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Bibliocide
Photograph courtesy of Reuters/Corbis-Bettmann
Libraries afire.

Bibliocide

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings," wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine in 1823. Heine's words seem uncannily prescient about the twentieth century. The largest single act of book burning in modern history took place in 1992 when, on August 25, Serb nationalist forces began a three-day incendiary assault on the National and University Library of Bosnia. Despite sniper fire, the people of Sarajevo risked their lives to form a human chain and pass books from the flames. "We managed to save just a few very special books. Everything else burnt down," one citizen reported. "And a lot of our heritage, our national heritage, lay down there in ashes." Nearly 1.5 million books-including 155,000 rare books and manuscripts-the state archives, and all the Bosnian periodical literature published since the mid-1800s were lost.

So testified András Riedlmayer, bibliographer in Islamic art and architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library, before the 1995 Congressional hearing on genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Riedlmayer and Jeffrey Spurr, cataloger for Islamic art in the Aga Khan Program at the Fine Arts Library, are spearheading efforts at Harvard and in the wider academic community to reconstruct the Bosnian National Library and to deter such "crimes against humanity" in the future. They are gathering evidence to convince the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to identify the burning of the library as a separate incident in their indictments, not simply one of many attacks on civilian areas in Sarajevo. Such destruction should not be viewed merely as the collateral damage of warfare, says Spurr, but "the deliberate, targeted, policy-driven assassination of culture, in its very worst form."

In campaigns of so-called "ethnic cleansing," Serb and Croat nationalists have razed mosques and churches, torched communal archives and libraries, and bulldozed cemeteries and monuments to erase the material memory of a society in which Jews, Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians have lived side by side for centuries. After one 500-year-old mosque had been destroyed, a young Muslim man said, "It's not that my family was burned down, but it's my foundation that burned. I was destroyed."

International law has recognized the link between genocide and the targeted destruction of culture since the 1948 Genocide Convention. Yet if Serb commanders are in fact prosecuted for destroying the National Library, Riedlmayer says, "It would be the first prosecution before an international tribunal specifically for crimes against culture."

Another essential deterrent to the resurgence of extremism is education. To that end, Spurr and Riedlmayer are working to revive Bosnian libraries via the World Wide Web. Their home page, entitled Fighting the Destruction of Memory: A Call for an Ingathering of Bosnian Manuscripts, invites scholars and librarians to assist in reassembling at least part of the destroyed collections. The project aims to locate microfilms and photocopies of rare Bosnian manuscripts that were made by visiting scholars over the years. The home page states that the resulting database will enable Bosnian librarians to obtain copies of copies, "thus resurrecting 'virtual' collections from the ashes and
helping to thwart the intentions of those who have sought to destroy them."

But real books are needed as well. "It has to be grasped what it means for the whole collection at the National University Library to have been incinerated," says Spurr. "That means that in every discipline everything went." Yet, he cautions, well-meaning but ill-considered book drives, which tend to gather the "detritus of the previous decade of people's casual reading," are not what overtaxed librarians in Bosnia need. For that reason, Spurr and Riedlmayer have enlisted the Sabre Foundation, a donor of English-language materials to the former Eastern bloc, to screen all donations so that Bosnian librarians can select titles prior to shipment.

The Harvard University Library and Harvard University Press, with the support of President Neil L. Rudenstine, have also joined reconstruction efforts. The press will donate two copies of every book on its list, and individual libraries will contribute duplicates, all selected by Bosnian libraries. This has happened only once before: when President Abbott Lawrence Lowell led a campaign to rebuild the library of Louvain after its destruction by the German army on August 25, 1914-78 years to the day before the attack on the National Library of Bosnia.

~ Harbour Fraser Hodder

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