Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
- Hermann Hesse (Nobel Prize for Literature 1964)
The Bosnian War (1992-1995) was a long, complex, and ugly conflict that followed the fall of communism in Europe. In 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina joined several republics of the former Yugoslavia and declared independence, which triggered a civil war that lasted four years. Bosnia’s population was a multiethnic mix of Muslim Bosniaks (44%), Orthodox Serbs (31%), and Catholic Croats (17%). The Bosnian Serbs, well-armed and backed by neighboring Serbia, laid siege to the city of Sarajevo in early April 1992.
They targeted mainly the Muslim population but killed many other Bosnian Serbs as well as Croats with rocket, mortar, and sniper attacks that went on for 44 months.
As shells fell on the Bosnian capital, nationalist Croat and Serb forces carried out horrific “ethnic cleansing” attacks across the countryside.
Finally, in 1995, UN air strikes and United Nations sanctions helped bring all parties to a peace agreement. Estimates of the war’s fatalities vary widely, ranging from 90,000 to 300,000. To date, more than 70 men involved have been convicted of war crimes by the UN.
A three-day Serb assault in August 1992 on the National and University Library in Sarajevo, for example, destroyed the late-19th-century Moorish revival building and reduced 90 percent of its 1.5 million volumes to ashes.
Aida Buturovic, a 32-year-old librarian in the exchanges section, was killed by sniper fire as she and her colleagues tried to rescue some of the rarest books in the Bosnia National and University Library in Sarajevo from the flames.
Burning books is not an act of war but an act of evil cowardice. Burning libraries to the ground is not act in defence of civilisation but an act of mindless barbarism.
As tragic as Aida’s death was there was some silver lining to her sacrifice. A short time after, Aida’s sister, Amila, teamed up with Andras Riedlmayer, a Harvard Islamic art bibliographer at the Documentation Center for Harvard’s Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture at the Fogg Art Museum.
Hungarian born Riedlmayer began giving talks about the loss of Bosnia’s libraries in 1993. “Your first response is ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?'” he said, ’'You never imagine you’d have to do it.” After a talk to the Middle East Studies Association in Research Triangle in North Carolina., a Bosnian woman who attended told him that 30 cabinets of foreign microfilm had also been destroyed during the attack on the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo. Almost simultaneously, Riedlmayer and the Bosnian both realised that an equal amount of Bosnian microfiche must exist outside the war-torn country since it is common practice for libraries to build their international collections through microfilm swaps.
And so Riedlmayer along with Amila and others to create the Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project. The aim was to enable scholars and librarians to register the whereabouts of microfilm and photocopies of important Bosnian manuscripts. The immediate aim was to compile a database of the locations of these materials so that Bosnian librarians could obtain them later. Other librarians and universities around the world helped out to reconstitute destroyed Bosnian collections.
The Internet Ingathering Project has thus far led to the discovery of about 500 pages of photocopies that reproduce all or part of about 25 to 30 destroyed manuscripts. Although thousands of codices and countless shelf-metres of archival documents were turned to ashes, in some cases the shadows of the lost originals may still endure in a variety of formats. The seach continues.
Aida Buturovic. Remember her name.
History matters. Memory matters. Culture matters.
**A note on heroic act of Aida Buturovic by Middle East Librarians Association (MELA): 'Killing Memory: The targeting of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina’ (Published in Fall 1994)
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