Villagers in Lazarevo demonstrate in support of Ratko Mladic outside the house of his cousin, where he was hiding until his arrest on May 26th. (Photo: Kevin Burden/flickr)

VIENNA – At 11 am on Saturday, cafes catering to the city’s large former-Yugoslav population are mainly empty, with rain and unseasonably cold weather forcing many to drink their morning coffee at home.

Two days earlier, after 16 years on the run, Bosnian-Serb general Ratko Mladic had been arrested by Serbian intelligence in Lazarevo village, some 60 miles from Belgrade. As then-Commander of the main staff of the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS), Mladic is charged with genocide and crimes against Bosnian Croats and Muslims (Bosniaks).  Among other charges, he is accused of the murder of close to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995.

At Cafe Melon in Vienna’s 16^th district, where the last night’s party is just winding down, people are not willing to talk about the arrest.  “We don’t talk politics here. People from everywhere – Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia – come here,” the bartender says. “Besides, we haven’t slept at all.”

A few days later on a second visit to Melon, this time in the afternoon, a few people are standing around the bar, having already had some drinks. This, perhaps, helps move the conversation along.

23-year-old David R. from Belgrade, Serbia says he feels that Austrians associate him and others from his country with “people like Mladic and [Slobodan] Milosevic,” which affects his life here. “I cannot prosper in my career,” says David, who is a musician.

His friend Miroljub G., 26, from Serbia’s Vojvodina region, is vehement about his support for the arrest of this “very bad man” who acted at a “very bad time,” although he is not sure whether he shares David’s belief that such associations have an effect on his everyday existence.

An article in Vienna’s daily Wiener Zeitung says that the response of the Serbian population — including Bosnian Serbs — can be described as surprised, exuberantly happy, sad — “in other words completely mixed.”  They quote Serbs who consider Mladic a defender of his people, and others, who feel released from being “hostages of this man” and who now hope for Brussels’ support in helping Serbia move toward a future as a member of the European Union.

Dino Sose, the editor of BUM Magazin, which caters to nearly half a million first and second-generation ex-Yugoslavs in Austria, says the mixed reaction is to be expected within the Bosnian community, made up primarily of ethnic Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.

“It is certain that in Vienna there is a large number of those who support the arrest as well as those who consider this an ‘act of betrayal.’ But the diaspora is tired of the 90′s and of the current, difficult political situation in the Balkans,” says Sose.

Members of the ex-Yugoslav immigrant community have, at times, feared a loss of their identity, which can lead to an intensification of nationalistic tendencies, says Sose. But there also exists  a diasporic identity where those who speak one of the languages formerly called Serbo-Croatian – Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian – becomes “nas” or “ours.”

While Mladic’s arrest may lead to a temporary cooling of relations between different former-Yugoslav ethnicities in Vienna, Sose believes people will soon return to their everyday, diasporic lives, and “togetherness” facilitated by the use of the same language and shared musical tastes.  Sose refers to the popular turbofolk genre that is favored among large numbers of ex-Yugoslavs in Vienna, but shunned by Melon’s patrons, who prefer the sounds of ex-Yu rock.

He adds that the arrest is a big step forward when it comes to healing the wounds of the 1990s and having the Balkan peoples face their war past.

Nijaz T., 45, from Sarajevo agrees while drinking coffee at Talisman, another one of the “multi-culti” bars he says are rare in Vienna (patrons of “Melon” and “Talisman” say these hangouts are unique as they attract people from all over former Yugoslavia. Other establishments, they say, are frequented primarily by people of the same ethnic group).

Nijaz, who is a Bosnian Muslim, has been living in Vienna since 1988. During the war in Bosnia, he had managed to bring his father out of the besieged Sarajevo. His father has since returned.

“We must sit down and clear up things that happened to us. It is time that people in Bosnia realize they have to live together,” says Nijaz .

Mladic’s arrest could bring those people who have lost their loved-ones closer to healing, he says, although he is reluctant to speak on their behalf.

In the U.S., the Congress of North American Bosniaks (CNAB) had welcomed the news of Mladic’s arrest on behalf of Bosniaks in the United States and Canada, in hope that the trial of both Mladic and another Serb leader already in The Hague – Radovan Karadzic – would “give some peace to the families of those who were killed and whose lives have been destroyed.”  But CNAB said the arrest should not be used for “political gain” by Serbian and Bosnian Serb politicians, “to obtain concessions from the international community, particularly the European Union.”

At Melon, the crowd grows as new people join the conversation that starts taking on more jovial tones. The bartender Jusuf L., brings a couple of beers and some coffee.  “Simply, there are those who are for him [Mladic] and those who are not for him,” says Jusuf, a Bosnian Muslim who married a Serbian woman during the war. Although they are divorced today, they have a son together.

His reaction to Mladic’s arrest is simple. “Justice,” he says.

Mary Sherhart sings sevdalinkas at a Bosnian celebration in New York. (Photo: Jelena Kopanja)

The name of Bosnia and Herzegovina –a small, heart-shaped country in the Balkans– is rarely associated with love.

The country made headlines in the mid ’90s as a place where ethnic hatred resulted in the death of 100,000 of its people and the exodus of many more. In addition to the photo albums and coffee grinders refugees packed in their suitcases as they fled, they also brought with them parts of their culture including sevdalinka, a traditional Bosnian song of love and longing for all that was left behind.

Now as Bosnian communities strengthen their roots in the United States, England and elsewhere, younger generations are growing up having little contact with their parents’ homeland. For these children, sevdalinka is perhaps a way to maintain a link. Mary Sherhart, director of Sevdah North America –a cultural organization dedicated to the study and preservation of this music– has seen the powerful connections sevdalinka can make.

“The little girls especially are enamored with it,” she said. “When those kids go home and hang out with their parents –in particular with their grandparents– the grandparents start singing, it gets them thinking about their youth. It is so healthy for these elders who feel particularly traumatized and isolated, as they often do not speak English.”

Listen to “Tamburalo Momce u Tamburu” (Youth was playing tamburitza) by Mary Sherhart, John Morovich and Balkan Cabaret:

[Visit post to listen to audio]

From the CD “Somewhere Far Away” (2006)

Mirza Basic, a former member of performance group London Sevdah, has played these songs for his son ever since he was in his mother’s womb. “He now knows when sevdah is on,” Basic said.

Refik Ahmetovic enjoys a sevdalinka at a Bosnian celebration in New York. (Photo: Jelena Kopanja)

Omer Pobric, director of the Institute for Sevdah in Visoko, near Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, envisions translating sevdalinkas into several foreign languages, including English, German, Spanish and Chinese. “Many of our children grow up far away,” he said. “They are born abroad, they forget our language and it is my wish that sevdalinka, even if sung in what is now their mother tongue, reminds them of their home country.”

Sevdalinka is sometimes compared to Portuguese fado, for its reliance on the singer’s ability to divulge his innermost secrets to the audience. A good sevdalinka singer has to disclose to the audience “everything about yourself, your country, your identity, your origins,” said Basic.

Origin and identity are complex concepts in Bosnia. Sevdalinka’s roots are in the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, and many of its motifs and its language are influenced by Islamic traditions. But the song was not immune to influences from Christian Serbs and Croats, Sephardic Jews and even Roma.

“We are fusion and confusion,” said Srdjan Kolarevic, a musician in Washington, D.C. “That’s our beauty and our curse.”

Watch an example of traditional sevdalinka:

Himzo Polovina, “Emina”

Like many things in Bosnia, sevdalinka is also susceptible to divisive politics that extend into Bosnian immigrant and refugee communities around the world. “I see sevdah being used politically,” said Sherhart. “It is probably inevitable and it is a shame. But the war is so recent, it is still going on in so many ways.”

Omer Pobric fears that sevdalinka is endangered by those who do not wish Bosnian Muslims well. “In these regions, the existence of Muslims (Bosniaks) is seen as a problem. And sevdah and sevdalinka are identified with Bosniaks,” he wrote in an email. Pobric mentions that many songs have been appropriated by Serbs from Serbia who sing them as their own. Others, however, have criticized Pobric for claiming sevdalinka has exclusively Muslim heritage.

“There are heavy overtones and undertones in a lot of sevdah songs of Muslim and Islamic culture, but a large portion of the sevdalinke catalogue consists of quite eclectic sounds and wording. It is very difficult, in my opinion, to call sevdah a Muslim music,” said Basic.

“People are confused,” Basic said. “They think that the fez [a hat that forms part of a traditional costume worn at some sevdah performances] is a Muslim outfit. So Muslims may refuse to wear it, so as not to insult non-Muslims; the non-Muslims may not want to wear it because they think it is Muslim. But the history tells us that it is business attire, an ethnically neutral outfit. There is a lot of this kind of ignorance.”

In the diaspora, Sherhart believes, “the children growing up far from Bosnia will be emotionally much healthier if families move on in their lives. It is next to impossible to expect that so soon — and probably unrealistic.” But she is hopeful.

Enjoying the music, a step towards reconciliation?

Evening of Sevdah, held last November in Seattle, brought together musicians from all over the former Yugoslavia. “It was a microcosm of how beloved sevdah was, and how artists and music should be above politics. The audience welcomed all the musicians — as though the audience was relieved to go back to that time when they could just enjoy music,” Sherhart said of the event. “I believe those are very small steps but important ones.”

Miki Koljenovic, a singer from New York who often entertains at weddings, has at least a couple of sevdalinkas in his repertoire. “I sing for people from all over former Yugoslavia. They all love sevdalinka.” But asked if he had witnessed many multi-ethnic weddings in his 20-year career as a singer in the diaspora, he replied, “I am not a politician. I am a musician. I do not get into that.”

There are those who do not want to listen to sevdalinkas. “I have had problems with people from Banja Luka listening to me play sevdah,” said Basic. Banja Luka is predominantly Serb and belongs to Republika Srpska, one of Bosnia’s two governing entities created by the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in 1995.

“But we had a bunch of Serbian people from Novi Sad, Belgrade coming to hear us in Oxford,” said Basic. “Who is sevdah uniting there? I don’t know. They were incredibly happy. We were very happy to see them. We didn’t feel any national divisions among us.”

“If someone does not want to hear it, they won’t hear it even if they are your neighbors. But if they want to hear it, they’ll hear it from across the world.”

For the first time, in March last year, scholars convened in Sarajevo to discuss the status of sevdalinka in Bosnia’s cultural heritage. “Sevdalinka is a national good, and a national brand,” said politician Irfan Ajanovic, as reported in a Croatian newspaper.

In an e-mail, Pobric agreed. “If we cannot agree on politics –some want this, some want that–, if we cannot agree on faith –some are believers, some atheists, some agnostic–, then we can at least agree on beauty. Sevdah is beauty and sevdah could be the connecting tissue for the whole of Bosnia. We all love sevdah.”

Also read: Part I – Sevdalinka, a Melancholy Soundtrack for Bosnian Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S.

NEW YORK – When Mary Sherhart first sang the traditional Bosnian songs known as sevdalinkas at a concert in 2004, a woman stood up and started weeping. Her bare arms, emblazoned with scars from the war that ravaged Bosnia in the early nineties, rose toward the ceiling.

Sevdalinka is "a bridge to home," says singer Mary Sherhart. (Photo: www.marysherhart.com)

At that moment, Sherhart knew that to be a “responsible artist” she would need to learn more about this song and its people, as the music extracted from her audiences the most private of emotions.

The emotion was evident on the faces of those who came to listen to Sherhart and Sakib Jakupovic, a Bosnian musician, this past April in Queens, NY at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Bosnian-American Association. At midnight, grateful guests lined up to personally thank Sherhart for coming. Many of them were older Bosnian men and women, self-conscious about their broken English, but nevertheless eager to express their gratitude.

Sevdalinka is a song of love in all its manifestations, but for Bosnians living outside their country, one feeling predominates — nostalgia.

“Sevdah takes a new meaning in the diaspora,” said Sherhart, who is the president of Sevdah North America, an organization dedicated to the preservation and study of this music. “It is a bridge to the time when they were happier, a bridge to home, a bridge to their children for whom those ties are not as strong.”

Listen to “Snijeg Pade na Behar na Voce” (Snow has fallen on blossoms, on fruit) by Mary Sherhart and Omer Pobric:

[Visit post to listen to audio]

From the CD Srce Puno Bosne, Amerika i sevdah, Mary i Omer

(2005, Institut Sevdaha)

For Mirza Basic, an accordion player and a sevdalinka aficionado now living in London, the nostalgia of sevdah is more concrete than an ambiguous notion of longing.

“I really miss having cevapi barbecue (a Bosnian meat specialty), on the banks of the river Vrbas in my hometown,” said Basic, a former member of the performance group London Sevdah. “Sevdah is the one thing that can make me as close as possible –emotionally and mentally– to that.”

The Bosnian diaspora has grown in the aftermath of the four-year war that began in 1992 with Bosnia’s declaration of independence from Yugoslavia. The ethnic strife that followed was a surprise for most. A multi-ethnic country consisting of Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats (as well as a small percentage of others, including Roma and Jews), Bosnia’s traditions, its language and the marriages of its people were mixed in what seemed a harmonious coexistence. Ethnic cleansing that marked the war led to the death of 100,000 Bosnians and the exodus of many more, 350,000 of whom now live in the United States.

The emotional core of the sevdalinka –sevdah– comes from the Turkish word sevda, which means love, and the Arabic word sawda, which translates as black bile. According to the ancient Greeks’ medical theory of four humors, it was this substance that, in excess, was responsible for melancholy.

In 1917, Yugoslav anthropologist and philosopher Vladimir Dvornikovic described the peculiar state of his people that was reflected in their music.

“Even without sorrow, sorrow is always present, even without lament, the elegiac note may still be heard –he said–. Whether Orthodox or Muslim or Catholic, it is always and everywhere the same, monotonous and desperate in its tedium, always the same song, always verging on tears.”

Watch an example of traditional sevdalinka:

Zaim Imamovic, “Mujo Kuje Konja Po Mjesecu” (Mujo Shoes His Horse Under the Moonlight)

Kelly Marshall, an American whose grandfather was Croatian, remembers him playing these songs over and over again. “A lot of immigrants that left Yugoslavia for America had a sadness, homesickness, nostalgia and longing for their homeland, friends and family –and that melancholy and nostalgia was then transferred onto their children and descendants here.

“Even though my grandfather came here when he was only three, he used to sit for hours in the living room listening to the music without saying much of anything.”

That melancholy, says Semir Vranic, a sevdalinka enthusiast and a collector from Sarajevo, remains at the center of this song that was originally plucked on the strings of an Oriental instrument called a saz.

Sevdalinka, like much of Bosnia’s food, architecture and popular customs, owes a lot to the legacy of the Ottoman Empire’s 400-year-long presence in that part of the world. But as Bosnia was a crossroads where empires met, each leaving traces upon retreat, so was sevdalinka a meeting point of its peoples. Along the way and through time it incorporated other influences.

“In Turkey, the players of saz are called asiks, or ‘those in love,” explains Mustafa Avci, an ethnomusicologist and a saz player from Turkey who now studies at New York University.

“A legend has it that if a man is visited in his dream by a saint who gives him wine to drink –a wine of love– he wakes up an asik, a skilled player who then wanders the earth with his saz, in search of his loved one.” In Bosnia, asikovati means “to flirt,” and many sevdalinka have been written as songs of courtship between young lovers.

At the celebration in Queens, Fatima Sahmanovic shared her memories and what sevdalinka meant to her.

“I used to take care of an elderly woman and I would often take her to the park. If the park was empty, I would just sing sevdalinkas the whole time. They remind me of my hometown’s sokaks (small streets), of my youth, of my first love.”

“But shhh…” she laughed, her voice muffled under the music. “Don’t let my husband hear.”

Part II: Sevdalinka, a way to keep younger Bosnians connected to the homeland.