If you search long enough on the Internet, you can still see the Vijecnica burning. On the night in August 1992 when Serb forces shelled the 100-year-old building, which housed the Bosnia and Herzegovina National and University Library, the citizens of Sarajevo were still shockable, and some left the shelter of their apartments to stand in the street while the ashes of a million books and manuscripts flew up in a wild cloud over their heads.
The fire burned all night and most of the next day, and photographs showing
flames billowing out of row after row of elegant high windows ran in newspapers
all over the world. Burning libraries get attention, and this particular
building, over several incarnations, had occupied a
central place in the life of its city. In the years immediately after the
shelling, the graceful, gutted Vijecnica (pronounced VYECH-neetsa, a
Serbo-Croatian word for "town hall") became about as famous as a
wrecked building can be: a symbol, variously, of the war's savagery, of the
blotting out of a shared culture, and of the indomitability of the human
spirit.
There was no shortage of symbols in those days: The library's director,
Enes Kujundzic, symbolically laid a single book on one of the building's
ruined pillars; Federico Mayor, the head of UNESCO, symbolically donated
300 books to the library; Prince Charles symbolically offered assistance
from his private architectural institute; the conductor Zubin Mehta and a
phalanx of Italian opera singers jetted into town for a symbolic
performance of Mozart's Requiem. In short, just as donors all over the
world were looking to affirm their solidarity with the besieged city, the
Vijecnica emerged as the foremost architectural symbol of wounded
Sarajevo.
So it is puzzling to realize that the Vijecnica will likely greet the
millennium as a symbol of the failure of reconstruction. Since Serb forces
withdrew from the hills around Sarajevo during the first days of 1996, the
newly Muslim-dominated city, capital of the new state of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, has stirred back to life in a million ways, but the Vijecnica
has remained curiously untouched. As 1999 began, no worker had laid a hand
on the building for a year and a half, and the only money spent on the
project -- the total cost of which is estimated at more than $13 million
-- was $825,000 donated by the Austrian government to replace the roof in
1997. Wind and rain have faded the placards announcing the end of that
phase of work, without which the building could have collapsed from the
vibrations of passing traffic. And now -- as the attention of the
international community drifts away -- some people who care about the
Vijecnica are beginning to doubt they will ever see it restored.
In a city that has become accustomed to loss, this possibility provokes
incomprehension rather than rage. At the National and University Library's
temporary headquarters in the old Marshal Tito army barracks across town,
director Enes Kujundzic can show you tokens from well-wishers around the
world: handsome paperweights, embossed stationery, photographs of himself
posing with foreign dignitaries. Hanging on his wall is a framed poem in
Spanish in honor of his library, or so he was told, anyway, by someone who
spoke Spanish.
"I don't understand," Kujundzic says. "You have this building,
you have
this great emotional appeal, and it did not generate reconstruction. It
did not even produce enough money for the library's [temporary
headquarters]. It produced a very modest amount of money and assistance.
If [international bodies] will not care about this building, what will
they care about? What is it? Is it factories? I don't see them. If they
say they care about big roads, I don't see them. So what is it? I would
like to see reconstruction physically."
He also tells a not very funny Bosnian joke about patience that goes like
this: A dying man calls a doctor and the doctor says, "patience,
patience," and by the time the doctor arrives the man is dead.
After the Turks occupied Sarajevo in the fifteenth century, the
architectural styles of the city asserted first the idea of Ottoman power
and then of Austro-Hungarian power and then of Yugoslavian power. The
grandiose, ornate Vijecnica, which was originally designed to house the
city's government, somehow manages to evoke all of them imperfectly. Built
by Austro-Hungarian occupiers in an arabesque style in what had been the
old Turkish Quarter, the 1896 Vijecnica is unmistakably a tip of the hat
by one colonial power to its predecessor. It is also fantastically
inaccurate, resembling, as UCLA art historian Carel Bertram says, "no
known Islamic architecture in either scale, plan, or decoration."
That's the nice way of putting it. The building, which Archduke Ferdinand
had just exited when he was assassinated blocks away in 1914, carries a
strong scent of Vienna. In her 1941 book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,
Rebecca West describes the Vijecnica as "stuffed with beer and sausages
down to its toes," and notes, witheringly, that "the minaret of the
mosque
beside it has the air of a cat that watches a dog making a fool of
itself." Muslim critics of the building have been apt to dismiss it as
fake Islamic, Communist-era modernists as fatuously sentimental.
Muslim skepticism about the Vijecnica was not lost on Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic, who -- although it was clear enough that his gunners had
targeted the library -- publicly suggested shortly after the attack that
the Muslims themselves had set fire to it "because they didn't like the
... architecture."
But here is an important fact: On the night the Vijecnica burned, all its
sins were forgiven. Ordinary people had a great affection for it -- the
postcard record will testify to that -- and they expect it to be rebuilt.
To many, the mere fact that Serbs stationed in the hills picked out the
library for destruction is enough of a reason to pay for its
reconstruction. There seems to be no other way to respond to a siege that
people still describe as an exercise in violent urban planning.
"It was destroyed because it was a Sarajevo landmark," says Colin
Kaiser,
who heads the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization mission in Bosnia. "[That act] was saying, 'We're creating a
new city by wrecking things.'"
Indeed, suggest to Sarajevans that the Vijecnica be leveled and you will
meet with looks of real hurt and shock. Muhamed Hamidovic, director of the
Bosnia and Herzegovina Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage,
sends his architecture students out to canvas neighborhoods when they are
trying to develop new plans for damaged public spaces. But many of the
students find themselves frustrated; all anyone wants is what was there
before the war. "There is only one goal -- to restore the destroyed
buildings," Hamidovic says, looking down sadly at a student's drawings.
There was a point when hope for the Vijecnica ran high. Foreign donors
wanted a reconstruction project with overwhelming cultural importance, and
the Vijecnica was an obvious choice. As certain international
organizations came together with the goal of reconstructing the library's
burned collections, others turned their attention to its bricks and
mortar. "UNESCO To Rebuild Sarajevo Library," announced Reuters in a
headline late in 1993. In 1994, UNESCO?s general director sponsored an
international architectural contest for the reconstruction project. In
1996, Agence France Presse ran a story headlined "France To Help Rebuild
National Library."
The main obstacle was that no one knew who owned the building. As was the
case with properties all over Bosnia that were scheduled for
reconstruction, the Vijecnica presented a rat's nest of competing legal
and moral claims. For almost 100 years, occupancy of the Vijecnica was a
privilege doled out to a series of official bodies. Under the
Austro-Hungarian empire, first the Sarajevo city government and then the
Bosnian parliament inhabited the building. After the end of World War I,
when control of Bosnia passed to the new kingdom of Yugoslavia, the city
government moved back in. And in 1945, under Tito, the building was given
to the National Library. On the night the Vijecnica burned, its last
uncontested owner had been the state of Yugoslavia, which had already
ceased to exist.
The turf war was on. Enes Kujundzic put in his bid early and has not
ceased to argue that the library still belongs in the building.
"It was destroyed as a library," he says now. "If your position
should be
clear about barbarism, then barbarism should be rectified by returning the
building to its library function. Because if you accept that the building
is to change its function, then you accept the argument of destruction."
But it wasn't Kujundzic's decision to make, since the library's status in
the building was technically that of a tenant, and the city and regional
authorities had their own ideas. For one thing, even friends of the
institution agree that the Vijecnica was never a very good library.
Hamidovic used it as a student, and recalls becoming so frustrated
searching for a book in the library's chaotic stacks that he traveled to
Oxford, where a university library also had the book, to save time.
Restoring the Vijecnica to its most recent function -- however
sentimentally appropriate it may seem -- doesn't make much sense, he
argues. A similar view comes from Ivan Straus, a 70-year-old architect
whose massive Modernist skyscrapers reshaped Sarajevo's skyline during the
Seventies and Eighties.
"We were guilty, because we kept this as a library too long," says
Straus,
who refused to work on post-World War II reconstruction throughout the
Communist era, saying that to do so would be derivative. "So why should we
again be a coconspirator, building a nonfunctional library? And will the
world give money to a nonfunctional building?"
The debate over the use of the building has never been resolved. Control
of the property has wavered between the mayor's office and the regional,
or cantonal, government, which is dominated by the SDA, Bosnia's main
Muslim political party. For a time, there was talk of using the Vijecnica
as SDA headquarters. Kujundzic, meanwhile, lobbied stubbornly to keep it
a library. As the Bosnians have waited for money from international
donors, international donors have been waiting for a consensus among the
Bosnians, and the Vijecnica went untouched for almost five years after the
shelling, until Austria pitched in to rebuild the roof. In the office of
the architectural firm DOM, Ferhad Mulabegovic spends all day every day
attempting to reconstruct the nineteenth-century plans for the Vijecnica
-- only 30 percent of the original plans have been located -- and
confesses that he is eager to turn his attention to new buildings. There's
a limited amount that Mulabegovic, who is the only architect permanently
assigned to the project, can do without a final decision as to the
library's function. He says the government's current plan allots half the
space to the National Library and half to the city government. And without
a trace of irony -- despite the Vijecnica's value to foreign donors as a
symbol of Bosnian statehood -- he also suggests that part of the building
could be used as office space for UNESCO.
In the meantime, some friends of the library, encouraged early on by the appearance of international support, are beginning to suspect that they have been strung along.
"It was such a stupid thing to shell the library. Everyone was astonished, everyone was full of anger," says Kemal Bakarsic, an assistant professor of librarianship at the University of Sarajevo. "But when it comes to reality, and reality is definitely money, no one really cares about it."
Not true, say some foreigners familiar with the reconstruction efforts. According to UNESCO's Kaiser, the money could have been raised easily enough, given Western interest in the project, but from the very beginning, working in Sarajevo has presented a disturbing obstacle: Bosnians -- from the mayor's office, the Federation government, and the regional administration -- squabbling with each other over property rights. Just renovating the library's temporary headquarters in the Tito Barracks -- a $220,000 project funded by UNESCO -- required a maddening number of hours spent in the offices of local bureaucrats, Kaiser says. And donors are wary of pouring money into buildings that may get snatched up by private owners or end up as a party's political headquarters.
"There have been appalling stories where the international community has
funded a restoration [of a public building] and the next day someone shows
up with a title," says Kaiser. "Enough of these things have happened
that
the international community does have the right to ask who owns a given
building. Why put in 12 million marks if you don't know what the building
is going to be?" The Vijecnica was also problematic because of its
symbolism. Even in the rare cases of buildings whose ownership was clear,
cultural-heritage projects had a very high symbolic bar to reach if they
wanted to get money from international groups. Officials from the World
Bank or UNESCO who were making lists of cultural-heritage reconstruction
priorities became extremely careful about classifying a site as important,
for fear of alienating factions.
"The trap of the Dayton Commission [agreements on cultural heritage] is
that cultural symbols are also nationalistic symbols," says Patrice
Dufour, who spent years in Bosnia as a special advisor to the World Bank
and now works in Paris for the organization. "You have the Muslims, who
want the mosques up on the top of the list of symbols, and the Catholics
want Catholic churches, and the Orthodox want Orthodox churches, and it
becomes a kind of competition for history. We put a Jewish synagogue first
on the list of monuments, because at least no one was against it."
There were some proposals early on for the Vijecnica to be rebuilt as a
"house of cultures of Bosnia and the world," but these proposals never
gained momentum, says Dufour. So while everyone agreed that the building
was important to the people of Sarajevo, it was never quite a clear enough
monument to multiculturalism to compel foreign donors to open their
wallets.
And ultimately there were plenty of other worthy projects vying for the
same international dollars. All the Vijecnica's drawbacks -- the
ground-level scuffling, the possibility that it could later house
political parties -- are cast into relief by a massive reconstruction
project taking place in the town of Mostar, 50 miles southwest of
Sarajevo. That project's centerpiece is the rebuilding of a
sixteenth-century bridge that had linked the Croat and Muslim sides of the
town and that gave way under shelling in November 1992. The bridge was
built during the Ottoman empire and had no strong political associations.
Political factions can't put their offices in a bridge. And when the
Croats signed on to work with the Muslims on the project, Mostar became
eminently salable. The bill for the work in Mostar is $14 million, and it
will be paid by such organizations as the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, the
World Monuments Fund, the World Bank, and UNESCO.
"The Mostar Bridge is really the symbol of all Bosnia," says Adrienne
Nassau, an officer working on Bosnian projects at the World Bank in
Washington. "[Donors] could have chosen the library, and they thought
about it and decided the bridge was a better object for symbolic value. If
you?re doing just one thing, you have to choose just one thing."
When Western donors demur, the other fast track to a building's
reconstruction is emergence as a Muslim cultural icon; Saudi money, for
example, has rolled in to reconstruct Sarajevo's mosques. But -- in part
because of the Western interest in the building -- that didn't pan out
either. Marian Wenzel,
director of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue,
a nonprofit organization whose patrons include the present Archduke and
Archduchess von Hapsburg, says the Vijecnica lost out because it couldn't
be aligned with either the Muslim nationalist SDA party or with Islam
itself. "Had the Vijecnica been permitted to turn into an SDA
government
building, as was for a time proposed, it would probably have received the
go-ahead," Wenzel
writes in a statement from London. "It would also
probably have been allowed to go ahead if it could have been given a
totally Islamic religious function; donations to complete the job could
have been obtained from oil-rich Islamic countries. Having lost, through
local infighting, the chance to receive either of these functions, the
Vijecnica is allowed to decay."
Three and a half years after the war ended, the people of Sarajevo have
such a variety of things to get angry about that the stalled Vijecnica
project is not likely to raise an uproar. If you doubt that, cruise by the
U.N. Mine Action Centre headquarters on Marshal Tito Street, the front
lawn of which is full of unexploded land mines. By 1998, according to the
U.S. Agency for International Development, industrial production in Bosnia
had reached only 30 percent of prewar levels; last August, the Bosnian
government reported that unemployment stood at 40 percent. Water is a
problem, electricity is a problem. In certain neighborhoods, shelled
apartment complexes still look like mineral formations rather than places
where people ever lived.
In short, it's not unreasonable to categorize cultural conservation as a
luxury. The World Bank's Dufour puts it this way: "Is it right to spend
money on an old bridge when people don't have roofs on their houses?"
And some even argue that high-profile cultural-heritage projects like
Mostar's bridge let international donors off the hook at a time when the
larger, slower task of rebuilding Bosnia's cities is far from finished.
Andrew Herscher, an American architect who worked on reconstruction
projects in Mostar before the war and who has traveled extensively through
Bosnia since, refers to these projects as "alibis" that assuage
the guilt
foreigners feel about withdrawing from the scene.
"There's an argument over whether this should be the first thing you reconstruct or the last thing," says Herscher, now a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "It's worrisome that as soon as they do [cultural heritage projects], they're pulling out all these resources, and I wonder, then what? Is the game over?"
But it's also true that foreigners will care about a war-torn country only for a limited amount of time after the guns fall silent, and that there was a reason to rebuild city landmarks while the money was still available. Shortly after the Dayton Accord, the World Bank held a donors' conference that ended up setting a goal of $5.1 billion to reconstruct Bosnia -- and when that goal is met next year, the window of opportunity will begin to close. Once the foreign money dries up, waiting for the Bosnians to raise $13.3 million for the library could mean waiting 20 years -- or 50. So time is running out for the Vijecnica. Maybe it's run out already.
Meanwhile, the Vijecnica's advocates are left with memories of the opera singers, the lone cellist, the posters and postcards, and the world-famous photographs that trumpeted its importance to the world. In the end, say observers, the Vijecnica may have been too important for its own good. Because it meant something, people fought over it; because people fought over it, it couldn't stand as a reliable symbol of a multiethnic Bosnia. That's a big responsibility for a building, and this particular building could collapse under the weight of it.
"It's too bad," says Kaiser. "The building deserves something. It deserves loyalty from the authorities. It deserves more serenity than we are going to give it."