Confessions of a ‘Mixed Marriage Child’. Diary in the Study of Yugoslavia’s Breakup

Diary as a Source

In my first attempt to read my diary as a historical source I focused on its silences, which when juxtaposed against my memories at the moment of interpretation seemed like outright lies. For example, statements like the one I jotted down on 16 December 1993—’I have never prayed or fasted before’—read like a trail of deception I had laid down in an effort to cover up my previous immersion in Islam a year before. The promise that ‘I will love all good people regardless of their nationality’ became a purposefully designed ruse in an attempt to mask a boy’s involvement in borderline criminal activities against his Serb neighbours during the previous summer.^[1] Rather than interpreting the diary with the detached strive for objectivity of a historian—as I would any other source—I thus succumbed to the impulse to pass what Jerome Bruner has called ‘the heavy handed judgment that autobiography is particularly subject to “self-deception”’.^[2] The judgment, according to Bruner, is based on the erroneous assumption that deep in the recesses of our brains there is a truth that can be discovered if only we did not predictably follow Freud and choose to repress it for a variety of reasons. Besides ignoring the countless studies showing that ‘perceiving and remembering are themselves constructions and reconstructions’,^[3] the self-deception approach to my diary led me to view my historical subject as a liar and even more importantly, to pass on the opportunity to read the diary with the same nuance I accorded to other, more conventional, historical sources.

I, of course, was not the first one to engage in such a judgmental reading of a diary. As Jochen Hellbeck has noted, there has been ‘a widespread proclivity’ amongst historians of totalitarianisms, particularly of stalinism, to read the diaries of their subjects with a keen eye towards ‘cracks and silences’^[4] as it was assumed the terrified subjects would either remain silent on controversial issues, or write in code. In his excellent study of diarists during the height of Stalin’s dictatorship, Hellbeck takes a different approach, the one advocated by Hannah Arendt, whose insistence to take subjects at their word reflects, in some ways, my judgmental reading of my own diary:

‘The sources talk and what they reveal is the self-understanding as well as the selfinterpretation of people who act and who believe they know what they are doing. If we deny them this capacity and pretend that we know better and can tell them what their real ‘motives’ are or which real ‘trends’ they objectively represent—no matter what they themselves think—we have robbed them of the very faculty of speech, insofar as speech makes sense.’^[5]

Following Arendt’s advice, Hellbeck shows that even at the height of Stalin’s terror, Soviet citizens used their diaries to improve themselves and to monitor their progress of integration into the new social order. In their daily entries they ‘were at pains to cast themselves as subjects of history’.^[6] Although a 14-year-old boy may have had less of a historical perception of himself than Hellbeck’s adult diarists, taking the boy’s claims at face value makes us more aware of the diary’s inherent ‘thematic obsessions’, to use the words of Philippe Lejeune who argues that ‘first and foremost it [the diary] is a piece of music, meaning an art of repetition and variation’.^[7] Embracing this view makes us more attuned to seeing variations, repetitions, contradictions, and silences, not as strategies of deception, but rather as integral parts of identity formation. In the words of Julie Rak, ‘Diaries do not present consistent pictures of a life: they show an identity in process, even as they are part of the process itself of creating identity, day after day’.^[8] As the discussion below shows, this insight is particularly fruitful in the study of ethnicity.

Reading the diary as a process of identity formation moves beyond the structuralist studies of ethnicity and closer to what Rogers Brubaker and his coauthors have described as ‘relational, processual, and dynamic understanding of ethnicity and “nation”’.^[9] Structuralists like Fredrik Barth were the first ones to highlight the episodic nature of ethnic identity, with Barth famously arguing that ethnic categories ‘may be of great relevance to behavior, but they need not be; they may pervade all social life or they may be relevant only in limited sectors of activity’.^[10] However, this and other older studies exclusively focused on the constellation of forces that maintain the interethnic boundary without being overly concerned with the content of ethnic identities on either side of that boundary. Brubaker has shifted the research focus on the process through which ethnic identity becomes, or ceases to be, salient in everyday interactions.^[11] A diary’s fragmentary structure, its propensity to react to events, and its lack of an overarching narrative are all particularly conducive to studying how ethnicity ebbs and flows into the daily life, how it interacts with other aspects of self-understanding, and how it impacts one’s worldview. These questions are especially pertinent when the diarist in question is a boy from a family marked as ethnically mixed during a major social upheaval of the twentieth century, the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The central argument of this article is that despite being marked as a child of mixed marriage with questionable loyalties to the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) cause, during my refugee life I embraced the nationalist logic, and in particular the hatred of Croats, as a banal part of my daily reality. Writing into my diary was an activity that allowed me to indulge in numerous obsessions, including recounting of my family’s harrowing escape from Mostar, archiving the crimes of the Bosnian Croat Army (Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane, HVO) against the Muslims of the city, and replaying my revenge fantasies. The fact that my fantasies of exacting revenge on the Croats coinhabited the pages of my diary with my worries about family members who identified as Croats, including my mother, illustrates the ability of nationalist thinking to sidestep contradictions and to (still) allow for a sense of unequivocal belonging. Put more concretely, even though I feared for the safety of my maternal Croat uncle or cared about the Muslim refugees’ attitudes in our camp towards my mother, I wholeheartedly embraced Bosniak narratives of the past and the future. But reflecting the diary’s ability to capture ‘identity in process’, the Bosniak nationalist in my diary is gradually eased out of its pages once the promises of an Islamic future are replaced by the dreams of a French future. In all of its four notebooks, the diary mimics my family’s frantic attempts to relocate to a European country–revealing the accuracy of Philippe Lejeune’s observation that ‘the diary is first and foremost an activity […] a way of living before it is a way of writing’.^[12] As our efforts to obtain, in Istanbul, an entry visa to France escalate, my alienation from Turkey and the Bosniak cause becomes more evident. While, on 24 September 1993 I write of having been ‘completely psychologically destroyed’^[13] by the news that the Bosniak army had failed to liberate my home town Mostar, only three months later, on 24 December, I refuse to allow for the possibility that my brother and father will be drafted into that same army:

‘Only now I realize that Alija Izetbegovic [the Bosnian Muslim president] wants to create a Muslim state for which none of us has any desire. We don’t need a state in which we all would not be able to live together regardless of nationality. For that state, Vanja and dad will not fight.’^[14]

The apparent ideological transformation reveals the pragmatic, self-centered (if not narcissistic) nature of our interaction with ethnic identity: what had happened in the three months between these two entries was not due to admission on the part of the Bosnian president of his real goals, but rather a tectonic shift in our family goals, away from Turkey and towards ‘France the promised land’, as I termed it.^[15] Of course, historians of nationalism have noted the pragmatic character of the ways in which humans embrace national identities,^[16] but when it comes to the identities of mixed marriage children in the former Yugoslavia, the historiography has so far portrayed a woefully inadequate and one-dimensional picture.

I kept my diary from 4 August 1993 until 28 June 1994 at the height of the ideological battles over Yugoslav mixed marriages that were reflective of the brutal wars tearing the country apart. Arguably, the most concerted campaign stigmatizing mixed marriage children came from the Bosniak nationalist newspapers, Ljiljan and Zmaj od Bosne, whose editorial boards were closely linked with the ruling Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA) in Sarajevo.^[17] The gist of the campaign was the criticism that the miješanci [mixed ones]—as one Bosniak journalist branded them with the word often used to describe dogs of impure breed–had been privileged in the communist system due to the fact that their parents ‘were strengthening in their sheets’ the ‘brotherhood and unity, that apple of the eye of the communist dictatorship’.^[18]Ljiljan’s editor-in-chief offered a more Freudian perspective when he diagnosed mixed marriage children as ‘frustrated by their heritage’,^[19] while an Islamic cleric in the same paper accused Muslims entering such marriages of committing a crime ‘worse than a rape’.^[20] The ideological opponents of these nationalists branded such attacks as fascist and as evidence of creeping Islamic authoritarianism in the Bosnian capital. For instance, Roger Cohen of The New York Times worried that Ljiljan’s campaign against mixed marriage was threatening to undo the ‘multiethnic, multireligious society as symbolized by the mingled minarets and church steeples of Sarajevo’.^[21] All of the stories, as far as I am aware, that were reported in Western media during the wars and which involved mixed marriages aimed at showing the baffling logic of the wars and of their tragic impact on ordinary couples. For example, the latter was even the central premise of a feature produced for the American dcoumentary series Frontline focusing on the death of a Bosniak-Serb couple that had been killed by snipers and were posthumously dubbed ‘Sarajevo’s Romeo and Juliet’.^[22] More than twenty years after the end of the wars, the mixed marriages of the former Yugoslavia have remained frozen in this one-dimensional and excessively ideologized image from the mid-1990s.

What is particularly disheartening is that Yugoslav authors supported in their writing, and therefore inadvertently strengthened, this stale image of mixed marriages. Prominent historians invoked the reportedly high number of urban mixed marriages during socialism to argue that with the wars Bosnians were ‘betraying’ the ‘tradition’ of religious tolerance and ethnic coexistence,^[23] or that they were unraveling the ‘Westernization’ of society that had been present in this urban mixing during Tito’s reign.^[24] Prodded by the lack of statistical data on mixed marriages during socialism, demographers countered the surprisingly low number of intermixing cases by claiming that these showed not only the ‘inherent fragility of the former Yugoslavia as a federal state’, but also the ‘importance of the differences in the cultural traditions’ in the country.^[25] These numbers did not stop some international relations analysts to hope, when the war ended, that the presence of mixed marriage children in Bosnia would bode well for peace and reconciliation.^[26] What these nationalist activists, journalists, filmmakers, historians, demographers, and think tank analysts shared was the assumption that the ascriptive category of mixedness sufficed to grasp the actual experience of these couples, and especially of their children.

The central aim of this article is to counter this assumption. My use of an alternative historical approach, by means of autobiography, and my reliance on my diary and thus on a source that has always been a controversial genre,^[27] aim to push the discussion of mixed marriages beyond the stale debates of the 1990s. Whilst acknowledging inherent problems with autobiography as a source—that scholars, especially literary critics, have debated for decades—,^[28] I argue that an autobiographical inspection of a diary kept at the height of the wars of Yugoslav succession, by a child belonging to a mixed marriage, is an invaluable lens through which we can study ethnicity as it happens. In this respect, I have been inspired by the methodology of Rogers Brubaker who, in the Transylvanian town of Cluj, instead of looking for ethnicity waited for it to emerge in everyday interactions between Romanians and Hungarians. In this way, he could observe how ethnicity, albeit occasionally, turned nominal into experiential mixed marriages.^[29] I treat my diary like Brubaker treats these interactions: I observe its repetitions with an eye on when, why, and how my mother’s ethnicity becomes a part of my daily experience. But instead of overwhelming it with my own ethnicity-obsessed investigative lens, I follow the diary’s own rhythm, a methodology that reveals ethnicity as one amongst many obsessions of my 14-year-old self. This is an important caveat because it is a precondition for becoming more cognizant of the pragmatic or even strategic thinking that interacts with ethnicity.

‘We Will Pay Them Back With High Interest Rates!’

One of my diary’s main thematic obsessions was the need to report on the news regarding the wars raging in Bosnia. In fact, I began my very first entry, on 4 August 1993, with a brief history of the events that had brought us to the house of my grandmother’s brother in Zagreb, at the very same time that the Bosnian Croat troops were cleansing West Mostar of all the remaining Muslims in their bid to create a Bosnian Croat nation-state (Herceg Bosna).^[30] The wording of the entry echoed what I had been hearing on TV and reading in the newspapers before and after leaving Mostar:

‘The war with the Serb-Chetnik aggressor had just started to die down in Mostar when the clashes between the formations of the Hrvatsko Vijeće Odbrane (HVO) and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine, ARBIH) broke out.’^[31]

What this very first sentence of my diary silenced was my complicity in the rhetoric of anti-Serbian chauvinism, which had gone well beyond the use of hateful words such as ‘the Serb-Chetnik aggressor’.^[32] During the previous summer I had participated in a ransacking of a Serb apartment in our building during which I stole a holy Serbian icon and then pelted it with rocks. Even more ominously, I had spent a significant portion of that summer stalking a Serb neighbor of mine, an old man and a widower. I was convinced he was a Serb spy and believed that his daily walks into the woods were actually trips to a hidden radio station. Although the reason for his walks turned out to be a pigeon loft rather than a radio station, my paranoia—never mentioned in the diary—is made evident by the extent to which I imbibed anti-Serb zealotry during that summer. Now, in August 1993, a few months after the Croat-Muslim alliance had crumbled amidst a brutal war, after my family had endured ransacking of our apartment by Croat militias, and only a few weeks after we had left Mostar for good, I embraced the anti-Croat sentiment and unequivocally identified with the Bosniak side of the conflict.

The war stories that my diary tells eventually evolve into revenge fantasies, particularly as our situation becomes more desperate. For example, in my first entry I write of our departure from Mostar with a sense of objective detachment:

‘After a few days when the fighting abated a bit, my family and I began to gather up the necessary papers to leave the city. We sold our apartment to an HVO police officer for only 1000 DM [Deutsche Mark].’^[33]

I do write of becoming emotional after realizing we would be leaving our apartment: ‘When dad told me that we sold our three-bedroom apartment for only 1000 DM and that we have to leave our “hearth” tears swelled up in my eyes and I felt a destructive pain in my soul.’^[34] However, instead of resentment towards the police officer who moved into our apartment, there was the certainty that we did the right thing and hope of a better tomorrow:

‘But my dad explained to me that it will be better for all of us if we left the city. We were going to go abroad but we would stay with our relatives in Croatia until we gathered up all the necessary paperwork.’^[35]

Not even two weeks after this entry, on 13 August 1993, I let my true feelings towards the new occupant of our apartment be known in my writing: ‘When better times come, we can always, God willing, evict this guy Mirko out of the apartment because he only signed a lease with us and that means that he is our tenant.’^[36] I wrote this just moments after we received a letter from Mirko in which he informed us that he would not be sending us the remainder of the money he owed us because we had supposedly reneged on our part of the deal by selling our TV, the stereo, and the VCR. But, in reality, these had been stolen from us. The night my brother and father escaped Mostar and crossed into Croatia illegally, the taxi driver who had transported them came back to our apartment where, with a gun holstered at his belt, he informed my mother and me that he would be taking our appliances. He then said that he was doing so because my father ended up owing him money for having smuggled them successfully across the border. Therefore, it may not be all that surprising that upon reading this letter I directed my anger not just at Mirko, the new inhabitant of our apartment, but at the HVO, which I deduced he symbolized:

‘People always tell me, “Fedja, don’t worry, the war in Mostar will be over and we will rebuild it once again!” But I don’t think so. The entire Old Town in Mostar has been destroyed. That cannot be rebuilt because you cannot rebuild old structures. Mostar has lost its soul. There are no more real Mostarians. […] Who are we going to live with in Mostar? I will never forgive them for this. They have expelled me from my hearth and made our return impossible. You are probably wondering who exiled us. Well, who else than the soldiers of the HVO! Like I’ve said, I can never forgive them for this.’^[37]

As the war grinds on and we move to a dusty Turkish town near the Bulgarian border—where we spend our days in a school turned refugee camp, in a shared room with another four-member family—my hate fantasies become even more visceral and frequent. After we receive reports of Croat-Muslim battles raging around the Šanticeva Street in Mostar—where the paternal side of my family is trapped—I once again let out my venom against the HVO:

‘I always think if any of my relatives are harmed, God forbid, the soldiers of the HVO will pay dearly for it. I will grow up one day and then I will exact my revenge on them. But dear God let this not happen because it would have terrible consequences.’^[38]

Four days later, I again contemplate revenge, this time not only against our apartment tenant, Mirko, but his children as well:

‘Are we ever going to return to Mostar and kick that Glibic out of our apartment! How can that Mirko G. who is in our apartment right now, sleep on our beds, and how can he walk around and live in the apartment we spent our entire lives investing in! And he even cheated us out of that money he promised us! Shame on him! But I vow to him that he will never be at peace in that apartment. Someone will return, whether that is me, my parents, my brother, or my son, whoever! And then he is going to be kicked out, ass first. He has two kids! If he is not alive at the time, or he is not there, they will pay for it. I have never been vengeful person, but this time they have really crossed the line! For expelling us from our beautiful Mostar, they will all pay, each of them separately. They or their descendants!’^[39]

In this entry, there is no effort to restrict my hatred only to Mirko or ‘the soldiers of the HVO’ as I had done before. Now, Mirko and his children are all identified as enemies who are to blame for our exile. A few days later, and after we managed to reach via telephone my aunt who, along with her husband, her two sons, and my paternal grandparents, remained stuck in their apartment in downtown Mostar, at the heart of the most intense street fighting, I write the following entry:

‘She [my aunt] says that the situation in Mostar is beyond terrible. Almost all Muslims from the West bank have been expelled to the East bank and they […] are waiting to be expelled at any moment […]. But at least on the East bank they will be at peace because they will be amongst their own people. So you can see, in this example, the ethnic cleansing that the HVO is conducting. But, there is a war coming to their country as well! […] There [in Croatia], the other day, sirens sounded and they all got ready to go to the basements. Italians have entered Istria and they are demanding that the territory belong to them. Yesterday, a Luna fell on Zagreb and killed nine people. It can be seen from the news that Croatia is not going to fare well either […] They have done enough evil in Mostar and now their bad karma is hitting them back.’^[40]

The entry is truly remarkable as evidence of the extent to which I had become an unequivocal nationalist who was willing to interpret the cold-blooded murder of nine Zagreb civilians by a Serb missile as payback for the war raging in Mostar. What becomes also clear in my statement is nationalism’s utter lack of nuance. I maintain that my paternal side of family would feel safer on the Muslim side of Mostar where they would be ‘amongst their own people’, even though my aunt was a Montenegrin-Croat which made my two cousins, her sons, children of a mixed marriage. However, I still expressed concern for the safety of my maternal grandfather who was living in Split at the time. But despite this concern and the caveat that ‘I do not like to see innocent people suffer even if these were people in Croatia’, my subsequent entries and my behavior outside the diary tell a different story.

The revenge fantasies that filled the pages of my diary would occasionally spill in public. But since this public was highly nationalized already, the hatred was a banal part of our daily experience. In early October of that year 1993, the camp administrators decided to organize a talent show for children. Performances were to be held in front of camp residents and Turkish officials. I eagerly anticipated the talent show and practiced the recitation of a few (bad) poems I had written and in which I clumsily expressed my love for Mostar. The song I chose to perform as a part of the main act was titled ‘God punish our enemies’ (Kazni Bože dušmane) and was originally written and performed by Sarajevo-born Alen Islamovic, a former lead vocal of the famous Yugoslav rock band Bijelo Dugme (White Button). This song had been on my mind well before the announcement of the show. I had even transcribed its lyrics into my diary, almost a full month before I performed it in front of the entire camp, and our Turkish visitors:

‘They are not letting me mourn my son,

They are not letting me, my only homeland.

The eyes are moist, the song touches the mother, but there is no son to play it.

Punish God! Punish God those enemies and let the heart of Bosnia beat forever!’^[41]

The grainy video of the performance, which survives to this day, shows the audience both singing and clapping enthusiastically to my friend Saša’s and my own listless and out of key performance. In the subsequent diary entries I describe the talent show as an unequivocal success, noting that the entire audience responded to my last act by shouting, in unison, ‘Fedja! Fedja! Fedja!’ Although the video does not show the audience shouting my name–raising the issue of the diary’s proclivity towards self-aggrandizement—it does illustrate how the crowd embraced the same nationalist sentiments expressed in the private confines of my diary. The video showcases my smiling, 14-year-old self as perfectly at home in this environment.

In places, the diary reads almost like an investigation to archive the crimes the HVO had committed in Mostar. In addition to reporting the news of the Croat army ethnically cleansing the Muslims of West Mostar, I also pasted two Croatian banknotes—of five and twenty-five kunas—with a caption that reads:

‘This is the type of money which Croatia began to use after its secession [from Yugoslavia]. They started using such banknotes in Mostar after its liberation from the Chetniks. They represented the symbol of the city’s occupation by the HVO, because we were not able to use any longer the money of the Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, but only this kind. But not only in this respect, in all other respects as well, in education, in health, etc., the HVO has been occupying our city and exerting pressure on the Muslim people. This is why, on 18 July 1993, I escaped from Mostar. But I hope to go back to Liberated Mostar.’^[42]

After we received the news that the HVO forces had destroyed Mostar’s famous Old Bridge, on 9 November 1993, I write: ‘They told us that the HVO destroyed the Old Bridge in Mostar […] They are animals, and not human beings! But we will pay them back with high interest rates!’^[43] The very next day we received a letter from my maternal grandfather, who was living in the Croat (western) part of Mostar, with stamps depicting the Old Bridge but with the logo of the Bosnian Croat state, Herceg-Bosna, underneath it. I pasted the stamps into my diary with the caption: ‘Can you believe it! They destroyed the Old Bridge and now they are putting it on stamps as if it was theirs! I can’t believe what they are doing.’^[44] In an entry several weeks later, I pasted a barely visible image of the Old Bridge—photocopied from a newspaper article—right next to the image of what remained of it with a note that said ‘It was destroyed by the enemies of Mostar.’^[45] The destruction of the Old Bridge came not even a month after we found out that my uncle—my father’s sister’s husband–had been killed by a Croatian shell, a piece of news that triggered another outpouring of nationalist angst: ‘Dražen joined the Army of BiH and he had fought in the defense of Mostar from the ustaša boot.’^[46] But just like in the aforementioned entry I had failed to mention my aunt’s Croat-Montenegrin identity, I now did not note that Dražen was a Serb, thus silencing once more the ethnic comingling that made up my family’s genealogy.

My mother’s Croat ethnicity, although glaringly absent in many of these entries, did begin to impact my perception of the events in Bosnia, and of our everyday reality in the camp in Turkey. In fact, on 1 September 1993, the day of our arrival in Turkey, I decide, for the first time, to mention that my mother was Croat:

‘And there are people here (and I don’t mean the family sharing our room), I am referring to some of these peasants from Bosnia, who are hateful towards Croats. I have now realized that all three sides in this war are the same, only ordinary people who suffer.’^[47]

Besides revealing my regional and urban elitism—Herzegovinians from a city could never be hateful towards Croats?!—the statement is interesting because I write it just after I express the fear over the possibility of my brother and father being drafted into the Bosnian army and sent back to the battlefield. While still airborne on our way from Croatia to Turkey, my brother and father, along with all other men ages eighteen and above, were given forms to fill out and sign, stating that they would respond to a draft call in case the Bosnian government issued one for the refugee population. My concerns over this are quickly assuaged when I realize that ‘they have medical documents showing that they are unfit for military service, but I also think they will not deport them [back to Bosnia] because my mom is a Croat’.^[48] Even though the Bosnian government at the time repeatedly claimed it was fighting for a multiethnic, not a Muslim, Bosnia-Herzegovina, my 14-year-old self readily accepted the fact that a mixed family’s loyalties would be inevitably suspect in the Bosnian army.

My ambivalent patriotism becomes more visible when the news of supposed battlefield success of the Bosnian Army in Mostar threatened to jeopardize the safety of my maternal side of the family. For example, on 12 September 1993 I write that Sabiha, the woman whose family shared our room, brought ‘half joyful half sad news’: according to reports, the Bosnian Army was advancing into West Mostar and was close to liberating the city. This would mean, I hypothesize in my diary, that my paternal side of the family would be safe and sound, but I still worried because ‘my uncle is a Croat’ and he, along with his family, lived in the heart of West Mostar.^[49] Seven days later, after hearing more news of Bosnian Army advances in the city, I write: ‘From all the excitement, I couldn’t help but sing patriotic songs dedicated to my beloved city.’ But once again, I qualify my joy: ‘But in all of this there is one worry. And that is? My uncle is a Croat and if the Army of BiH enters [that side] of Mostar they could harm him. But I console myself with the hope that he has already gotten away.’^[50] Having accepted the brutality of the war, I did not even bother to hope that they would not retaliate against my uncle—a frail man who had been bed-ridden since he barely survived a terrible car accident just a year before the war—and I readily acknowledged the possibility that ‘my side’ would harm a civilian on the sole basis of their ethnicity. That I had become inured to the logic of nationalist hate becomes clear in the entry of 10 September 1993. Once hearing that Sabiha’s husband, along with thousands of other Muslims, had been released from the Croat concentration camp near Mostar (Heliodrom), I write:

‘But how are these prisoners from Heliodrom and their children supposed to live with Croats? I listen to Sabiha and I can tell she has really come to hate Croats, and I completely understand her. They have imprisoned her husband, her brother, and her father-in-law, and have taken her huge estate in Dubrave [a village near Mostar].’^[51]

I precede this admission with yet another summary of how during the previous summer the HVO had torn through our building; had taken away Muslim men; had beaten up an old Muslim man; and had, in the process of searching for weapons, pointed their guns at a 6-year-old boy. I also write of the night my family and I heard a baby screaming from the direction of the forest just outside of our building. Later we found out that those were the screams of a 1-year-old being murdered by the HVO. Never bothering to even acknowledge the possibility that the murder of a newborn may have been a rumour, my words easily slide into the nationalist logic by projecting the crimes of the HVO (both real and imagined) onto the entire Croat nation.What these entries illustrate is the extent to which I had externalized my mother’s Croatness and made my own Bosniak identity immune to it. In other words, on one page I worried about the fate of my Croat uncle in Mostar, while on another I hoped for the liberation of the city by an army that had the capacity to harm him. I could worry about the safety of my grandfather in Split, but saw nothing wrong with wishing for the war in Croatia to escalate in order to (supposedly) relieve the Mostar frontlines. Although, curiously, references to it are largely absent from the diary—save a few entries about fasting—around the same time I also embraced Islam: I prayed regularly, fasted, occasionally attended religious instruction at the camp, and even signed up to attend a medresa in Istanbul that was run by Turkey’s main Islamist party, the Welfare Party (Refah partisi). My description of the Refah-sponsored trip—during which my mother and I, along with several other camp children accompanied by their parents, toured the medresas of Istanbul—shows that I was particularly aware of my mother’s reactions to my hesitant acceptance of the Refah leader’s offer to attend the school:

‘[On the bus on our way to Istanbul] I kept thinking if I should stay at the school and how my mother would take the separation as she looked really worried.’ […] [After I accepted the Refah’s offer to attend the school] mom just stood there quietly.’ […] ‘[On the bus back to our camp after I had revoked my decision to attend the school] mom looked much more joyful and was much happier.’^[52]

Of course, my mother’s demeanor may have had little to do with her Croatness and more to do with her not wanting me to separate from her and my father. After all, the other (Muslim) parents on the trip decided to take their children back as well. Nevertheless, my obsession with her reaction was at least partially shaped by how I imagined her accepting her Croatness. My mother confirms this, recalling that during this time period I would constantly ask her if she was upset that I was attending the mosque more regularly or that I was fasting. Despite often indulging in Croat hatred myself, I was also quick to dream up conspiracies that the people of the camp supposedly plotted against my mother because of her ethnicity. For example, a few days after our failed excursion to the Refah-run medresa, I clashed with the camp director, Salko, over his decision to forbid the residents to take the food from the cafeteria up to their rooms, and explained this incident in the following way:

‘But it’s not only his [the camp director’s] fault. It’s also the fault of all these people who have brainwashed him with all sorts of stories and who can hardly wait for my mother to raise her voice so they can stick it to her for being a Croat. I only now see how hard it must be for my mom. She is a Croat and there is so much nationalism in here and she is afraid to say peep. I only now see that Muslims also have their nationalism and that it is no less intense than that of Croats and Serbs. All three nationalisms are equally awful.’^[53]

The entry is significant not only because it shows the paranoia that would often engulf me at the thought that my mother was a Croat in an overwhelmingly Muslim-dominated place, but also because it is a testament to my Bosniak identity: yes, I condemn all three nationalisms and accuse my fellow residents of plotting against my mother; however, it is my mother who is a Croat, not me.

‘We Are Digging With Our Hands and Legs to Go Abroad’

This frequently used Bosnian expression (kopamo i rukama i nogama)—albeit awkward when translated into English—aptly describes the obsession that elbowed out my revenge fantasies from the many pages of my diary and became the sole focus of my daily existence. When juxtaposed against our incessant efforts to leave Croatia and Turkey for some western European country–daily and sometimes hourly walks to the post office to make phone calls to my aunt in France and our embassy in Zagreb, the repeated, and exhausting, one-day trips my father and I took from our refugee camp to Istanbul in yet another hunt for an entry visa, and the hastily written letters, in bad English, to European governments and UN agencies begging for a resettlement–the folk expression invokes the image of a vermin, or a family of vermin in this case, ferociously burrowing a tunnel, only to dig themselves deeper into the ground and away from the fresh air above. The feeling of exclusion that permeates my diary—as a result of being kept out of what Gorbachev had, only a few years before, optimistically branded ‘our common European home’^[54]—is also aptly captured by the image of the unwanted pest.

I used the expression for the first time in the entry of 28 August 1993, three days after we had arrived at the Ivankovo refugee camp in eastern Slavonia, Croatia, where we were housed in immobilized train cars just a few 100 kilometers away from the Croat-Serb frontlines.^[55] The UNHCR-run settlement was our last option after my late grandmother’s brother had kicked us out of his house in Zagreb out of fear that he would face retaliation from neighbours for harbouring Muslims. The eviction sent us scrambling to find a temporary home, and after a day long search through the classifieds, we boarded with a pleasant lady who rented us the entire second floor of her spacious house in the Zagreb suburb of Savski Marof. But due to the abrupt change in the pleasant demeanor of the house owners, once they began to suspect we were Muslims, we were forced to go to the offices of the UNCHR in Zagreb and beg for a resettlement to a country outside of the former Yugoslavia. Instead of France—where my aunt lived and where she would soon obtain political asylum—or Slovakia—where the Bosnian embassy staff had promised to relocate us–we ended up in train cars. The burrowing which I described in that late August diary entry, however, resulted in us getting even further away from the West, this time to a more permanent residence in Turkey. In Turkey we spent one year and nine months, this time split almost evenly between two refugee camps near the Bulgarian border.

The country whose number of references in my diary rivals even that of Sanja, a girl who had been my object of fascination before leaving Mostar, was France. Not only does the dream of going to France appear in the very first entry, but it dominates the structure of every subsequent one: almost every single day begins with a summary of what my father and I had done towards fulfilling our plans to reunite with my father’s sister Edisa in Marseille and start a new life there. Setbacks almost always ruined my days and triggered episodes of depression and even brought about physical illness characterized by an onset of asthma attacks. For example, on 5 January 1994, I described how my father and I unsuccessfully visited the French consulate in Istanbul during which our French entry visa was turned down without an explanation. The rejection was a heavy blow to our plans to leave Turkey and it was especially painful because it came on the heels of a protracted struggle waged by my aunt in France against the French immigration bureaucracy, which had by this time become particularly hesitant in granting asylum to Bosnian refugees. This is how I describe the scene at the French consulate in Istanbul:

‘Dad went in [to the office of a consular official] and I stayed in the waiting room. I paced up and down. I didn’t know how to calm my nerves. I kept thinking to myself, “if they accept [Edisa’s] letter of sponsorship we will be good to go, but if not, then bad things will happen”. In fifteen minutes or so my dad came out. He had the letter in his hand and he walked with his head bowed. I asked: “What happened?” He said that they told him that we cannot get the visa! I felt my legs give out. I simply stopped feeling them. My father and I sheepishly left the consulate. Tears swelled up in my eyes. I suddenly had an asthma attack.’^[56]

The rejection was all the more harder to take in because by this time I had become deeply attached to the idea of going to France and, at the same time, had felt deeply alienated from Turkey. The latter was especially evident after I had reneged on my decision to attend the Refah medresa despite the Refah leader’s promise that he would relocate my entire family to Istanbul and find them jobs. But when my mother and I returned to the camp a few days after our trip to the medresa, with the intention of permanently relocating to the city with the entire family, we learned that the Bosnian girls who had stayed in Istanbul were horrified by the conditions in which they had to live, including the obligation to pray five times a day, to wear the hijab, and eat daily meals under the supervision of stern, baton-carrying women. Reportedly, Refah officials had threatened the parents who had pulled their children out of the medresa, warning them that they would ‘regret it’. On 27 November 1993, after I summarized the Refah story, I write the following:

‘In a way I felt bad that we decided not to go to Istanbul, but if we had done so, and if Husein [the Refah leader] had given us an apartment, and we lost the refugee status in the camp, we would be at his mercy. He could do to us whatever he wanted. Mom would have to cover her face and my dad would have to wear a beard and we would all have to pray five times per day. That would be a strict religious life to which we are not used to. In Mostar we lived a normal life and we don’t intend to change it.’^[57]

It is important to note that the Islamic future becomes unpalatable only after our plans to implement it fail: I had most certainly known that relocating to Istanbul would mean a stricter adherence to the Islamic lifestyle; after all, we would be under the sponsorship of a political party that, in 1998, would become officially banned by Turkish authorities for its Islamist nature. I had in fact visited the medresa I would be attending and despite my misgivings, which I do express in the diary, I did accept Husein’s offer to attend the school with the condition that my entire family follows me to Istanbul. But once the plans for the relocation fell through, I reintroduced France as the only viable future: ‘Our only hope is to leave this country and go to that promised land, France. God willing!’ Several days later, on 2 December, my obsession with France is clearly evident: ‘All of the last night I kept thinking of my relatives and my friends, and of France.’^[58] Concomitant to my infatuation with a French future was my growing alienation from the Turkish present. On 4 December, after attending a Turkish ceremony at the nearby school, I write:

‘In the afternoon, I went to the nearby school where they had some ceremony. There were a lot of people there and they were dancing the kolo. When I saw them dance the kolo I realized just how backward they are in relation to us. I couldn’t stand to be there much longer because I got sick of them, their kolo and their music. All they know how to do is to hoist flags and beat their drums. That’s all they know how to do.’^[59]

The kolo was not an unusual sight for me as I had danced it many times before in Yugoslavia. The extent of my alienation is also evident in my criticism of flag-waving despite having, in the entry of 15 September 1993, praised Turkish patriotism and in particular their reverence of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, contrasting it with Yugoslavia’s destruction of Tito’s memory which made me feel ‘as if I come from a country of savagery and barbarism’.^[60] My orientalization of Turkey only escalated after our application for asylum in France was rejected. On 11 January 1994, seven days after our defeat at the hands of the consular official, I write:

‘Today was a market day. Mum, dad, and I went to the market to buy some groceries. Mud was knee-high. Gypsydom everywhere! What kind of a country is this?! It’s as if they live in the 15^th century. You can’t move because of all the mud.’^[61]

Eight days later, on 19 January, my dad was turned down, once again, at the French consulate, but this time with the explanation that we could enter France only as refugees, a status that Turkey had not bestowed upon us, treating us instead as guests (misafirler). Instead of dissuading me from dreaming of France, the news only emboldened me as I described our plans to write to the Turkish officials in Ankara, asking to be granted refugee status after which Edisa would arrange for another letter of sponsorship, and we would reapply for admission: ‘God please let this plan work so that mom, dad, Vanja, and I finally get that visa and leave this place for that promised land, France.’^[62] Seven months later we would be relocated, but not to France, but to yet another Turkish refugee camp where we would remain for an additional nine months before immigrating to the United States.

Conclusion. The ‘What Ifs’

Just because I was born to and raised by parents whose ethnicity socialism had muted to the point of irrelevance, it did not mean that I was not susceptible to nationalist hatreds once these ethnicities became abruptly marked with violent implications. As my diary shows, the experiences of having been ethnically cleansed as a Bosniak, having to hide out in Croatia, and then integrate within what was an overwhelmingly Bosniak population in the Turkish refugee camps, have all pushed me to internalize the narratives of Bosniak nationalism and even play them out in my daily existence. The seductive and often overwhelming nature of war-fueled nationalist logic is starkly illustrated by the case of Dražen Erdemović, a man from a mixed marriage—with a Serb father and a Croat mother—who identified as a Bosnian Croat and yet who as a 24-year old participated in the Serb genocide in Srebrenica where he, as he himself later admitted, personally executed seventy Muslims. What is interesting about Erdemović is not only that very soon after the war, he willingly surrendered to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague because he wanted to help to, in his words, ‘understand what happened to ordinary people like myself in Yugoslavia’, but that he interpreted his participation as involuntary:

‘I have lost many very good friends of all nationalities because of that war, and I am convinced that all of them, all of my friends, were not in favor of a war. I am convinced of that. But simply, they had no other choice. This war came and there was no way out. The same happened to me.’^[63]

Thankfully, my wrongdoing in the war consisted of a broken religious icon, suspicious glances directed at my Serb neighbour, and hateful words against Croats and Serbs written in the confines of my diary, but Erdemovićs feeling of being overwhelmed by events rings uncomfortably true. Had the conjunctures of history been different—had I really turned in my Serb neighbour to the Croat militias, had I accepted the Refah’s offer to attend the medresa, and had my entire family relocated to Istanbul under the Islamists’ sponsorship—it is likely that a religiously-based ethnic identity would have come to dominate the self that was in considerable flux at the time of writing. Certainly, the self would not have undergone the transformation from a Bosniak nationalist to an American student of ethnicity who, starting in the late 2000s, began to reimagine his 14-year-old self as a child of a mixed marriage. In other words, the diary clearly shows that even though my mother was marked Croat, I did not think of myself as a mixed marriage child despite of what the editorial boards of Ljiljan, Zmaj od Bosne, or even The New York Times might have thought of me at the time. The present article thus highlights the contingent nature of ethnic identity.

In conclusion, the intent of this article is not to present mine as a stand-in story for all mixed marriages of the former Yugoslavia. On the contrary, it was to smudge the edges of an overly neat, and politicized, portraits of mixed marriages that emerged in the battles, real and discursive, of the 1990s. In her autobiography, in which she paints a complicated picture of her mother’s working-class attitudes, the British historian Carolyn Steedman could have been talking about the historiography of Yugoslav mixed marriages when she said that the mainstream history of the British working class ‘denies its subjects a particular story, a personal history, except when that story illustrates a general thesis’.^[64] Similarly, the point of my navel gazing was so that, in the words of Steedman, ‘the people in exile […] may start to use the autobiographical ‘I’, and tell the stories of their life’.^[65]