Anniversary of the Destruction of Bosnia’s National and University Library by Bosnian Serb forces
Thanks to Andras Riedlmayer for posting this on the Middle East Librarians’ Association’s listserv.
Anniversary of a Crime against Culture
25-27 August 1992
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LAMENT FOR VIJECNICA
The National Library burned for three days last August and
the city was choked with black snow.
Set free from the stacks, characters wandered the streets,
mingling with passers-by and the souls of dead soldiers.
I saw Werther sitting on the ruined graveyard fence;
I saw Quasimodo swinging one-handed from a minaret.
Raskolnikov and Mersault whispered together for days
in my cellar; Gavroche paraded in camouflage fatigues;
Yossarian was already selling spares to the enemy; for
a few dinars young Sawyer would dive off Princip’s bridge.
Each day — more ghosts and fewer people alive; and
the terrible suspicion formed that the shells fell just for me.
I locked myself in the house. I leafed through tourist guides.
I didn’t come out until the radio told me
how they’d taken ten tons of coals from the deepest cellar
of the burned-out National Library.
— Goran Simic
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Today marks the anniversary of a crime against culture: the shelling and destruction of Bosnia’s National and University Library by Bosnian Serb forces.
Housed in a handsome Moorish-revival building — built in the 1890s as Sarajevo’s town hall (Vijecnica) — the National and University Library held an estimated 1.5 million volumes, among them thousands of rare books, unique archives and special collections, 478 manuscript codices, the national collection of record of books, newspapers, and journals published in Bosnia since the mid-19th century, studies published abroad about Bosnia, its history and culture, as well as the central research collections of the University of Sarajevo.
In a three-day inferno (25-27 August 1992) the library building was completely, gutted, the greater part (more than 90%) of its irreplaceable contents reduced to ashes. About an hour after nightfall on 25 August, a concentrated barrage of incendiary shells fired by Serb nationalist forces from positions on the heights overlooking the library burst through the roof and the large stained-glass skylight, setting the book stacks ablaze. Repeated shelling kept rekindling the fire, while snipers, mortar shells and anti-aircraft guns fired at sidewalk level shredded fire hoses and targeted firefighters and volunteers attempting to save the books.
Eyewitness reports describe the scene:
[The National Library] was blazing out of control Wednesday after the besieged Bosnian capital came under fierce bombardment overnight.
Firefighters struggling with low water pressure managed to extinguish
the blaze several times during the night but the building … kept coming under renewed attack. … By mid-morning, the north and
central sections of the crenelated four-storey building were completely engulfed by flames. Windows were exploding out into the narrow
streets and the building’s stone north wall was cracking and collapsing
under the heat of the raging inferno. …The fire started shortly after
10 p.m. on Tuesday night and, despite the efforts of the city’s fire
department, kept reigniting and growing. The slender Moorish columns
of the Library’s main reading room exploded from the intense heat and
portions of the roof came crashing through the ceiling. …
SOURCE: (Kurt Schork, “Sarajevo’s Much-loved Old Town Hall Ablaze,” Reuters, Wednesday, August 26, 1992)
Serb fighters in the hills ringing Sarajevo peppered the area around the library with machine-gun fire, trying to prevent firemen from fighting the blaze along the banks of the Miljacka river in the old city. Machine gun bursts ripped chips from the crenellated building and sent firemen scurrying for cover. Mortar rounds landed around the building with deafening crashes, kicking up bricks and plaster and spraying shrapnel. Asked why he was risking his life, fire brigade chief Kenan Slinic, sweaty, soot-covered and two yards from the blaze, said: “Because I was born here and they are burning a part of me.”
SOURCE: (John Pomfret, “Battles for Sarajevo Intensify as Bosnian Peace Conference Opens,” The Associated Press, August 26, 1992)
Braving a hail of sniper fire, librarians and citizen volunteers formed a human chain to pass books out of the burning building to trucks queued outside. Interviewed later by a television camera crew, one of them said: “We managed to save just a few, very precious books. Everything else burned down. And a lot of our heritage, national history, lay down there in ashes.”
Among the human casualties was Aida Buturovic, a 32-year-old librarian in the National Library’s international exchanges section; she was killed by a mortar shell as she tried to make her way home from the library on 25 August. Amidst the carnage caused by the intense bombardment of the city, her death went unnoted except by her family and colleagues. Bosnia’s Ministry of Health reported on August 26, 1992, that 14 people had been killed and 126 had been wounded in besieged Sarajevo during the preceding 24 hours.
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http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/91/13685.pdf
International Court of Justice
Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro — Application of the
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Judgement of 26 February 2007, pp. 121-124, para. 335-344:
Destruction of historical, religious and cultural property
342. The Court notes that archives and libraries were also subjected to attacks during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. On 17 May 1992, the Institute for Oriental Studies in Sarajevo was bombarded with incendiary munitions and burnt, resulting in the loss of 200,000 documents including a collection of over 5,000 Islamic manuscripts (Riedlmayer Report, p. 18; Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, Second Information Report on War Damage to the Cultural Heritage in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, doc. 6869, 17 June 1993, p. 11, Ann. 38). On 25 August 1992, Bosnia’s National Library was bombarded and an estimated 1.5 million volumes were destroyed (Riedlmayer Report, p. 19). The Court observes that, although the Respondent considers that there is no certainty as to who shelled these institutions, there is evidence that both the Institute for Oriental Studies in Sarajevo and the National Library were bombarded from Serb positions.
