ON THE EVENING of 25 August 1992 shells began to rain down on a building in Bosnia’s capital city of Sarajevo, the infamous site of the assassination that triggered the First World War. These were not ordinary shells and the building was not an ordinary structure. The shells were incendiaries, designed to raise fire rapidly on impact, especially when surrounded by combustible material. The building they hit was the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the shells were fired by the Serbian militia who had surrounded the city as part of the strategy of the Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, to destroy Bosnia.
The Serbs then placed marksmen to pick off the firefighters and even used anti-aircraft guns turned not toward the skies but horizontally. The staff of the library formed a human chain to remove materials from the burning structure but the relentless shelling and sniper fire made it too dangerous for all but a few of the rare books to be saved. At around 2 p.m. that day one member of the library’s staff, Aida Buturović, was shot by a sniper.1 She had been a talented linguist working to support the collaborative network of libraries in the country. She was only thirty years old and joined a casualty list of 14 deaths and 126 wounded from that day in Sarajevo.2
The writer Ray Bradbury reminded us in 1953 of the temperature at which paper burns – Fahrenheit 451 – but an entire library takes a long time to be destroyed. The ash from the burnt volumes fell on the city over subsequent days like ‘black birds’, in the words of Bosnian poet and writer Valerijan Žujo.3
Although the motivations for destroying libraries and archives vary from case to case the erasure of a particular culture has featured prominently. The book ravages of the European Reformation had a strong religious flavour to them and there is a sense that Catholic communities were targeted by the destruction of their libraries, as the content of those libraries was regarded as heretical. The destruction of Louvain University Library had a cultural component too with its national status as a centre of knowledge. The attacks on libraries and archives during the Holocaust were a cultural assault in its broadest sense: it was not merely the religion of the Jews that the Nazi machine sought to eradicate but all aspects of Jewish existence: from living beings to the gravestones of their ancestors.
The National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was situated in a building known locally as Vijećnica (City Hall). It housed over 1.5 million books, manuscripts, maps, photographs and other materials. Together these provided the recorded memory not just of a nation but the culture of an entire region, one that had a significant Muslim population. The shells that struck the building did not do so by chance. The library was not accidentally caught in the crossfire of a regional war, it was deliberately targeted by Serbian forces that sought not only military domination but annihilation of the Muslim population. No other buildings nearby were hit – the library was the sole target.4
Just forty-five years after the end of the Second World War and the public exposure of the full horrors of the Holocaust, with the perpetual refrain of ‘never again’ ringing in the world’s ears, cultural genocide once again returned to Europe. It emerged during the break-up of Yugoslavia into a series of separate states. The motivations for this cultural genocide were a complex knot of issues. Nationalism was mixed with racial and religious hatred, and was given political expression.5
During the summer of 1992 many student backpackers Interrailing around Europe had Yugoslavia on their itineraries. Shoved in their backpacks were the new guidebooks aimed at young people travelling on a tight budget. They might well have taken the latest edition of Yugoslavia: The Rough Guide, which gave them a few introductory pages on the history of the region. It had been dominated by the Turks for five hundred years, was bordered by many countries, had fought Nazi occupation during the Second World War, and had been brought together by General Tito. The country was currently suffering the effects of years of communist rule under Tito: economic depression, underinvestment in key infrastructure and hyperinflation. Following the death of Tito in 1980 the cohesion of the federation of republics began to break down:
The fiercely defended individuality of the Republics persists. Only four percent of Yugoslavs describe themselves as such on their passports. Strikes, demonstrations, and a resurgence of nationalism, especially in Serbia, have for the first time since the war threatened the future of the alliance.6
This political and social fragmentation was inevitable given the history of the region. The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been resisted by the European monarchies. Bosnia’s Ottoman rule lasted for almost four hundred years. In 1878 Vienna replaced Istanbul as the imperial centre from which the region was governed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was approaching its zenith as a political and cultural force at the time that it supplanted Ottoman rule and, invoking an international mandate to occupy and ‘civilise’ the province, the new rulers brought their own administrative order to bear on the region.
The 1910 census for Bosnia recorded a majority Christian Orthodox population (43 per cent) followed by a Muslim one of 32 per cent and a Catholic one of 23 per cent. This religious complexity, where no one group dominated, also fostered a cultural amalgam, where architectural styles, music, food and literature all intermingled. There were political tensions within the ethnic groups and these tensions were influenced by the strength of the neighbouring republics of Serbia and Croatia, both of which had laid claims to the lands of Bosnia, citing the presence of people with Serbian or Croatian ethnicity as the justification. Serbia in particular looked hungrily at its neighbour. The Serbs had asserted their own nationalist aspirations early on. By 1878 they had managed to form an independent state and over the century that followed would continue to make claims over Bosnia, maintaining strong ties with the ethnic Serbs in the republic during the disaggregation of communist Yugoslavia, which had united the countries after the Second World War.
Although this background cast a looming shadow over Bosnia, many visitors in the twentieth century remarked on how peacefully the different ethnic groups coexisted. Nowhere was this coexistence more visible, or remarkable, than in its capital city of Sarajevo: ‘Mosques, minarets and fezes – holding the gorgeous east in fee while the river cools the air, splashing through the town and the bridge on which whatsisname was assassinated’, wrote Lawrence Durrell.7 Sarajevo defied the historic tensions within the region, and this was reflected in the great library of the city, which served the whole republic.
The Balkans as a region had a strong book culture. In the Middle Ages, Catholic religious orders such as the Cistercians were present in Slovenia, fostering scriptoria and libraries, and further south Jewish, Orthodox and Ottoman communities had flourishing book-making centres. Sarajevo was one of the hubs of book culture. The city boasted one of the finest collections of Arabic, Turkish and Persian books and manuscripts in the Gazi Husrev-beg Library established by the second ‘founder’ of Sarajevo in the early sixteenth century; by the 1990s it was one of the oldest continuously functioning libraries in Europe. The Jewish community in Sarajevo also had its own library, in La Benevolencija. Other religions also maintained libraries. The Franciscan order had a convent and seminary in Sarajevo and built up a library to serve their religious mission.8 In the late nineteenth century the Habsburg rulers, encouraging the modernisation of Bosnia, created a regional museum, the Zemaljski Muzej, which contained a research library. From its foundation in 1888, the museum library had grown to roughly a quarter of a million volumes and preserved one of the region’s greatest artistic treasures, the Sarajevo Haggadah.
The Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, founded in 1950, also provided a major centre for the documentation of Bosnian culture, with a focus on Arabic, Persian and Hebrew books, manuscripts and documents, and – of particular regional significance – a collection of documents in Adžamijski, an Arabic script used for Bosnian Slavic texts, symbolic of the cultural crossroads that Sarajevo had become. It was the most important cultural and intellectual centre of its kind in south-eastern Europe.
The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded in 1945. By 1992 it had 150,000 rare books, 500 medieval codices, hundreds of incunabula and major archives, as well as the country’s main holdings of newspapers and journals from the region, and scholarly material from across the world necessary for a serious educational establishment. The library served not only as a cultural resource for the nation but also as the University of Sarajevo’s research base. One of the special functions of a national library is to document the intellectual heritage of a country, and one of the defining collections in the National and University Library was their collection of ‘Bosniaca’, a ‘collection of record’ which brought together all publications ever printed in Bosnia and books about Bosnia wherever they were printed or published. The collection – and the staff – naturally reflected the multicultural nature of Bosnia.
The building that housed the National and University Library was originally constructed in the late nineteenth century at the height of Austro-Hungarian rule as the city’s Town Hall; it was designed to reflect the cultural legacy of the city’s Moorish history. Positioned at the end of a grand street, Vojvode Stepe, it was designed in a pseudo-Moorish style, which the Habsburg rulers clearly thought would fit in seamlessly with the Turkish buildings of the cobbled Baščaršija area of Sarajevo, the heart of the Ottoman city. The collections were the ultimate target for the shelling, but the significance of the building did not lie purely in its intellectual and cultural associations. From 1910–15 it had been the seat of the first Bosnian Parliament, a symbol of independent democracy that the Serbian aggressors would have known about and deplored.
It took three days (25–27 August) for the library to burn through, three days during which it might have been possible to rescue part of the collections. Smoke damage may have rendered the volumes of the library unusable and even hazardous to health, but if the flames had been quelled after the first shells were fired, some of the library could have been saved. But then the intensity of the heat exploded the slender marble columns of the main reading rooms, causing the roof to crash into the space below, making the rescue of the collection no longer a realistic option for the firefighters of Sarajevo. One of them reported: ‘there have been mortars falling here for hours, this makes the job very difficult.’9 Their desperate efforts were also hampered by low water pressure, due to damage to the water pumping system of the city caused by the warfare of the previous months. The firefighters worked flat out to suppress the fire but the repeated shelling meant that fires continued to engulf the building. The front pages of the world’s newspapers didn’t even carry the story.10
The National and University Library was perhaps the most conspicuous intellectual and cultural casualty of the conflict but it was not alone. Across Bosnia dozens of libraries and archives received the same treatment. Archive collections in Muslim areas were brutally treated and here the ethnic cleansing of individuals was matched by the destruction of documents in land registries – where the records of Muslims holding property were destroyed and even gravestones bulldozed to eradicate the suggestion that Muslims had been buried in Bosnian soil.
It has been estimated that more than half of the provincial archives of Bosnia were destroyed: more than 81 km of history.11 These documents recorded in minute detail the citizenship of these communities: births, marriages and deaths were written down for centuries, and land ownership recorded in great detail (as Ottoman custom dictated). These documents help root a community in their environment, allowing those roots to be traced back in time and made personal through the evidence of families which had existed in those localities over succeeding generations. Future claims of residence, ownership and possession, the very right to exist, were wiped out, or so the nationalists attempted to do. The records of Muslim existence were ‘cleansed’ alongside the humans themselves, or as Noel Malcolm has put it: ‘The people who organized such acts were attempting, in the most literal way, to erase history.’12
In the town of Doboj, after the Serb militias had destroyed the mosque and the Catholic church, special forces (the ‘red berets’) arrived from Belgrade seeking baptismal records in the Catholic rectory. Fortunately, according to the parish priest, ‘good people, local Serbs’ had hidden the registers at his request, as he knew that this would be a further step in the cultural genocide that was being inflicted on the town.13 In Herzegovina, the country’s south-western region, the historic city of Mostar was also a target for the Serbs. The archives of Herzegovina were repeatedly targeted, along with the library of the Catholic archbishopric and the University Library in the city. The destruction of the beautiful and historic medieval bridge at Mostar became the symbol of the damage done to the cultural life of Bosnia during the conflict, but millions of books and documents in hundreds of public libraries and archives were destroyed and received scant attention in the press.
Other libraries and archives in Sarajevo also suffered. The Oriental Institute was the first victim, with phosphorous shells being deliberately fired at the building on 17 May 1992, destroying the entire collection. The shelling, and the inferno that resulted, destroyed 5,000 manuscripts, 200,000 Ottoman documents, over 100 Ottoman-era cadastral registers (listing land ownership) and a reference collection of 10,000 printed books and journals. Not even the catalogue to the collection survived. Just as with the National and University Library no other surrounding building was hit.14
The libraries of ten of the sixteen faculties of the University of Sarajevo were also attacked and destroyed, mostly in the terrible year of 1992, with an estimated loss of 400,000 volumes. On 8 June 1992, the Franciscan convent in a suburb of the city was seized by Serb forces and the friars were ejected. With no protection for the convent library, its 50,000 books were plundered, either destroyed or looted, some of them emerging in the antiquarian book trade around Europe in subsequent years.15
In September 1992, when the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo was shelled, the BBC reporter Kate Adie furiously demanded to know from the Serbian battery commander why the hotel where all the foreign correspondents were staying was targeted. In an astonishing admission, he profusely apologised saying that the target was in fact the National Museum across the street – they had missed and the shells had fallen on the hotel by mistake.16
In all, it is estimated that 480,000 metres of archives and manuscripts held in institutional collections across Bosnia and around 2 million volumes of printed books were destroyed in the conflict.17
From the moment shells started exploding in the National and University Library, strenuous efforts were made to save the collections. Library staff and people of Sarajevo – Serbs, Croats, Jews and Muslims – together formed a human chain to remove books but only managed to recover less than 10 per cent of its holdings. The services of the library were heroically maintained – over a hundred students managed to complete doctoral degrees during the siege, despite the horrific conditions. The Oriental Institute continued to hold seminars and symposia, the staff operating the services from their homes. Numerous groups offered help, from international library associations to individual libraries, such as the University of Michigan and Harvard University Library. UNESCO quickly endorsed the international community’s pledge to support the rebuilding of the library.
The repair of the library building was undertaken in stages, starting in 1996–7 (financed by a donation from the region’s former colonial ruler, Austria), at first with the aim of simply stabilising the structure. On 30 July 1998, the World Bank, UNESCO and the city of Mostar launched an appeal for the restoration of the famous bridge in the city, the Stari Most, bringing competition for international funding to the former Yugoslavia. The World Bank regarded the Mostar Bridge as ‘the symbol of all Bosnia’, and huge resources for reconstruction were thrown at the project by the international community to the exclusion of almost every other cultural heritage initiative in Bosnia.18
In the meantime the project to rebuild the library became increasingly mired in political difficulties. In 1999 the European Commission contributed a second tranche of funding, although the work did not begin until 2002 and stopped again in 2004. Ten years after the end of the war the library was still in ruins and even the ownership of the building was disputed – did it belong to the library or the city? The two bodies had differing views on what function the building should have after the reconstruction. But eventually, after further Spanish and EU funding, the building has been reconstructed, and is now a monument to the 15,000 lives lost during the siege of Sarajevo. The Balkan wars of the 1990s left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced or dispossessed. The ethnic cleansing that so shocked the world and which brought Milošević and others to The Hague to stand trial for their crimes overshadowed a parallel tragedy – the loss of the intellectual and cultural memory of the region through the deliberate savagery meted out to the libraries and archives.
The Serbian leaders who planned and executed the savage attacks across Bosnia were eventually brought to trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, held at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The leader of the Serb nationalists, Radovan Karadžić, denied that his forces were responsible for the attack on the National and University Library, blaming instead the Muslim population of Sarajevo as, he claimed, they didn’t like the architecture of the building.19 Fortunately the court had appointed an expert adviser with all the knowledge needed to expose these falsehoods: unsurprisingly it was a librarian who would highlight the place of libraries and archives in the cultural genocide in Bosnia.
András Riedlmayer, of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University, completed a doctorate in Ottoman history and developed a thorough knowledge of the history and culture of the Balkans. He offered his services to help rebuild the libraries of Bosnia as soon as he heard of the devastation, making field trips to gather evidence across the former Yugoslavia.20 His travels through the region sometimes put him in danger from uncleared mines or from rioting. Over the course of his work for the International Criminal Tribunal, Riedlmayer documented 534 individual sites, some of which were inspected at first hand, but for the others he relied on photographs, testimonies and other forms of documented evidence.21
Riedlmayer is one of the few librarians to have faced war criminals like Milošević, Ratko Mladić and Karadžić directly, eye-to-eye, in a courtroom. Thanks to his knowledge of the libraries and archives of the region, Riedlmayer was asked to give evidence in the trial of Milošević, countering with hard facts when Milošević denied the incidents that he was accused of.22
The International Criminal Tribunal broke new ground in successfully prosecuting war crimes against cultural heritage, especially against ethnic and religious buildings, as well as libraries and archives. Compared with the attacks and the damage caused, however, the number of prosecutions was tiny, but it did set a precedent and established a sense of redress. The fate of libraries and archives has tended to be lost amid the devastation of war. The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict did nothing to prevent the devastation of the National Library in Sarajevo or the many other libraries in Bosnia. However, the existence of the tribunal did result in efforts to hide the evidence of genocide and other war crimes – showing perhaps that the laws had some deterrent effect.23
Stanislav Galić, the Serbian general who directed the sniper and shelling campaign that hampered the efforts of library staff, firefighters and citizens to save the collections of the National Library, appeared before the court, and in 2006 was sentenced to life imprisonment. Galić’s successor during the siege, Mladić, was also indicted in 1996 at The Hague with ‘intentional and wanton destruction of religious and cultural buildings … including … libraries’, and he too was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017. He was joined in the dock by Karadžić and Milošević. Milošević was in poor health and died in 2006 before judgement could be reached. Despite the linkage in the tribunal between crimes against cultural heritage and crimes against humanity, the destruction of the National Library was deleted from the Schedule of Incidents in the prosecution’s amended submissions for the trials of Karadžić and Mladić, and there were no convictions for its destruction.24
Thousands of historic buildings were destroyed in the war. The priceless books, manuscripts and documents that were also lost received much less press attention. Attempts to restore damaged collections and replace destroyed books have only dealt with a fraction of what was lost. The contents of the National Library included many unique items, an irreplaceable body of material. Destroying the library struck at the heart of Bosnia’s culture and crippled the university’s ability to educate the next generation. The chief of the Sarajevo fire brigade, Kenan Slinić, when asked what motivated him and his men as they risked their own lives to save the library, said: ‘Because I was born here and they are burning a part of me.’25
One library in Sarajevo managed to escape the destruction. The staff of the research library of the National Museum evacuated most of their 200,000-volume collection, together with the artefacts of the museum, dodging the bullets of snipers and the artillery bombardment that rained down on the city at an average of 400 shells per day. The director of the museum, Dr Rizo Sijarić, was killed by a grenade blast in 1993 trying to arrange plastic sheeting to cover holes in the walls of the museum to protect the collections that remained inside.26
This heroic action enabled the Hebrew manuscript known as the Sarajevo Haggadah to be saved. It is an important illuminated manuscript with a long and complex history, created in Spain in the middle of the fourteenth century and taken by Jews who were expelled from the Iberian peninsula in 1497. The Sarajevo Haggadah has become a symbol of the multicultural strength and resilience of Sarajevo, and of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and is now the most famous book in the region. It passed through many hands and survived many conflicts before being purchased by the National Museum of Bosnia in 1894. During the Second World War the manuscript was hidden from the Nazis by the museum’s chief librarian, Derviš Korkut, who smuggled the Haggadah out of Sarajevo. Korkut gave it to a Muslim cleric in the town of Zenica where it was hidden under the floorboards of either a mosque or a Muslim home. In 1992, the Haggadah manuscript survived a museum break-in and it was discovered on the floor with many other items the thieves believed were not valuable, and was later stored in an underground bank vault. To quell rumours that the government had sold the Haggadah in order to buy weapons the President of Bosnia presented the manuscript back to the National Museum at a community Seder in 1995 – and it remains accessible there to this day.27 In November 2017 it was added to the Memory of the World Register, maintained by UNESCO for the preservation of the world’s documentary heritage.
Bosnia is not alone in witnessing cultural genocide in recent times. A decade earlier it was the city of Jaffna. Jaffna is the capital of the northernmost province of Sri Lanka, a region where struggles between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities have been a stark feature of society since Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948. In the northern provinces of the island the Tamils, many of whom are Muslim, are a minority. In May 1981, amid unrest triggered by local government elections, two hundred policemen went on a rampage.
On the night of 1 June the Jaffna Public Library was burned down, destroying its entire collection of 100,000 books and 10,000 manuscripts built up since the foundation of the library. Although there had been a library in Sri Lanka since the early nineteenth century, the first truly public library did not arrive until the creation of the Jaffna Public Library in 1934 and although it moved to a new location and was rededicated in 1954–9, by 1981 it had become ‘part of the Jaffna psyche and the desire of its people to attain higher levels of education’.28
The Tamil community had always placed great emphasis on the importance of education, and the burning of the library was a deliberate act, perpetrated by policemen and intended to intimidate the Tamils, but also to destroy their aspirations for the future. As journalist Francis Wheen wrote at the time, the destruction of the library, bookshop and newspaper headquarters ‘were clearly a systematic onslaught on the Tamil culture’.29 One Tamil political group asserted that the destruction of Tamil libraries by the Sri Lankan police were part of a policy of ‘cultural genocide’.30 The Sri Lankan government attributed the violence of May and June 1981 to rogue security forces, and following international pressure pledged 900,000 rupees in compensation. Despite this additional funding, the library had still not been rebuilt when twenty-three members of the Jaffna Municipal Council resigned in protest at this failure in 2003. It finally reopened the following year and continues to be used today.
In Yemen, another culture is facing threats of the same kind. The civil war in Yemen has claimed tens of thousands of lives and turned hundreds of thousands into refugees. Yemen’s libraries have been seriously damaged. The libraries of the Zaydi community are a unique feature of Yemen’s cultural life, as the intellectual heritage of their faith is fostered by its manuscripts, which have been in the country since the ninth century CE. Zaydism is a branch of Shi’a Islam (otherwise found only in the Caspian regions of northern Iran) and is strongest in the mountainous parts of Yemen. The Zaydi community embraces the Houthis – the rebel group opposed by Saudi Arabian-led (and, until December 2018, US-backed) coalition forces.
The Zaydi intellectual tradition is particularly rich, as reflected in the manuscripts in its libraries, due to the openness of the sect to non-Shi-ite ideas, and the location of Yemen, easily accessible to Muslim groups from the Arabian peninsula, North Africa and the Indian Ocean. Zaydis preserve the teachings of the Mu’tazilites, a medieval school of Islamic rationalist thought that promotes the use of human reason as a way to access holy wisdom.31 The destruction of Zaydi libraries has been in part due to the general devastation wrought by the war, with libraries caught in the crossfire. Much of the destruction has, however, been deliberate, the result of sectarian hatred from Salafi militants, although there has been a long tradition of looting and destruction in the various conflicts that Yemen has witnessed.
Digital technologies are being deployed by librarians to help fight back against the permanent loss of knowledge. Before András Riedlmayer gave evidence at the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague he had been valiantly trying to rebuild Bosnia’s libraries through the ‘Bosnian Manuscripts Ingathering Project’. Riedlmayer and librarians around the world tracked copies of manuscripts destroyed in Bosnian libraries (especially the rich holdings of the Oriental Institute Library in Sarajevo). Some of these copies (mostly on microfilm) were found in institutional libraries, some in the private working collections of scholars. Riedlmayer and his colleagues made digital scans of the copies. Only a small number of manuscripts were recovered in this way and copies are not as important as originals. But as a way of helping institutions recover, and for knowledge to serve the local communities in Bosnia, this project was a major step forward.32
Digitisation and copying is also playing its part in Yemen. A project undertaken jointly by the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota is digitising Zaydi manuscripts in Yemen and across the world where Zaydi manuscripts have been collected. Digitisation projects collaborating with the US initiative have been funded in European countries, including Italy, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands. To help protect the Zaydi manuscript culture, over 15,000 volumes in all will be captured digitally and made available to raise the profile of the community and highlight the importance of this rare branch of human knowledge.
Contained within the threatened Zaydi manuscripts is the cultural memory of a community that has endured since the tenth century. One library, founded in Zafār by the Imam al-Mansūr bi-Llāh ‘Abd Allāh b. Hamza (reigned 1187–1217), has had a more or less continued existence to this day, although it is now held in the Mosque of San‘ā. In the face of a violent war being waged by forces with immense power, that unique culture is at risk of being erased. Despite these threats the preservation of knowledge goes on.33