Question 3

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Inside the UN-run airport in besieged Sarajevo hung a makeshift sign: Maybe Airlines. Along the edges of the sign, aid workers, journal- ists, and diplomats had posted stickers—CNN, ITN, CBS, RTL, MSF, VOX, UNICEF, the French flag, the Canadian flag, the Swedish flag, and so on. Above the sign was a piece of plywood with the word des- tinations handwritten at the top, with a changeable placard below (the placard choices included New York, Geneva, Rome, Berlin, Zagreb, Paris, and Heaven). “Maybe Airlines” was the nickname given to the unreliable UN flights in and out of wartime Sarajevo—the longest-lasting airlift ever attempted and the centerpiece of the international humanitarian response to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina.1 Meanwhile, underneath the airport tarmac ran a narrow and damp 800-meter tunnel that by- passed both UN controls and the siege lines. Protected from Serb shelling and sniper fire, thousands of people and tons of food, arms, and other supplies moved through the underground passageway every day (which the UN pretended did not exist), providing both a vital lifeline for the city and an enormous opportunity for black mar- ket profiteering. While the UN airlift was part of the highly visible front stage of the siege, the tunnel was part of the much less visible but equally important backstage action. Together, they helped Sara- jevo survive for over three and a half years, setting a siege longevity record.2

The 1992–95 battle for Sarajevo was not only the longest siege in modern history but also the most internationalized—an urban

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Andreas, Peter. Blue Helmets and Black Markets : The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo, Cornell University Press, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3137928. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2018-07-02 10:04:53.

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A United Nations sign at the Sarajevo airport, 1994. Photo reproduced with permis- sion of Ron Haviv/VII.

The tunnel under the Sarajevo airport. Photo reproduced with permission of the Historical Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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magnet for aid workers, diplomats, UN “Blue Helmet” soldiers, jour- nalists, artists, celebrities, peace activists, adventure seekers, embargo busters, and black market traders. Sarajevo under siege became the most visible and recognizable face of post–Cold War “ethnic conflict” and humanitarian intervention. At the same time, the less visible and less recognized face of the siege included aid diversion, clandestine commerce, and peacekeeper corruption. As the Sarajevo experience powerfully illustrates, just as changes in fortifications and weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, aid convoys, and diaspora remittances. The internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses. It changed the strategic calculus and opportunities and constraints of both the besiegers and the besieged.

Given the overwhelming military advantage of the Serb besiegers, many at first expected the poorly defended city and its government to fall quickly and easily. At the same time, because of the intensity of in- ternational political and media attention, many expected that the Serb leadership would back down and the siege would be short-lived. It did not turn out that way. Why not? What sustained the siege for such an unexpectedly long period of time? These questions are particularly puzzling because siege warfare in Europe was supposed to be obsolete—and in Sarajevo it not only returned with a vengeance, but contrary to all expectations stubbornly persisted. Moreover, it was being broadcast live across the globe. As one Western journalist de- scribed it: “A European city was being reduced to nothing; Carthage in slow motion, but this time with an audience and videotaped record.”3

This book is about the imposition, maintenance, lifting, and after- math of the siege of Sarajevo. I focus on the Sarajevo case not simply be- cause it is a particularly fascinating and important historical story. The siege offers a powerful lens through which to scrutinize the relation- ship between the material and performative aspects of conflict, interna- tional intervention, and postwar reconstruction. In a highly confined and intensely contested geographic space, the siege provides a striking illustration of the interdependence between the upper-world and un- derworld, formal and informal, front stage and backstage in armed confrontations and external involvement. At the broadest level, this is a

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book about the dynamics of war economies, humanitarian and media access to conflict zones, and the political repercussions of relief aid told through the story of Sarajevo. More specifically, issues of aid diversion, embargo busting, trading with the enemy, war profiteering, and irregu- lar combatants all come together and crystallize in the Sarajevo case. In concentrated form, the siege illuminates important elements of the po- litical economy of contemporary conflict and the dilemmas, contradic- tions, and unintended consequences of humanitarian action.

I examine the bottom-up, micro-dynamics of the siege in the con- text of top-down international conditions and developments. I show how and why the internationalization of the siege, which aimed to end the conflict, paradoxically helped to perpetuate it by becoming incorporated into the war economy. A peculiar and in many ways un- intended symbiosis developed on the ground between key actors among the besiegers, besieged, and external interveners. I explain the logic and trace the causal mechanisms of this siege symbiosis and show how it was finally broken. For comparative leverage, I briefly extend the analysis to other siege cases both within Bosnia (Srebrenica) and outside the region (Leningrad, Grozny, Falluja), helping to illumi- nate what is and is not distinctive about the Sarajevo experience.

Pointing to the symbiotic aspects of the Sarajevo siege is not meant to suggest that the besieged and the international interveners did not want the siege lifted, that the besiegers would not have preferred a quick and decisive military victory, or that all sides benefited equally from the siege and were equally responsible for its continuation. However, it does draw attention to the ways in which moves on all sides often ended up being reinforcing, even if not necessarily inten- tionally. No elaborate conspiracy was required, making the siege symbiosis all the more durable.

For many local and international actors, the partial and continu- ously negotiated permeability of the city made the siege politically tolerable, militarily acceptable, and economically profitable. Siege dy- namics were often more about controlling humanitarian supplies and smuggling routes in and out of the city than making the siege militar- ily succeed or fail. While the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants struggled for survival and lived in a state of terror, a semi-porous siege kept the city formally and informally supplied and served vari- ous local and international interests.

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Dissecting the anatomy of the siege shows how and why it proved to be not only sustainable but rewarding for some key players on all sides. For the nationalist Serb besiegers, the siege kept the city bottled up and useful as a political lever while helping to distract attention away from far more severe atrocities elsewhere; for the inner circle of Sarajevo’s political leadership, the siege helped keep them in power, consolidate their party’s political position, marginalize opponents, and generate and sustain international sympathy and support; for the UN and its Western sponsors, the siege provided a remarkably viable working environment to showcase aid provision in the Bosnian war, avoid more direct military entanglement, and contain a further flood of refugees; for foreign journalists, the siege offered a front-row seat in a high-drama spectacle and the most accessible war zone in Bosnia; and for well-placed black market entrepreneurs on all sides the siege conditions assured a captive market with highly inflated profits. As described by Hasib Salkib, the secretary general of the Liberal Party of Bosnia, the siege was “the best course in market economy one can get. I learnt it and I use it today. Naturally some used it as education, some for getting rich, for wheeling and dealing, for stealing.”4

I should say a few words about what this book is not. It is certainly not meant to provide an exhaustive account of the battle for Sarajevo— that challenging task is best left to military historians. It also does not offer a detailed examination of the historical roots of the conflict, but instead focuses on the political economy of its conduct, longevity, out- come, and aftermath. This book is also not meant to be a polemic against crime, corruption, and black market profiteering. Although I examine these activities with a critical eye, the primary purpose is to explain and understand rather than to expose and condemn. All too often, denouncements of corruption and criminality substitute for crit- ical evaluation and fuel politically motivated speculation. Rather than simply joining the chorus of voices loudly condemning such behavior, I often stress its double-edged character: the criminalized side of the conflict involved both looting and saving Sarajevo, it contributed to both the persistence and ending of the war, and it fostered both state formation and deformation. Equally important, an analytical focus on the criminalized dimensions of the siege is not meant to discredit the re- markable defense of Sarajevo and survival skills of its inhabitants. My goal is not to diminish the heroics and sacrifices of Sarajevo’s citizens

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but to shed light on a dimension of conflict that is too often either neg- lected or distorted. Crucially, this includes acknowledging and criti- cally evaluating the role of international actors and their interaction with local players in shaping and enabling the criminalization of the siege and wider war. Indeed, as I stress, the particular mode of exter- nal intervention was critical in turning the conflict into such an enor- mous black market business opportunity.

Much of what has been written about the siege of Sarajevo involves eyewitness reports by journalists, diplomats, military officials, and local residents. This book draws extensively on these memoirs, di- aries, and other on-the-ground accounts to develop a more focused and systematic argument about the role of formal and informal mech- anisms and practices in sustaining the siege. Those who typically pay the most attention to on-the-ground micro-processes of conflict, such as journalists, have usefully documented these dynamics but have tended not to systematically analyze or theorize about them. Al- though my account of the siege is not a full-blown ethnography, I do take seriously the anthropological emphasis on bottom-up analysis of micro-dynamics,5 while also taking into account top-down interna- tional forces and contexts.6

A heavy dose of caution is called for regarding the subject matter of this book. Focusing on the role of black market operators, criminals turned combatants, and smuggling networks runs the risk of exagger- ating their importance, providing an overly criminalized narrative of the siege. In its crudest form, this can generate a knee-jerk cynical dismissal of all actors as simply greedy and corrupt. It is not my in- tention to reduce the dynamics of the siege merely to crime and profi- teering. This is only one (albeit important) dimension of a complex conflict. Rather than invalidating or supplanting other accounts, I aim to incorporate and thus illuminate a commonly overlooked or misun- derstood aspect of the siege and wider war. Moreover, the criminal- ized component of the conflict has left a powerful legacy—including the emergence of new elites who profited from the war and the persis- tence of politically protected wartime smuggling networks—that needs to be taken more fully into account in order to understand the challenges for postwar reconstruction.

There are inherent obstacles to doing research on this topic. Not surprisingly, information on smuggling and criminal actors tends to

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