ESTRUCTURA DE UN INFORME

The second hidden transcript startled me when I first heard it. Since the women I interviewed had lived through the siege of Sarajevo, I found it confusing and contradictory that they would deny or minimize VRS violence. Had they not been forced to bolt across exposed streets for fear of VRS snipers? Had they not been terrified by the sheer randomness of an exploding mortar shell? Had they not felt the humiliation of deprivation: the hunger and the cold, the brittle fingernails? Of course, they had. Other parts of their interviews detailed how difficult it was for them to endure siege conditions.

In fact, it was precisely the way the second hidden transcript interwove with other narratives that unsettled and confounded me. Over the course of a single conversation, the same speaker could describe the terror of fleeing from VRS snipers and the maliciousness with which the VRS would cut off electricity, and then go on to absolve the VRS of guilt for the deadliest crimes it committed, or reframe the siege as an act of defense and not

aggression. In other words, the same speaker could position themselves as victims of VRS violence, and as VRS sympathizers, a contradiction I explain further below.

While a few women I interviewed showed their ethno-nationalist stripes right away, several women did not reveal the second hidden transcript to me until months into our research relationships. In one case (see chapter 2), I had interviewed a woman, Milka, numerous times over nine months, and she had shared a great deal with me about her experiences inside the siege, positioning herself as someone who suffered in both the internal and external zones of violence. She had always referred to Sarajevans as “us” and the besieging VRS as “them.” She had never said anything that even resembled a justification of VRS violence. Her shift in narrative startled me the most, when one day, unprompted, she began to use we-language to describe herself as a Serb, to tell me about her doubts that the VRS could really have been responsible for certain particularly brutal massacres, and to explain that the besieging Serbs were really waging a defensive war against Bosniak and Croat separatism.

I thus separate the two transcripts conceptually, but this does not imply that one group of women articulated the first, and a separate group of women articulated the second. Almost all of my research participants articulated the siege’s internal zone of violence. A smaller number among them also articulated the second transcript.

Three interrelated strategies were present in the second transcript. Relativization, justification, and denial. Relativization took the form of “blame-all-around-ism,” which declared a symmetry in the violence between the two warring sides. Such accounts conceded that the VRS and Serb paramilitaries had indeed inflicted violence, but stressed that so too had the Bosnian Army (ARBiH) and Bosniak and Croat paramilitaries inside Sarajevo. A symmetry was asserted between the internal and external zones of violence. “It was war” became an oft-repeated phrase, and an answer to my (very gentle) push-back in interviews. “It was war” asserted that the siege was not an unprovoked act of Serb aggression, but that both sides bore equal measures of blame and responsibility for the conflict.

Justification, closely related, transformed the aggression of the siege form an act of aggression into an act of defense. In justificatory narratives, speakers effectively acknowledged the violence inflicted by the VRS, but stressed that the siege was necessary to protect the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia from Bosniak and Croat separatism, and to protect Serbs who wanted to remain in Yugoslavia. One of the troubles with violence, as Arendt (1969) argued, is that it always seeks justification. It seeks narratives that affirm and legitimize it. Each side in a conflict will be determined in its own conviction that “it fights a just war” (Enns 2012, 12). Even though they had suffered siege conditions, women speaking from a position of justification tended to see themselves not as victims of VRS violence per se, but of Bosniak and Croat separatism that had, in their view, made the siege possible, or even necessary.

Denial took the form of displacing blame for the worst atrocities onto the Bosniaks themselves. The three most frequently invoked incidents for this strategy were: the breadline massacre on Vase Miskina street which killed 16 people on 27 May 1992; and the Markale massacres, two separate shellings that targeted the busy Markale marketplace in downtown Sarajevo. The first shelling killed 68 and wounded 144 people on 5 February 1994; and the second shelling killed 43 and wounded 75 people on 28 August 1995.

These three events were “central to the escalation of Western involvement in the war” (Burg and Shoup 1999, 164). The second Markale massacre resulted two days later in NATO Operation “Deliberate Force”: 11 days of air strikes on VRS positions that constituted “the largest operation ever conducted by the alliance and proved decisive in ending the Bosnian war” (Rusek and Ingrao 2004, 847). At the time, and still today, Republika Srpska denied responsibility for these three atrocities, and argued that the ARBiH had attacked its own side in order to rouse international sympathy and solicit Western military intervention.

Burg and Shoup (1999) argue that Republika Srpska’s version of events is highly improbable, but that it is not completely outside of the realm of possibility. There had been confirmed reports of much smaller-scale attacks by the ARBiH on their own side (Boyd 1995; Sudetic 1994), including UN peacekeepers discovering an ARBiH sniper who had

been targeting civilians inside besieged Sarajevo (Burg and Shoup 1999, 165; O’Connor 1995). But while the circumstances surrounding these massacres were somewhat unusual (Binder 1994; MacKenzie 1993; Rusek and Ingrao 2004), Burg and Shoup (1999, 168) make a crucial point: “The uncertainties surrounding these three events do not negate the evidence of disproportionate attacks and atrocities committed against Muslim civilians by the Bosnian Serbs.”.

These three strategies are revealing of a deep and complicated shame for the violence committed by Serb forces. Scholarship on denial in the aftermath of violence emphasizes that denial often occurs when a crime is considered too intolerable, and when accepting responsibility for it would create an unbearable burden (S. Cohen 2001; Frie 2017; Gordy 2013; von Kellenbach 2003, 2013; Uzun Avci 2019). As Steflja (2010, 235) puts it, the “defensive nationalism” of Serbs functions to displace feelings of shame, humiliation, and guilt, and thus to “soothe the bruised collective ego.”

Similarly, cognitive dissonance theory posits that if people are confronted with information that challenges their accepted beliefs, they will generally make modifications to their beliefs in order to reduce or eliminate the dissonance (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956). However, if one’s beliefs are integral to one’s identity, and accepting the dissonant information would be too unbearable, then it may actually be “less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief and admit that one had been wrong” (27). In other words, it may well be easier to deny what one already knows to be true, despite the mental cacophony this denial will produce.

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What does it mean to conceptualize this second narrative as a hidden transcript (Scott 1990), spoken by the marginalized behind the backs of the dominant? The concept of resistance is being re-examined by scholars who have questioned its “implicit link to progressive politics” (Hathaway 2013, 87). For instance, Blee (2002, 158) conceptualizes

the private talk of racist activist women as a “racist variant of the ‘arts of resistance,’” reflecting how members of racist movements consider themselves to be victims who have been silenced by the dominant society. In these terms, the second hidden transcript could be considered a Serb ethno-nationalist variant of the arts of resistance.

Like the victim-perpetrator paradigm, the concept of resistance relies on a dichotomous framework where actors are divided into two camps: as Hathaway (2013) puts it, they are represented as being either virtuous resisters or villainous oppressors. In conceptualizing the second narrative as a hidden transcript, I aim to complicate this vision, and to re-assess some of the questionable assumptions that under-grid anthropological literature on silence and voice, and that set parameters around what is and is not acceptable for victims to say. Just as a “consensus silence” compels Serb women to keep quiet about their experiences of suffering inside the siege’s internal zone of violence, the second transcript provides evidence of Serb ethno-nationalist women’s own consensus on silence, and their knowledge that they should keep quiet about their political views. Taking these two silences together enables me to draw a line of connection between them, to make the case that misrecognition foments discontent and division, and ultimately feeds a clandestine ethno-nationalism.