Republic or Death! (28 page)

I ask if things would change if Dušan's anthem was given words, but Dino says it's a pointless question given that the country is ‘still divided'. ‘Nowadays, children in Republika Srpska, in the Croatian part of the country and here each learn completely different versions of history. That's how separate it is. And everything has to be changed and improved before we can expect an anthem that unites people.' His celebrity smile fades for the first time. ‘I would like to live in a Bosnia where people don't know anything about governments, presidents, anthems. It'd be excellent. It'd mean humanity is the most important thing to everyone at last.'

*

There have been some efforts to give the anthem words. In 2008, ten years after Dušan wrote the music, there was an official contest, and an eleven-member committee of politicians, poets and musicologists trawled through all 336 entries – even the ones that didn't seem to be taking the endeavour entirely seriously. One entry focused on Our Lady of Medjugorje, an apparition of the Virgin Mary that's been appearing daily to a handful of women in the south of the country since 24 June 1981 (the Catholic Church is sceptical). Another was about Radovan Karadži
ć
, the first president of Republika Srpska and one of the people responsible for the war's worst atrocities, including the Srebrenica Massacre (he was later indicted for war crimes along with the likes of the former Serbian president Slobodan Miloševi
ć
and the paramilitary leader Arkan). At the time of the contest Karadži
ć
was still on the run in Serbia, disguised as a practitioner of alternative medicine complete with voluminous beard and wild hair. The entry started, ‘Come, Raso, come down from the mountain.' I'm unsure if it was sincerely praising him as a new messiah or simply an excellent piece of satire.

In the end the committee did manage to find one entry they thought was worthy of winning – by, of all people, Dušan Šesti
ć
. Dušan was due to get a staggering €30,000 for his words, but there were, inevitably, objections from Bosniak and Croat politicians. A Serb cannot write both the words and music to Bosnia's anthem, they said, and so Dušan was made to collaborate with a Bosniak poet, Benjamin Isovi
ć
(they were allocated two verses each). The final lyrics were the result of eight months' discussion between the two men and seemingly Bosnia's whole political machinery. Politicians examined and questioned every word put forward. ‘Delete this. Put this in. Change that. Move these verses around,' one would say, before the next would order it all reversed. I wouldn't be surprised if there were even arguments about how many words were written in Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, despite all three languages being basically the same (they wrote in Bosnian, for the record). One politician, Slavko Jovi
č
i
ć
, summed up the absurdity of the process in a newspaper interview: ‘If we were singing about grass – “Our grass is the greenest” – Serbs would immediately reject it because green is a Muslim colour. “It's for the Bosniaks” [they'd say].' Jovi
č
i
ć
is a Serb himself.

The final version of the words reads with the kind of emotional blandness you would expect given the process through which they were chosen. ‘You're the light of the soul, / Eternal fire's flame,' they start, promisingly enough,

Mother of ours, land of Bosnia.

I belong to you.

But then it descends into a string of unimaginative phrases of the sort you find in so many anthems. ‘In the heart are your / Rivers, mountains / And blue sea,' goes the second verse. ‘Proud and famous / Land of ancestors, / You shall live in our hearts / Ever more,' reads the third. And as for the triumphal ending?

Generations of yours

Show as one:

We go into the future,

Together!

The words were announced to much fanfare but then went to Bosnia's parliament for approval and were immediately rejected – including by some of the very politicians who had chosen them in the first place. Dušan and Benjamin Isovi
ć
are still owed €15,000 each.

After that farce, only a handful of people have dared raise the issue again, the most prominent being Nermina
Ć
emalovi
ć
, a psychiatric doctor by training and once one of the few politicians in the country people actually liked (she lost her seat at the last election). ‘I put forward an initiative to get words three times,' she says from her home in Cazin, a small town near the Croatian border. ‘I told everyone that a country needs an anthem like a person needs a passport, that words would make people feel a little prouder of the country – but each time they said, “Today's not the time.” So I'd ask, “When is then? It's been twenty years!” and they'd just shrug their shoulders and smile.' She lets out a sarcastic laugh. ‘I was so embarrassed to be a politician at the end.'

Nermina made her final attempt to get words at the start of 2014, when Bosnia was getting ready for its first appearance in the football World Cup, sending a multi-ethnic squad that was tipped to do well. ‘I told people we needed words for the simple human reason that there should be something to sing in the stadiums – for the players to sing! – but again, of course, no. This is how it is with all areas of life here. It's impossible to make something positive for the country.' I ask if that is because some Serb and Croat politicians just don't want this country to exist. Nermina seems to agree at first, starting to talk about Serb politicians as if they're to blame, saying one told her, ‘We have our own anthem in Republika Srpska, we don't need yours as well,' but then she corrects herself, remembering that her own Bosniak party were against the anthem too, for reasons she can't fathom. The only way things are going to change, she says, is if Bosnia's entire political structure is ripped up and the country starts again. Or if there are riots so large politicians are forced to listen.

As if we've both realised that the conversation is getting rather heavy, we start joking about what words could be acceptable to everyone. It seems as though it would have to be an endless list of rivers, mountains and towns, naming every single one in the country so no one could possibly complain. It sounds dreadful, rather like one of those sections of the Bible where people endlessly ‘beget' more people. If the lyrics have to be so exhaustive and anodyne in order to be acceptable, is there really any point in having them at all? ‘It's okay if it's boring,' Nermina says. ‘At least we'd have something.'

*

The strangest thing about Bosnia is that as much as it seems crippled by ethnic politics (which is blamed for everything from Bosnia's 60 per cent youth unemployment rate, to the difficulties people have getting medical care), it proves incredibly hard to meet anyone here who believes that questions of ethnic identity are remotely important. You can talk to people in coffee shops or over
ć
evapi
(the national dish of meat fingers) and they'll all say they couldn't care less about such issues and just want a job, that they wish arguments around identity could just be left in the past, the politicians with them. The only time I came close to meeting a Serb nationalist in two visits to the country was when I went to Banja Luka and met Mladen Matovi
ć
, the long-haired and gregarious composer of Republika Srpska's anthem, ‘Moja Republika', who spent an excruciating amount of time trying to avoid saying he wanted Bosnia to break up. ‘Let's be truthful and admit the majority of people in Republika Srpska wish to one day be an independent state,' he said at one point, before meekly adding, ‘But this is a question for politicians not artists,' as if afraid to be quoted. No one else I met came remotely close to even saying that. In Banja Luka, Mirala Markovic, a Bosnian Croat and my interpreter Dragan's mother, told me she didn't know which ethnic group she was meant to belong to any more and she didn't care – she just wanted to meet a sheik who could take her on shopping sprees in Abu Dhabi. I asked her what words Bosnia's anthem should have and she suggested:

Why are we still living here?

We must be really stupid.

Admittedly pockets of ethnic nationalism may exist outside the cities. Also it is quite easy to meet Bosniaks who are proud of their country, given what it has been through. But even among them it's hard to find people you would class as bigoted nationalists; they don't rant about Serbs and Croats, or say the country would be better off if they left. Nidžara Helja, a student in Sarajevo, for instance, told me she couldn't feel happier whenever she hears DuÅ¡an's anthem. ‘I'm like, “This is mine. This is MINE! Pay attention!”' She did little jumps up and down like a spoilt child while saying this, as if to prove her enthusiasm. But then she said she was happy for it to be wordless for the sake of unity. ‘If it ever did get words, I'd probably be like, “Why? What have the politicians done now? It must be really bad if they've had to cover it up with this.”'

The person I met who best seemed to sum up the way most people feel was Brano Jakubovi
ć
, the ever-unshaven leader of the ska band Dubioza Kolektiv, who are well known across the former Yugoslavia for writing both heavily political songs and ones calling for people to smoke more marijuana. ‘I actually like the anthem since I discovered it's a rip-off from a film,' he laughed, over a beer in the centre of Sarajevo. ‘It fits perfectly with our situation here. Bosnians will always manage to survive. You can put these people anywhere and they'll find a way. They will cheat, steal, whatever, and that's why I like this – you have a composer making an anthem because he's short of money and taking the melody from someone else. And then the politicians pick that one! You see how fucked-up this country is?' It took him a while to stop laughing. ‘We should keep with tradition and steal some words for it. Take them from Jamaica's anthem or something: “We have a very nice ocean and coconuts and we're all black.”'

Brano has every reason to be a rampant nationalist. He grew up in Sarajevo during the siege, playing in death metal and hard-core bands as a way of ‘escaping the madness' (bands used to steal electricity from the police and army so they could perform). He was about to be drafted right as it ended. But instead he couldn't be more of the opposite. ‘Every year, I hate this word “patriotism” more and more,' he said at one point. ‘I mean, who's ever moved by a national anthem actually? Why don't you listen to anthems in your car? Because they don't have any real feelings inside them. It's just a well-paid songwriter who only plays the white keys on the piano. They don't touch the black keys, the sad ones. If we really need a melody because the football rules say we have to play something before a game, why can't we choose our own? If you, me and ten thousand other people want to have “Smoke on the Water”, why can't we do that? It'd be funny, and we should always make jokes about this kind of national pride – that's the only way to stop violence.' The closest thing he's ever had to an anthem, he said, was a football chant popular a few years ago that roughly translates as, ‘I've had seven Jägermeisters and my dad's going to kill me' – a phrase a girl uttered one night on live TV when a camera crew asked her how she was celebrating Eid.

‘There is a society here,' he added, worried I was getting the wrong impression of his country, ‘but it's not built by the government. We had these floods, in 2014, and it was important to see Muslim villages helping Serb villages, to make people realise how silly this confrontation is, and remind everyone what it was like before the war.'

‘So what'll it take to change the politics?' I asked.

‘If you have any ideas, please tell us,' he laughed. ‘Just don't say our anthem should get words. That's not going to solve it.'

He's right, of course: giving the anthem a few verses and a chorus would achieve little, but there's no doubt the current lack of them only leaves a gap both politicians and football fanatics can exploit to exacerbate ethnic tension. The United Nations seems to think otherwise, though, presumably assuming that no words means fewer opportunities for confrontation, to the point that wordless anthems appear to have become a typical part of its solution to conflicts. You only have to look at the fact Kosovo's anthem is wordless too (if you can remember back to this book's Prologue), or that in the early 2000s the UN put forward a plan to try to reunify Cyprus, split in the 1970s, which included a wordless anthem – the music ready to go and streaming online (it was quickly rejected by both the Turkish and Greek parts of the island, hopefully because the tune was so dismal).

But this approach isn't the only one available. Rwanda changed its anthem in 2002 as part of efforts to move on from its civil war, dropping a song called ‘Our Rwanda' for the far-too-similarly named ‘Beautiful Rwanda' and making sure it included lines about how ‘Our common culture identifies us, / Our single language unifies us' as quickly as possible. Similarly, Nicaragua, back in the 1910s, decided to have a competition for new words to its anthem after repeated periods of civil war, the one condition being they could only mention ‘peace and work'.

And then, of course, there's Iraq, where the US forced an anthem on the country after its second invasion. Actually, that might not be the case; it depends who you listen to. Under Saddam Hussein's rule, the country's anthem was ‘The Land of the Two Rivers', named after the Tigris and Euphrates that meet in the south of the country. It's a song that at first glance seems standard anthem fare, filled with boasts about how the country's ‘made of flame and splendour, / [with a] pride unmatched by the highest heaven'. But then it hits its third verse, and suddenly swerves into an ode to Saddam's Ba'ath Party. ‘Oh company of al-Ba'ath, you pride of lions,' it goes. ‘Advance like terror to a certain victory.' It was unsurprisingly discarded as soon as the first Saddam statue was pulled down, and replaced with a song called ‘Mawtini', written by a Palestinian, Ibrahim Touqan, during his people's revolt against British rule in the 1930s. ‘My homeland, … / The youth will not tire until your independence / Or they die,' goes its second verse, showing its suitability for Palestine, perhaps less so for Iraq. The question is, who made that change?