolerance and respect. One of my interviewees referred to his mother’s stories of how, at the beginning of the last century, girls of different faiths would share the same classroom but huddle in separate groups in the opposite corners of the room to study their respective religious texts (Qu’ran and the Holy Bible).
44. Interview with Zibija Sarenkapic.
45. Interview with Esad Hamzagic.
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