Scholars Help Bosnia Rebuild Destroyed Libraries

By David P. Johnson Jr.

As the world watched in horror, the guns of August 1992 pounded the beautiful old city of Sarajevo to ruins. While the human carnage has been widely reported, another aspect of the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian Muslims has not received much publicity: the attempt to obliterate the Islamic past through the destruction of libraries, mosques and educational institutions.

Of all the Bosnian mosques, schools and libraries that have been destroyed by the Serbs, perhaps the most dramatic and the most tragic was the burning of the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a magnificent Moorish revival edifice covered by an enormous stained glass skylight built by the Hapsburg Emperor in 1896. The library burned for three days in August 1992 after being hit by Serbian incendiary grenades. Ninety percent of the 1.5 million volumes in the building were destroyed.

Scholars who are now working to replenish the collection say the attack was the worst single book burning in history, comparable to the burning of the great classical library at Alexandria and the Chinese communist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

“The destruction of the library at Sarajevo was the single largest act of deliberate book burning in history,” said Andras Riedlmayer, a bibliographer at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University. “I have detailed witnesses’ statements that the library was shelled with phosphorous incendiary shells. Phosphorous burns on contact with oxygen and leaves a fine white trail of smoke and fans of sparks.” He also said that he has video tapes made by witnesses showing Serbian soldiers shooting at firemen rushing to extinguish the blaze and at their water hoses.

“It was a cultural crime the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War II,” said Jeffrey Spurr, a cataloguer for Islamic Art at the Fine Arts Library. “We were enraged and distressed beyond words.”

Since the library was both a research facility for scholars and the governmental archives for Bosnia-Herzegovina, “It was a symbol for Sarajevo,” Riedlmayer stated, adding that the library’s legacy indicated that the cultures of the region could live together.

The documents destroyed included archives from the 500 years of Ottoman rule over Bosnia, as well as manuscripts in various languages on all sorts of topics. In addition, a priceless collection of maps, sheet music, posters, pamphlets, photographs and local Bosnian newspapers and a large array of local literary magazines from the 19th and early 20th centuries is now gone.

A sizable collection of colored postcards representing scenes from the region from the 1890s to the 1920s was also destroyed. While many of the scholarly works in the library can probably be duplicated, most of the local material, including accounts of local Croatian Catholic, Serbian Orthodox, Bosnian Muslim and Jewish life, is now probably lost forever.

Riedlmayer said, “It was 500 years of the country’s history.”

“If you no longer have the documents, you impoverish a people,” Spurr stated.

Ironically, Riedlmayer said the Serbs also obliterated much of their own culture as well. “Probably the biggest destruction of Serbian culture in Bosnia and Croatia was the bombing of the National Library by Serb Nationalist forces.”

The National Library is not alone in its fate. In May 1992 the Serbs burned virtually the entire contents of Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute, home to one of the most extensive collections of Islamic manuscripts in Europe. In just a few days, 5,263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and Alhamijado, Serbo-Croatian written with Arabic letters, were destroyed. More than 200,000 documents dating as far back as the 15th century, when the Ottomans conquered Bosnia, were also burned. Priceless manuscripts of Islamic science, history, medicine, illuminated manuscripts and many copies of the Qur’an were also lost.

The library of the Museum of Herzegovina, the Archives of Herzegovina, the library of the Roman Catholic Archbishopric of Mostar, the Orthodox Monastery in Zitomislic and numerous mosques have all been either destroyed or damaged by Serb forces.

Riedlmayer and Spurr decided to launch their effort to help replenish the libraries after the initial reports of the destruction went virtually unnoticed in the United States.

“In April ’92, I saw the horrendous reports of human rights violations,” Riedlmayer said. “I started seeing photos of the destruction of the mosques. It became obvious that while there was an attack on Bosnia, there was an attack on culture. And no one seemed to want to notice.”

Spurr said that when the subject was brought up before some professional library organizations, the response was that the groups should remain “non-political.”

“It was really kind of pathetic,” he said. But with no other group formed, “In the great tradition of American volunteerism we volunteered.”

After raising money from fellow librarians and academicians, they placed an appeal in The New York Times, which generated enough donations to be rerun in The New York Review of Books.

Seeking Photographs of Destroyed Works

Riedlmayer and Spurr have launched a two-part effort to replenish the collections. First, they are compiling a list of scholars or institutions which may have microfilm copies of manuscripts from the National Library. Riedlmayer explained that since the institution was not awash with money, it often traded batches of microfilm from its collection with those in other institutions. Library staff say that some 30 cabinets of foreign microfilm were burned. Therefore, it is likely that other libraries and universities around the world hold a total of 30 cabinets of microfilm from Bosnia.

The scholars are hoping that at least some of the works can be preserved for future generations in that form. Roughly 500 pages of copies have been collected so far, including 360 pages from a Canadian scholar who had researched at the Oriental Institute in 1981.

They have also sent newly published books to the National Library, with some 30,000 copies shipped so far. Various academic publishers, including Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins, have recently donated two copies of each book on their current lists.

A $20,000 grant from the Dusky Foundation of Boston paid for most of the shipments, which were handled by the Cambridge-based Sabre Foundation, which sends books to various former Eastern bloc nations, Palestine, Gaza, Mongolia and other nations struggling to create libraries.

Unfortunately, due to the expense of shipping and storing books, that effort has been temporarily suspended until more money can be raised.

The National Library is now located in one wing of an enormous building built by former Yugoslavian President Tito as a barracks, while the Oriental Institute will be installed in a new building to be built with money from UNESCO, the World Bank and financier George Soros.

Another hopeful sign is the fact that most libraries in the U.S. are now photocopying books which are in danger of disintegration from acid in the paper. Since it is not difficult to make extra copies, the scholars are hoping that material printed in Bosnia or written about the country could be copied and sent to Sarajevo. The University of Michigan has launched a pilot program to determine which U.S. institutions might possess Bosnian material. Libraries in other countries, including the National Library of Slovenia, are also helping. There has been no assistance from Belgrade, however.

Spurr also noted that politics is not the only reason for the destruction. The second is the looting of valuables for the lucrative art market. In the early 1990s, “Belgrade became a major art market. Western dealers were buying up apartments” to work from, he said, adding that, “It’s happening again.”

In reference to the current situation in Kosovo, where ethnic cleansing against Albanians is underway, Riedlmayer said, “Whole collections have been taken from the National Library in Pristina to be pulped.”

For more information, contact Riedlmayer or Spurr at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, 32 Quincy St., Cambridge, MA 02138, (617) 495-3372; fax: (617) 496-4889; or e-mail: riedlmay@fas.harvard.edu. For information regarding shipping books, contact Tania Vitvitsky at the Sabre Foundation, (617) 868-3510; or the Community of Bosnia Foundation, c/o Department of Religion, Haverford College, Haverford, PA, 19041-1392, (610) 896-1027.

David P. Johnson Jr. is a Boston-based freelance writer specializing in international affairs.