Republic or Death! (27 page)

I asked if there's any way this situation could have turned out differently and Dušan looked at me as if I hadn't understood anything he'd said about how crippled Bosnia is by ethnic politics. His look wasn't what I had wanted. I'd been hoping he was going to say, ‘Well, giving my anthem words might have helped.'

*

There are two things that you would think every national anthem needs: a tune, obviously, and some words to accompany it. It's the words, though, that at first glance seem most important. It's the words, after all, that tell a person what their country is about: how its hills roll and its leaders govern; the ordeals its people have been through and the dreams they hold. And it's the words that are meant to make people's hearts swell with pride or at least make them nod ‘How true'. Anthems also need words for a more simple reason: so that people can sing along when they're played; so they can look around at everyone else singing and feel part of the same community, and revel in the collective agreement. Only someone who believes in the lost art of humming would argue otherwise.

But despite that, Bosnia is far from alone in having a wordless anthem. The most famous, of course, is Spain's ‘Marcha Real', its ‘Royal March', a highly whistle-able thirty-five seconds (in its original form) but one that sounds more like the coda to an anthem than an anthem itself. Written by Manuel de Espinosa de los Monteros, it appeared in a book of military calls in 1761 and was originally meant to be a march for Spain's grenadiers (given it's just thirty-five seconds, you have to question their dedication to marching). However, the nation-building King Carlos III soon took it as his own and it started being played to welcome him wherever he went. Carlos would have known about Britain's ‘God Save the King' at that time, so why he didn't ask for words to be added in praise of him is unknown. Perhaps he thought having a band soundtrack his every step was praise enough. It has been given words a couple of times since, most notably during Franco's dictatorship, when it gained a verse that sounded like it was written for a keep-fit class (‘Raise your arms, sons / of Spain, / who are rising again'). But none were officially adopted and it's unlikely any could be now due to opposition from Basques, Catalans and other Spaniards who want their own states. (Catalans might be especially opposed. Their own anthem, ‘The Reapers', is all about driving away the ‘conceited and … contemptful' Castilians of Madrid, whose dialect any Spanish anthem would be sung in. ‘Strike [them] with your sickle!' it says repeatedly over a tumbling, funereal melody.)

San Marino is the only other country that has a wordless anthem today, but the historical list is long. There's Italy's old monarchical anthem, the ‘Marcia Reale d'Ordinanza', for a start, and Russia's in the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin chose Mikhail Glinka's ‘Patriotic Song' to help move on from the Soviet Union. Then there's the State of Somaliland, which for its five days of independence in 1960 had a song that was best played on bagpipes rather than any instrument Somalilanders had to hand (it was written by a bandmaster from Britain's Royal Highland Fusiliers); and the Ottoman Empire's many anthems, most of which sound unflatteringly as though they were written by someone trying to compose an opera about a sultan wobbling through his court (Donizetti wrote two of them). But the idea of doing without words has been most popular in the Middle East – a surprise perhaps, given poetry is considered the greatest of art forms in most of its countries. Kuwait's anthem, for instance, was initially just a fifteen-second brass flourish and so boring at that it could have done with being half the length. Iraq, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and North and South Yemen (the two countries that preceded the current one) also didn't feel the need to have words to their original anthems, although from the 1950s onwards they all seemed to cave in, one after the other, like embarrassed teenagers desperately trying not to look out of place at the school disco. Kuwait's anthem is now a word-packed two minutes (at one point it praises the country's emir for ‘Fencing us all fairly'). It could still do with being cut in half.

But for all that history, the idea of Bosnia having a wordless anthem just doesn't feel right, given it's a country in need of anything that could create even a sliver of unity. In fact, it doesn't even feel sensible, especially if you've had the pleasure of watching one of the country's football matches.

*

It's tipping it down at the Bilino Polje stadium in Zenica, a depressed steel town an hour's drive north of Sarajevo. It hasn't rained here for four months, apparently, and after five minutes the drains don't appear able to cope. Everyone in the crowd is grabbing whatever they can for shelter – I turned down the offer of a plastic bag from the man next to me – and there's water rushing down the steps of the terraces. Bosnia plays its home games here rather than in the capital and it's easy to see why. The ground is tiny – it holds just 15,000 – and the crowd seem about to tumble on to the pitch, all of them looking as if they've come straight from the steel mills, broad-shouldered, shaven-headed, wrapped in the country's blue and yellow flag, intimidating for any opposition even with plastic bags on their heads. The ground is also surrounded by tower blocks, the residents leaning out of the windows seeming close enough to lob their microwaves on to the pitch if they get annoyed by a bad tackle.

Luxembourg's players certainly look terrified standing for their anthem, ‘Ons Heemecht' (‘Our Homeland'). There are only a few of the country's fans present, which is a shame as it means no one gets to hear the words praising the country's ability to produce a half-decent wine (‘Where fragrant vineyards grow / On the Moselle's banks'). There's polite applause when it ends, to be instantly forgotten by everyone present. But now it's Bosnia's turn, and Dušan's graceful hymn begins crackling out of the stadium's speaker system. Most of the crowd stands quietly observing it, not even moving to sweep the rain off their faces, surprisingly solemn for a football crowd, but then from one corner, the stand housing the most fanatical fans, a song starts up. ‘
Zemljo tisu
ć
ljetna
, /
Na vjernost ti se kunem
,' it begins, clear throughout the stadium thanks to everyone else's silence. ‘My thousand-year-old land, I pledge my loyalty to you,' it means. ‘
Od mora so Save, / Od Drine do Une
,' the chant goes on, listing Bosnia's main rivers, laying out the country's borders for anyone who doesn't know. They're words that sound perfect for a national anthem, which is because that's exactly what they once were: taken from a song called ‘Jedna si Jedina' (‘You Are the One and Only'). It was Bosnia's anthem during the war, written during the Siege of Sarajevo and loved by every resident of that city no matter their ethnicity or religion. The problem is, this anthem has nothing to do with Dušan's. It's to a completely different tune, and you couldn't make its words fit his melody no matter how hard you tried. As the fanatics carry on – ‘
Jedna si jedina / Bosna i Hercegovina
' – someone turns up the volume on Dušan's anthem in an attempt to drown out the singing. That only succeeds in making things worse, the fanatics increasing their volume too, turning what's meant to be a polite minute into a farce, one song to the tune of another. God knows what the Luxembourgers are thinking, but I doubt it's helping with their nerves.

The game kicks off, and Bosnia are quickly 2–0 up, but I'm not really paying attention as I'm trying to get my head around what I've just heard. In a country with such a history of ethnic strife, you wouldn't expect everyone to respect the anthem, of course. Some Bosnian Serbs would always say their anthem is really Serbia's ‘God of Justice' (music written by a Slovenian) or perhaps even ‘My Republic', Republika Srpska's official song (‘Where the most beautiful sunrise awakens, / There live good people, honourable and proud'). Some Bosnian Croats would say their anthem is Croatia's ‘Our Beautiful Homeland' (music by a Serb), or even that it's still ‘Hey, Slavs', the old hymn of Yugoslavia. However, out of all the country's diverse groups, the one you would expect to respect Dušan's anthem is the Bosniaks. His anthem is the song of the only country they have – the place they fought for years for – and so it makes little sense to trash one of its main symbols. And yet the fans who started singing are all Bosniaks. It's a bizarre situation, and one that seems to please few people in the stadium with me, let alone in the country. It doesn't even please the person who wrote the song they're singing.

*

Dino Merlin, Bosnia's answer to Paul McCartney, is busy arranging items on a restaurant table. We're in Sarajevo and he's trying to recreate the first time he escaped from the city's siege. The table is meant to be Sarajevo's airport, a coffee cup is a United Nations jeep, and there's a handful of sugar sachets doing a very bad job of representing Serb snipers hiding in their base in the mountains. There's a Pepsi can too, which I think is meant to be Dino. Unless he's the spoon. I'm not sure exactly, the details having got rather lost amid Dino's enthusiasm. ‘So,' he says, smiling broadly and clapping his hands together, ‘I had to get out to go to Eurovision. It was in Cork. Ireland! I'd written Bosnia's first ever entry and I was needed for rehearsals. It was very important for us,' he adds, using a word not normally applied to Europe's high-camp songwriting contest. ‘So I had no choice but to run across the runway. Did you hear about it? It was the only way to get out to safe territory back then, but it was really dangerous! There were United Nations soldiers patrolling all the time, and if they caught you they put you back in the city. And from this side' – he points at the sugar sachets – ‘snipers were shooting. So you had to be very, very lucky and very, very brave. When I got there, I saw all the people were running this way.' He picks up the Pepsi can and moves it towards the sugar. ‘And the snipers were shooting them.' He knocks the can over with a comic effect he perhaps wasn't intending. ‘So I decided to go the other way, and I made it!'

‘How did you get on at Eurovision?' I ask.

‘Sixteenth!' he says proudly, before saying he was back in Sarajevo just weeks later.

Dino's real name is Edin Dervišhalidovi
ć
. He's in his early fifties, bearded and silver-haired, and he's a star across Eastern Europe. As we sit drinking Turkish coffee outside this restaurant, passers-by do double takes when they notice him, a few managing to pluck up the courage to walk over and say hello.

Dino was already famous back in April 1992 when the siege began, so he wasn't the sort of person you'd have expected to find living in the city. In fact, he wasn't even
in
the city when the first bombs fell, launched by Serbian artillery dug into the mountains that surround Sarajevo and make it so picturesque. ‘I was in Sweden when I heard,' he says, ‘but I came back and tried to live a normal life like everybody else. I felt it was my duty to be here, to play music, you understand? Because you know when people hear one of my songs, something they can whistle, it makes them feel better. It gives them some respite.' I ask him about the siege and he talks about the bombs, the constant fear, the deaths of friends and band-mates, the lack of electricity, food and water. And he talks about it all completely emotionless, as if it's something he just wants to pretend never happened. However, his eyes light up as soon as we start talking about ‘Jedna si Jedina'.

It was during the siege that he wrote it. He was in the Holiday Inn – a jaundiced yellow and brown block that still dominates downtown Sarajevo. It was the closest thing the city had to a safe haven, the place where all the foreign newspaper reporters stayed. ‘It was a horrible day,' Dino recalls, ‘hundreds of bombs fell. I was in the basement and one of my friends turned to me and said: “Hey, Dino, you know we're independent now. Why don't you write us an anthem?” He was laughing – he meant it as a joke – but I thought: What an excellent idea! And I ran home – as fast as I could, given the bombing – and wrote the lyric in one breath. I chose one of the best Bosnian folk songs for the melody. I had the whole thing finished in about an hour. I called my friend and said, “What do you think about this?” and he started crying, so I knew it was good.'

I ask how he managed to do it so quickly and Dino says, almost wistfully, ‘It's difficult to explain, but when you're under siege and you think you might die any minute, in that situation you are able to do things you normally can't. Today, it'd be impossible.' He played the song for the first time a few days later at a party in the Hotel Belgrade (which had been hastily renamed the Hotel Bosnia). ‘You can't believe it. I stood on this table and played it maybe ten times back to back. Everyone kept calling for it. It was like hitting the rewind button on a tape player again and again.' In November 1992, seven months into the siege, it was made the country's anthem. Dino's sure it was soon being sung everywhere in the country, even perhaps by the people bombing him, ‘because my songs were never propaganda. I didn't talk about Serbs, Croats or Muslims. I was talking about freedom, about love. My song, it's not a hard anthem about the past or God or something like that. It's an ordinary story of a place between two rivers. That's it. Nothing special.'

After the war, there was never any question that Dino's song could stay the country's anthem. It was too closely associated with the war, and seen by too many people as a song for Bosniaks only. Dino didn't mind – ‘If my anthem was collateral damage for a better life, then I don't have a problem with that' – and he seems genuinely angry that it's still sung as if nothing has changed. I mention the football game I saw the night before. ‘They're crazy people,' he says. ‘It's a cacophony! I'm a legalist – is that a word? – and I would like people to respect the new anthem because the law is the law, a new time is a new time, the past is the past.' In dozens of interviews he's asked the fans not to sing it, but they don't listen. It's only out of spite they keep singing, he says. He suggests that anthems are like toys, ‘and children hate someone who steals their toy'. A moment later he tries to expand that point from a different angle. ‘A national anthem is a kind of emotional pilgrimage. When you sing it, you are going towards the unreal – towards your dreams – and the politicians here cancelled people's dreams.' He means they've stopped Bosnia becoming what it was meant to be – united and prosperous, something that his song was meant to represent.