Bosnian Austrians: Accidental Migrants in Trans-Local and Cyber Spaces by ERSTE Foundation

2011â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2012

ERSTE Foundation Fellowship for Social Research Should we stay or should we go? Migration and its effects on demographic and economic development in Central Eastern Europe

Bosnian Austrians: Accidental Skilled Migrants in Trans-local Spaces Hariz Halilovich

Bosnian Austrians: Accidental migrants in trans–local and cyber spaces Hariz Halilovich1 Abstract 2

This paper explores the realities of three groups of Bosnian immigrants in Austria whose migration, at least initially, started as a forced displacement during the 1990s. It describes how their social networks, level of education, professional skills, life experiences and embodied bi–culturalism are utilised in strengthening social cohesion and intergenerational solidarity in relation to Austria and to 3 Bosnia–Herzegovina . Detailed attention is paid to the history and the make–up of particular cities both in the country of origin and the host countries. Ultimately, the paper attempts to challenge the established methodological and theoretical orthodoxies in migration studies and to deconstruct the myth about refugees as a ‘societal burden’ subject to charity and lacking human and social capital, arguing that any strict division between different migration categories (like economic migration, skilled migration, family reunion, temporary and forced migration) and paradigms (like transnationalism or the brain drain vs. brain gain concept) will miss addressing the multiplicity of ever–changing relationships, meanings and opportunities any migration is likely to create. The paper concludes that it is impossible to talk about some standardised ‘refugee pattern’ as, like any other migrant groups, people who experience forced displacement do not remain in a stage of permanent liminality. Their ‘migration’ into new identities, even if these identities are only transitory— from refugees to migrants to citizens of new countries or to returnees—is often founded on the remnants of their earlier place–based identities and locally–embedded social networks. Such communities are not only socially (re–)constructed at the points of migration, but also increasingly (re)imagined and (re)imaged beyond real space, in the realm of cyber space.

Introduction In this paper, I explore lived realities, embodied memories and the performance of the identities of three groups of Bosnian refugees who settled in Austria. The paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted during 2011 with 28 ‘Bosnian Austrians’ and their social and professional networks. In order to gather information– rich qualitative data, participants were selected through a combination of ethnographic sampling—considering people, places, contexts, time and events— the ‘snowball method’ and convenience sampling. Another important criterion was that participants should all be former Bosnian refugees who have become Austrian citizens and are regarded, or see themselves, as well–integrated immigrants. Hence the participants selected include some prominent Bosnians in Austria, such as academics, directors, artists and managers as well as those considered to be more 1

Office of the Pro-‐Vice Chancellor (Learning and Teaching), Monash University. Email: hariz.halilovich@monash.edu. The research for this paper was generously supported by the Erste Foundation Fellowship for Social Research (Generations in Dialogue) 2011 (http://www.erstestiftung.org/factory/generations-‐in-‐dialogue/). 2 Terms ‘Bosnian’ and ‘Bosnians’ are generally used to describe all people who live(d) in Bosnia–Herzegovina regardless of their ethnic, religious or regional identities. 3 ‘Bosnia’, ‘Bosnia–Herzegovina’, ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’ and ‘BiH’ are all terms that are commonly used when referring to Bosnia and Herzegovina (its full, official name). I use all these terms interchangeably in this paper and my other publications.

‘ordinary’ migrants without a prominent public profile. The study itself draws upon my earlier research on the forced displacement and diasporic identities of Bosnian refugees in Austria, Sweden, the USA and Australia, conducted between 2007 and 2009. All of the 28 participants I interviewed, and whose activities I observed and participated in, arrived in Austria as refugees during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia. Their ages range from 26 to 55 years. Sixteen are men and twelve are women. In terms of education, 18 have undergraduate and masters degrees from Austrian universities, 12 of whom started studying in Bosnia and completed their studies at an Austrian university upon their arrival. Of the remaining ten participants, four finished their university degrees in Bosnia or in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, while six do not have tertiary qualifications. Twenty participants are married or live in long– term relationships, most of them with children, while eight participants are single. Four participants are in relationships with Austrians and others have Bosnian partners. All but two participants have members of their families living in Austria and all have relatives in Bosnia and other countries. While this is a relatively small sample of a section of the Bosnian immigrant community in Austria, the data collected during the ethnographic research reveal some important broader patterns about the settlement and integration of Bosnian refugees in this country. However, the paper does not aspire to provide a ‘community profile’ of some 100,000 Bosnians living in Austria in terms of demographic or economic indicators. It rather explores how a group of 28 ‘former’ Bosnian refugees negotiate the plurality of their identities and see themselves in relation to different roles and places in both their country of origin and their adopted country of residence. Challenging methodological and theoretical orthodoxies and dominant perceptions of forced displacement The research sites, or places where my participants live and work in Austria, include Vienna, Graz, Linz and Steyr, the cities with the largest population of Bosnian immigrants in Austria (Franz 2005; 2011; and Tretter et al. 1994). I extended my research to include members of my participants’ networks in Bosnia, and I engaged with the social interactions of ‘Bosnian Austrians’ via mobile phones and in cyber space via web 2.0 tools and by visiting the websites, online portals, YouTube, blogs and forums where ‘Bosnian Austrians’ meet and exchange their views. Hence my research approach involves elements of both conventional and digital ethnography, or ‘on–site and on–line fieldwork’ (Landzelius 2006: 2). However, these two forms of ethnographic research should not be seen as separate but rather complementing and in line with the established anthropological perspective in migration studies— which is actor–centered as it puts an emphasis on practice and agency, that is on the experiences, feelings, meanings, imagination, narratives, metaphors and social networks of the people who are the subjects of an anthropological inquiry (Čapo Žmegač 2007). As Murthy (2008: 837) points out, ‘ethnography is about telling social stories’, and while ‘ethnography goes digital, its epistemological remit remains 2

much the same’. In an age when connectivity, as much as mobility, has become one of the key features of migrant realities, any research into contemporary migration needs to take into account the role of new media and digital technologies in the social morphology of migrant communities; hence digital ethnography becomes a logical extension of conventional ethnography rather than its substitute (Landzelius 2006). The official website of Cyborg Anthropology defines digital ethnography as the ‘process and methodology of doing ethnographic research in a digital space, [whereby] the digital field site is sometimes comprised of text, video or images, and may contain social relations and behaviour patterns strewn across many nations, cities or intellectual geographies’ (Cyborg Anthropology 2011). Even though ethnographers are yet to come up with a universally acceptable definition of digital ethnography, this definition captures much of the essence of digital ethnography applied in collecting data for this paper. Nonetheless, what does and what does not come under digital ethnography, and whether other terms like ‘cyber ethnography’, ‘online ethnography’, and ‘netnography’ have the same meaning as digital ethnography remains contested. While all the methodological neologisms are yet to be fully conceptualised, I favour the use of the term digital ethnography to include not only the worldwide web but also other information technologies such as mobile phones, satellite TV and digital radio. However, a more comprehensive debate on digital ethnography and other forms of online research is beyond the scope of this paper. In a most practical way, digital ethnography enabled me to remain engaged with my field–sites from a distance and to explore and be a part of the social networks of my participants in a way which disregarded the constraints of physical space. As such, my research approach has the qualities of multi–sited ethnography ‘designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations’ (Marcus 1995: 105). However, my multi–sited ethnography is not primarily a comparative study— even though some aspects of the research in different sites are contrasted—nor is it a classical ethnography of ‘fixed’ places and cultures. Rather, it represents a study of socially–networked places made up of people dispersed across different localities as a result of forced displacement. Drawing upon Hannerz’s (2006: 23–41) ideas about ‘studying down, up, sideways, through, backwards, forwards, away and at home’ [by] ‘tracing webs of relations between actors, institutions and discourses’, my exploration goes beyond real and imagined fixities and certainties of place and cannot be seen in isolation or disentangled from the life stories and experiences of my participants. Thus, in line with Marcus’ view of multi–sited ethnography—applying a variety of roles as a researcher, such as completely participant, completely observer, observer as participant and marginal native—I have followed the people, the metaphors, the plots, the stories, the biographies, and the conflict (Marcus 1995). In addition to methodological approaches, this paper also challenges some of the theoretical orthodoxies dominant in migration studies. This primarily refers to some of the limits of transnationalism, the dominant paradigm in migrations studies. Glick 3

Schiller et al. (1999) define transnationalism as ‘processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement’; while Vertovec (1999) understands transnationalism as ‘multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation states’. The concept of transnationalism, as Al–Ali et al. (2001) argue, is especially limited when it comes to interpreting the complexities of refugee identities and experiences involving forced migration from ancestral homes, and often dramatic separation from spatial practices and identities associated with a particular place. As described in this paper, the pre– migration place–based identities and ‘locally–embedded’ social networks play a crucial role in social morphology of the displaced groups, effectively turning them into trans–local, rather than transnational, communities. (Trans–)local networks like any social networks are often linked or equated with social capital. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) defines social capital as ‘the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition…’ Following on from Bourdieu, Putnam (2000) argues that ‘the term social capital emphasises not just warm and cuddly feelings, but a wide variety of quite specific benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks’. While migration—especially one involving forced displacement—inevitably results in the disruption of place–based social networks, it also enables migrants to (re)create and become a part of new social networks spreading across the borders of different nation states. As described in the paper, rather than destroying the local social networks, the forced displacement of Bosnians has had a ‘paradoxical effect’ on some displaced local communities by strengthening local pre–migration networks at the points of migration: in Graz, Vienna, Linz and Steyr. These networks have proven to be the most valuable asset—or social capital—the disposed and displaced Bosnians brought along with them to Austria. Much of the scholarship on migration has been focused on the ethnic identity of migrants—or dominated by ‘ethno gaze’ as Glick Schiller (2008) put it. More recently, however, a number of scholars have pointed to the limits of such an approach (cf. Čapo 2011; Glick Schiller 2008; Halilovich 2012; Wimmer 2011). As there is no one single Bosnian ethnic identity but rather three Bosnian ethno–religious identifications—Bosniak, Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb (and many other minorities, and people who reject ethnic labelling)—that share more similarities than differences in terms of language, history, territory and common Slavic origins, the ‘ethno gaze’ approach to studying a multiethnic group might not only prove to be oxymoronic but also highly problematic and hegemonic. Furthermore, such an ethnicised approach will often fail to recognise many local particularities of the studied groups that may be much more meaningful to them than broader categories like ethnicity or nationality. As with other complex social phenomena, any generalisations of different migrant groups and migration trends will always remain 4

‘partial truths’, sometimes even filled with contradictions (Clifford 1986). Still, in order to collect ‘hard data’ and produce research findings that fit into accepted categories, many researchers opt to focus on a particular ‘dominant’ aspect of the group being studied. Hence, broader identities such as ethnicity, religion and gender continue to attract the interest of scholars studying migration. When it comes to researching forced migration and refugees, scholars have tended to focus on negatives such as humanitarian and political issues as well as the personal and communal burden of displacement in relation to trauma, violence and resettlement. As I have argued elsewhere, regardless of the fact that almost anyone could become subject to such unfair treatment and be turned into a refugee, there is a general perception in host countries that refugees are a homogenous collective, which somehow has to do more with ‘them’ than with ‘us’ (Halilovich 2006). Hence, it should not come as a surprise that the word ‘refugee’ usually has negative connotations, reducing the identity of diverse groups of people to only one of their life episodes—that of fleeing persecution and leaving their homelands. Unlike forced migration, skilled migration is usually linked to the positive aspects of migration, and it is most often measured by the economic contribution of migrants to their respective ‘receiving’ and ‘sending’ countries (OECD 2001; Skeldon 2009). Migration is also often debated in terms of the ‘brain gain’ and brain drain’ dichotomy, implying that there are always winners and losers in any ‘skilled’ migration process, with sending countries losing their brightest and most skilled in whose education they invested, and ‘receiving’ countries depleting human capital from poorer countries not able to retain their skilled workers (Beine 1997). The three groups of former Bosnian refugees described in this paper demonstrate that we cannot make a neat distinction between different types of migration, like skilled and forced migration, for instance. While ‘Bosnian Austrians’ might have become refugees due to a historical accident beyond their control, there was nothing accidental in them fitting into Austrian society and economy as ‘skilled’ migrants, even though the provocative title of this paper may suggest otherwise. Austria—an immigration nation or its neighbours’ refuge? By deliberately using the term ‘Bosnian Austrians’ I am challenging the widespread ignorance of the dual and transnational identities of immigrants in European countries like Austria. While the use of such terms and ‘hyphenated identities’ is common in countries recognised as immigrant or multicultural nations, like, for instance, Australia, the USA and Canada, in Austria and many other countries, the ‘native populations’ and state bureaucracies generally ignore the plurality of the cultural and political identities of immigrants. This ‘semiotic challenge’ only reflects underlying attitudes towards accepting the fact that for a long time Austria has not only been a country of emigration but also an immigration country (Münz et al. 2003). However, despite the relatively high rate of immigration to Austria, the dominant Austrian politics and media still treat Austria as if it were a non–immigration nation 5

unaffected by population movements. As Münz et al (2003) argue, this does not only misrepresent the current demographic realities in Austria, but it also ignores the country’s long history of immigration. Analysing demographic and immigration trends in Austria over the last two centuries, Bauer (2008) concludes that it was mainly due to a huge influx of immigrants from Central, South–eastern and Western Europe— who at times made up to two thirds of the Viennese population—that the Austrian capital has emerged as one of Europe’s main cultural, trading and political centres. Throughout the XX century, the geopolitical position of Austria made it the most attractive destination and transit country for refugees coming from countries to the East and South. In the aftermath of the Second World War, there were some 1.4 million refugees, displaced people and stateless persons housed in refugee centres in Austria and waiting for permanent resettlement in third countries (Šunjić and Volf 1995). While most of these refugees migrated to Australia, Canada and the USA, many—especially the German speaking refugees—chose to stay in Austria. According to the UNHCR (2004), a similar migration trend, with refugees coming via Austria, continued during the cold war: Austria was a ‘transit country’ for 180,000 refugees from Hungary after the failed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, then for 160,000 Czechoslovak refugees in 1968 after the Prague Spring, followed by 120,000 Polish refugees in the early 1980s during martial law in Poland, and in the early 1990s for some 150,000 from Bosnia and thousands of refugees from Croatia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia. To these numbers, many thousands of German escapees from Eastern Germany on the way to West Germany, and some 300,000 Soviet Jews mostly resettled to Israel as well as thousands of non–European refugees seeking asylum in Europe need to be added. It is estimated that, since 1945, out of some 2 million refugees who were in transit via Austria some 700,000 have stayed in the country (UNHCR 2004). From Bosnian refugees in Austria to Bosnian Austrians The countries that once made Yugoslavia4 have a long tradition of temporary and permanent migration both to other European countries and to faraway destinations such as Australia, the US and Canada. The peak of migration from the region occurred during the 1990s socio–political crisis and the series of armed conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, when more than 2.5 million people left the region (Halpern and Kideckel 2000). About half of those who left were refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the longest and most brutal of the Yugoslav wars of secession took place. The war in Bosnia started in March 1992 when the BiH government followed the examples of Slovenia and Croatia, held a referendum (boycotted by the Serb Democratic Party [SDS], the main political party of the Bosnian Serbs at the time) and declared independence from the crumbling Yugoslav Federation (Hoare 2007; 4

This includes the independent states of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-‐Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Kosovo.

and Malcolm 1994). In late March and early April 1992, Serbian government– controlled militias invaded the eastern Bosnian border towns of Bijeljina, Brčko and Zvornik, killing non–Serb civilians (Cigar 1995). By mid–April 1992, there was all–out war in the country between the SDS militias (later the Army of Republika Srpska or VRS) and the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) on the one side and on the other the BiH government–controlled police and territorial defence (later the Army of BiH) and the Croatian Defence Council (HVO), the armed–wing of the Croat Democratic Union (HDZ), the nationalist party of the Bosnian Croats. However, within the ‘main war’ (often simplified as Serbs vs. Bosniaks and Croats), at different times different armed groups fought together and against each other. In 1992–93, rival armed groups of Bosnian Croats, HVO and HOS (Croatian Armed Forces), fought a brief but bitter war for monopoly control in Croat–dominated parts of the country (western Herzegovina). By early 1993, war broke out between HVO units and ABiH in central Bosnia and Mostar, followed by further fratricide between Bosniak troops in western Bosnia, when Fikret Abdić’s troops (‘Autonomaši’) fought against ABiH. After four years of bloodshed5, the war ended in December 1995, with the country divided into two semi–autonomous political entities, Republika Srpska (Serb Republic or RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and special status given to the ‘District Brčko’. In addition to large–scale human rights abuses and a significant loss of human life, the war in Bosnia also resulted in unprecedented displacement from and within the country. It created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War Two (Hitchcock 2003: 380–409). While close to a million Bosnians were turned into internally displaced persons (IDPs), a further 1.3 million people became refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in many countries, predominantly in Europe, North America, and Australia (BiH Ministry for Human Rights and Refugees 2008). Most refugees never returned to their original places—at least not permanently—and many were allowed to take up residency and citizenship of the countries of their ‘temporary’ refuge or resettlement. The World Bank (2005) estimates that the number of Bosnians living outside the country is close to 1.5 million (1,471,594), or 37.7% of the country’s pre–war population. Like many other refugee groups coming from Eastern Europe before them, hundreds of thousands of Bosnian refugees arrived in or were in transit through Austria during the 1990s. And, like other refugee groups, Bosnian refugees believed that their displacement was of a temporary nature and that they would eventually return to their original places, so staying closer to home was for many individuals and groups the most preferable option. In addition to its geographical location, in the case of Bosnian refugees, Austria was also perceived as a preferable refuge and a friendly host due to many political, cultural and historical factors. Among the political factors, 5

The war resulted in 100,000–150,000 people killed, about 2 million forcibly displaced, between 20,000 and 50,000 women raped, 35,000 missing, tens of thousands of people imprisoned and tortured, more than 800,000 homes destroyed. See Research and Documentation Centre (2007).

an important one was that Austria supported Bosnian independence and Alois Mock, a prominent Austrian politician, was a fierce advocate of Western intervention to stop the war in Bosnia. In terms of cultural and historical connections, Bosnia and Austria shared a part of the collective memory of the last four decades of the Habsburg Empire when Bosnia was a part of the monarchy6 (Hoare 2007; Riedlmayer 2002; and Malcolm 1994). As is well known, the Habsburg Empire ended in the First World War, which started with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914. There were—and still are—other cultural connections, including the fact that the German language had been studied by generations of Bosnians, and many Bosnians looked up to Vienna with some nostalgia remembering the shared glorious past (Schachinger 1989). That nostalgia was materialised through some ‘old laws’ being reactivated once Bosnia regained its statehood in 1992, such as, for instance, the law dating back to 1907 that guaranteed all Bosnians free education in Austria. It can also be argued that Austria was very proactive in dealing with the Bosnian refugee and humanitarian crisis; Austria was one of the first European countries to recognise some 100,000 Bosnian ‘forced migrants’ as de facto refugees and provide them with opportunities for employment, further education and permanent residency (Franz 2005). Because of these opportunities offered to Bosnians very early upon their arrival in Austria, as Barbara Franz (2000; 2003; 2005; 2011) has written, there are many distinctions that make the experiences of Bosnians in Austria quite different from those who looked for refuge in Germany and other European countries. Rather than ‘getting stuck’ in their refugee identities due to migration and integration limits imposed upon them by the bureaucracy of the host country, as has been the case in Germany, over the last two decades many ‘former’ Bosnian refugees have become Austrian citizens and reinvented themselves as naturalised Austrians and productive members of Austrian society. Bosnian Austrians in Graz Graz has become one of the important centres where Bosnian refugees have settled and made a lasting cultural impact. The city could be rightly regarded as the Bosnian cultural and intellectual centre in Austria. It is also the most Sarajevan city in Austria, with many Sarajevan refugees making it their adopted home over the last two decades. Not surprisingly, Sarajevo is a member of the Cultural City Network Graz, a network fostering cultural exchange between its member cities. At least some of the connections between Graz and Sarajevo can be credited to the writer Dževad Karahasan, undoubtedly the most prominent Bosnian Austrian living in Graz since 1993, when he escaped from the besieged Sarajevo. While the legacy of leaving Sarajevo during the war has found expression in Karahasan’s writing and may still haunt and inspire him, his identity as a writer has significantly changed over his 16 6

Under article 25 of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, Austria–Hungary received special rights in the Ottoman Empire's province of Bosnia–Herzegovina. Bosnia–Herzegovina was officially annexed to Austria in 1908.

years in exile (Gebauer 2007). From a refugee writer from Sarajevo, he has come to be regarded in the German–speaking world as the most influential contemporary writer from the region of the former Yugoslavia. He has received numerous prestigious awards including the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the Heinrich Heine Medal for 2012. Although he maintains his dual residency in Graz and in Sarajevo—as one expression of his dual identity—as an author he has been gradually growing apart from the political and social turmoil of post–war BiH, becoming a Bosnian–Austrian writer. Many other Sarajevans—and Bosnians from other places—continue to shape Graz as a place where Bosnian Austrian identity is a valuable cultural and social asset. A number of them—mostly former student refugees from Sarajevo—work at the World University Service Austria (WUS) headquarters in Graz. As stated in its mission statement, WUS is an ‘association committed to the promotion of the human right to education on the basis of academic freedom and university autonomy’7. Upon arriving in Graz and Vienna during the war, the Bosnian student refugees were able to continue their interrupted studies free of charge at Austrian universities. During their studies they were also financially supported by WUS Austria. For many of the Bosnian student refugees, this relationship with WUS gradually evolved into various forms of professional engagement with the organisation. For some it turned into long–term employment and a career. From a former supporting organisation, WUS has become an organisation where some half of the employees, including its executive director Adi Kovačević, are of Bosnian, or, to put it more correctly, of Bosnian–Austrian background. Adi Kovačević was not an established writer, a skilled immigrant or known by anyone in Austria when he reached Vienna in 1992. He was just an ‘accidental migrant’, a 22 year old refugee, whose studies at the Sarajevo University were stopped by ‘the war and the longest siege of a city in modern history’ which was to follow (Donia 2006). Adi’s ‘ethnically mixed’ parents insisted on his leaving war–torn Bosnia, his studies being only one of their many concerns about their only son’s future. Namely, at the age of 22, still unmarried, Adi represented an ideal recruit and target of the brutal war in Bosnia. His father took his place as a defender of the city, but made sure his son was far enough from the artillery and sniper fire raining down on Sarajevo from the surrounding hills. Upon arriving in Austria, Adi enrolled at the University of Vienna, lived in the student village, helped set up the association of Bosnian students in Austria and worked on a part–time basis for different organisations including WUS. After completion of his studies, Adi moved to Graz taking up a project management position within WUS. From a casual and part–time project worker, within a few years, Adi worked himself up to become the WUS’ executive director.

Cf. www.wus-austria.org/

Adi’s WUS office became in many respects my research base in Graz, where I was able not only to immerse myself in the social and professional life of this truly Bosnian–Austrian organisation but also to participate in various events WUS organised in both Austria and Bosnia, or more precisely in Graz and Sarajevo. Thanks to the internet and mobile phones, my relationship with WUS and its employees continues to be very active and ongoing. Through such contacts, as a researcher, I keep up to date with the latest news ‘from the field’ and the lives of my participants. While WUS has played an important part in the lives of Bosnian students in Austria, these same students, ‘former’ refugees like Adi, might have played an even greater role in the expansion of WUS, defining its future directions. From a relatively small organisation, WUS has grown into a notable one with some forty permanent staff and an annual budget of 2.5 million EUR. Since joining WUS, ‘Bosnian Austrians’ have directed its humanitarian and development work and programs relating to reforming higher education sector firstly to Bosnia and then to other countries in the region. Since 1994, from an office in Graz, WUS has opened an office in Sarajevo and gradually branched out from there into most of the capital cities in the former Yugoslavia. Today, WUS is one of the key organisations implementing various EU programs primarily targeted at improving higher education and human rights in the former Yugoslavia. Without the ‘Bosnian Austrians’, it is highly unlikely that the organisation would have become what it is today. Through WUS and established connections between Graz and Sarajevo, Graz continues to attract various forms of cultural, economic and social exchange. In many respects, ‘Bosnian Austrians’ in Graz are perceived as role model immigrants, even though they arrived in Austria as refugees. Bosnian Austrians in Vienna Graz and Vienna differ in many ways and some of these differences are reflected among ‘Bosnian Austrians’ living in Vienna. Austria’s capital city, for forty years the centre from where Bosnia–Herzegovina had once been administered, was a point of arrival as well as a transit for many Bosnian refugees during the 1990s (Halilovich 2011a). For many of them, the journey continued to either destinations in other countries, or to other parts of Austria where their social networks were present. However, in total numbers, Austria’s largest city accommodated the largest number of Bosnian refugees. The first large wave of Bosnian refugees arrived in Vienna in the summer of 1992. While they came from many different parts of BiH, the largest single group were victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ from the municipality of Zvornik (Tretter et al. 1994). The town of Zvornik and surrounding villages in eastern Bosnia suffered one of the first and most ‘efficiently’ executed ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns in the Bosnian war. The Zvornik municipality was ‘ethnically cleansed’ of its dominant ethnic group, 10

Bosniaks, who made up 60 per cent—compared to 38 per cent ethnic Serbs—of Zvornik’s 81,000 strong population (Bećirević 2009; and Government of Bosnia– Herzegovina 1991). By the end of June 1992, Zvornik was close to 100 per cent Serbian (Tretter et al. 1994; and Hoare 2003). This ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaign impressed even Samuel Huntington (1996: 272), who used it as a point of reference for his highly controversial thesis on the clash of cultures (Halilovich 2004). The Bosniak civilians who weren’t killed, or who didn’t manage to escape to one of the nearby Bosnian government–controlled areas, were put on cargo trains and buses to Subotica, a town in Vojvodina, on the border between Serbia and Hungary (Karup– Druško 2009). Via Hungary, some 20,000 Zvornik survivors of this ‘ethnic cleansing’ reached Austria in summer 1992 (Tretter et al. 1994). Most of them ‘settled’—i.e., were accommodated in refugee hostels—in and around Vienna. The strong presence of the Zvornik pre–war Gastarbeiter (guest workers) community was an important factor in why so many Zvornik refugees chose Austria—and Vienna in particular—as their preferred refuge destination. Among the 20,000 Bosnian refugees from Zvornik who arrived in Vienna in 1992 were also people like Marinko Stevanović, who did not fit into the ‘ethnic profile’ of the refugee group. Namely, Marinko—who up to 1992 worked as a primary school teacher in Sjenokos, a Bosniak village near Zvornik—is an ethnic Serb. When, in May 1992, the armed Serb militias attacked the village, killing, rounding up and expelling its residents, Marinko, at the time in his late twenties, chose to risk his life and stay with his Bosniak pupils and their families rather than use his ‘ethnic privilege’ and be spared from violence and humiliation by siding with the Serb ‘co– ethnics’, the attackers. By putting his moral principles above his ethnicity (and his own safety!), he exposed himself to the additional risk of being regarded as an ethnic traitor. While he still claims that this was nothing heroic, just something that every teacher in his position would have done, his fellow Zvorničani8 in Vienna have never forgotten what Marinko the teacher did in 1992. The day Marinko was expelled with the villagers of Sjenokos was also the last day he taught in a classroom. For the last twenty years, Marinko—a former teacher, a poet, a keen blogger and a peace activist—has been stretched between unemployment, underemployment or earning his income mainly from working as a labourer and an aid in one of the many nursing homes in Vienna. However, these jobs, and often prolonged periods of joblessness, have not altered any of his ‘old’ identities; among his fellow ‘Bosnian Austrians’ from Zvornik—many of whom are his former students—Marinko is still their most popular teacher and poet. Via his blog and YouTube, Marinko’s poetry also reaches Zvorničani, and other audiences, in other destinations across the globe9. Offering rich primary ‘data’—in the form of text, video, voice and photographs— on Zvorničani in Vienna as well as their lives prior, during and in the aftermath of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of their hometown, Marinko’s ‘online presence’ was an important site of my digital ethnography. Marinko’s online poetry in multimedia format does not only lament over 8 9

Those coming from Zvornik. Cf. http://www.yurope.com/people/marinko/

the past and how life once was; it also deals with many important issues and challenges faced by himself, his fellow Zvorničani and other Bosnian migrants, as well as more generally by any migrant in Austria. Some of the themes of his poetry include unemployment, discrimination, and prejudices against foreigners (Ausländer) in Austria10. This socially–engaged poetry is written and performed by Marinko in German, in a distinct Viennese dialect. As with my other research sites described in this paper, the digital ethnography of Zvorničani in Vienna complemented my fieldwork in the actual site adding an important dimension to understanding the trans–local communities after forced displacement and gaining insights into their ‘new’ lives in places they resettled in. While over the last twenty years their status has legally changed from de facto refugees to Gastarbeiter to, more recently, Austrian citizens, in reality many of the displaced Zvorničani—like Marinko—are where they were when they first arrived in Austria: working in underpaid jobs for which they are usually overqualified, living in almost ghettoised Ausländer (foreigner) parts of the city, building and/or exchanging houses and flats in their ‘old homeland’ in which they don’t live for most of the year. Thus, many Viennese Zvorničani are effectively living multiple temporary lives: 1) as Austrian and EU citizens because of the Austrian passports they obtained through the naturalisation process; 2) as Ausländer and Gastarbeiter in Vienna, as that’s really how their ‘host’ community perceives them and how in most cases they experience their life in Austria; 3) as ‘newcomers’ (došljaci or došlje), not unlike other IDPs in Bosnia, who have never returned to their original ‘ethnically cleansed’ places but ‘settled’ in the closest towns to Zvornik in the Federation, in places like Živinice, Tuzla and Srebrenik; 4) and, in the eyes of home(land)–based Bosnian nationalists, as dijasporci (a pejorative for those living outside of BiH)—those who have exchanged the poverty of homeland for the prestigious West. To paraphrase Jasna Ćapo Žmegač (2007), they remain ‘strangers either way’. While this is how Zvorničani in Vienna are perceived by and in relation to others, they are a very vibrant community of their own: they maintain a closely knit social network with regular communal gatherings, festive events, humanitarian activities and commemorations. Through such performances—in both real and cyber space— they continue to live and imagine their local Zvornik identity despite the fact that they will most likely never return permanently to their lost hometown. Višegrad in Linz and Steyr Višegrad is a town in eastern Bosnia that suffered a fate similar to Zvornik. In fact, in terms of the atrocities committed in this historical city, Višegrad is one of the saddest places in Bosnia (Stanišić 2006). During 1992, Serb militias slaughtered some 3000 Bosniak civilians, and then threw many of them into the Drina from the famous bridge built during the Ottoman era and eternalised by Nobel Prize winning writer Ivo 10

Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7a0gJajmTA&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NTz0nlDUrw&feature=related

Andrić (Boose 2002). Once a famed tourist destination nestled in the breathtaking Drina canyon, more recently Višegrad has been mainly associated with some of the worst war crimes committed in the Former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, that included burning civilians alive in locked houses, the systematic rape of women and girls and the indiscriminate killings of non–Serbs who made up the majority of the town’s population before 1992 (Vešović 2009; Lippman 2010; Karup–Druško, 2006; and Irwin and Bećirević 2008). A number of war criminals who ordered and participated in these crimes were sentenced to long imprisonment by the Hague Tribunal (ICTY 1996; 2006). However, the legacy of the crimes is so deep that Višegrad has remained one of the towns with the lowest number of returning refugees. This background cannot be separated from Višegrad residents—or Višegradjani11— who have made Austria their new home. Their stories, the pictures of killed and missing relatives displayed in their new homes as well as their personal memories and collective remembrances are a part of their Bosnian Austrian realities. As much as Graz was an attractive destination for Sarajevans and Vienna for Bosnian refugees from Zvornik, Linz and Steyr have become cities with the largest number of refugees from Višegrad. The pre–existing social networks, involving many Višegradjani working as guest workers in these towns before the war, were the main reason for this migration pattern. The guest workers assisted their family members and fellow Višegradjani with the required paperwork to enter Austria and with the legalisation of their status by providing them with assistance to find jobs, in many cases in the same companies and industries where they themselves had worked for many years. It is not uncommon among Višegradjani in Linz and Steyr that many family members work for the same employer and that sons inherited their fathers’ jobs. While many of these jobs are in low–skilled, construction and trade professions, many members of Višegrad’s younger generation have completed university degrees and broken the established pre–war Gastarbeiter pattern by securing jobs in privileged and better paid sectors such as law, education, medicine and the local administration. However, most Višegradjani are united when it comes to attempting to preserve their local identity; from sticking to their local dialect to favouring intermarriage with fellow Višegradjani and other communities from the Drina valley (known as Podrinje), and to proudly displaying pictures of their old hometown with the famed Ottoman bridge where their relatives and neighbours were killed in 1992, as the bridge has also become a symbol of their local tragedy. The social gatherings, mutual support and the active maintenance of social relationships between Bosnian Austrians from Višegrad are important features and factors of social cohesion that make Višegradjani feel who they continue to be. The tragedy of their ‘former’ hometown which in some form and to various degrees has affected every family from Višegrad has made these locally–embedded bonds even 11

Those who come from Višegrad.

stronger. Some of these bonds and nostalgia for the lost hometown has been replicated in new social media, especially on Facebook and YouTube.12 Over the last two decades, Aida Gušo has been a community activist, assisting her fellow Višegradjani with many personal issues relating to both their lives in Austria and their ‘past’ lives in Bosnia. One of the major issues from the past lives remain their missing relatives, many of whom have not been found and identified up to this day. Aida’s older brother is among the missing. Even though her life in her hometown has been forever shattered, Aida is aware that she was much luckier than many other Višegrad girls of her age. After having survived the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of her town, in late 1992, with her mother and younger brother, Aida managed to reunite with her father in Austria, who had worked as a Gastarbeiter in Steyr since the 1970s. As most Gastarbeiter from Višegrad in Steyr and Linz had worked as unskilled and semiskilled labourers, they lacked the practical knowledge required to assist their relatives and other fellow Višegradjani, often feeling overwhelmed with the multiplicity of issues affecting arriving refugees. Unlike them, Aida spoke English, acquired German in the shortest time possible and started helping those around her. Very soon after her arrival in Steyr, she became the main contact person for refugees from Višegrad. She also finished a degree in social work and was able to find a ‘white collar’ job in the local city administration. Her role has not changed much in the last twenty years; in addition to her full–time job in the local council, she has also been a full–time activist and unofficial community leader working on different initiatives relating to people from Višegrad both in Austria and Bosnia as well as in other countries where Višegrad residents settled after the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of their town in 1992. One of such initiatives in the last five years has been organising regular pilgrimages to their old place of (be)longing. While there has been hardly any significant return of refugees to Višegrad, many Višegradjani and their sympathisers—including many of their new Australian neighbours and friends—have started returning to Višegrad for an annual commemoration for Višegrad victims, calling for the perpetrators to be brought to justice. While this is a once a year event, for much of the year, Aida and her fellow Višegradjani from Linz and Steyr—as well as those in other places and countries with whom they are in contact on the Internet—keep preparing for and talking about the pilgrimage to the place that once used to be home and now has become a place of pain and remembrance. In this way, by keeping the memory of who they once were, Višegradjani also strengthen their identities as a distinct group of Bosnian Austrians, a trans–local pattern followed by many other forcibly displaced local communities from Bosnia–Herzegovina (Halilovich 2011a; 2011b; 2012). Trans–local within the transnational 12

Cf. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEIndKEn0pQ&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUI2qdGBEiE&feature=related

When referring to the ‘preservation’ and (re–)construction of the local Sarajevo, Zvornik and Višegrad identities in Graz, Vienna, Linz and Steyr, I do not imply that these local identities somehow became ‘conserved’, ‘sealed off’ and remain unchanged in the new socio–cultural environment. On the contrary, the (trans–)local diasporic communities described in this paper are not ‘stuck in the past’ or ‘fixed and stable’ and localised in time and space. The lived realities of displaced Bosnians in Austria exemplify how cultural place and embodied local identities transcend geographical space and chronological time; how mobility and attachment to place are not intrinsically contradictory, but can in fact be complementary processes (Halilovich 2012: 174). Sarajevans, Zvornicani and Višegradjani in Austria also demonstrate that, even when it is reduced down—or elevated—to the level of an idea(l), the place called home remains a ‘symbolic anchor’, a metaphor around which narratives of belonging and memories of home are constructed and performed (Gupta and Ferguson 1992: 11). The attachment to the idea of the ‘old’ place as home, as Ghassan Hage (1997) argues, should not be seen as a hindering factor for migrants and refugees in their new places of settlement. Rather, it provides them with a ‘sense of possibility’ to (re)create their new home constructed around ‘[the] desire to promote the feeling of being there here’ (Hage 1997: 102; 108). In practical terms, this means that displacement leads to a new placement; that ‘there is no deterritorialisation without an effort for reterritorialisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1980: 214). As reflected in Marinko’s poetry and in the daily lives of Bosnians in Austria, for many people who experienced forced displacement, the ‘original’ place is not located in space any more, but in time which has passed—in memories, narratives and performative enactments of ‘local’ identities—or, as Leslie van Gelder (2008:58) put it, ‘people in diasporas do not root in place, but in each other’. Many of these subtle complexities and local particularities often get overlooked by researchers favouring exclusivity of transnational paradigm in migration studies. While the concept of transnationalism, as outlined by Glick Schiller et al. (1999) and Vertovec (1999), seems to be accommodating to various immigrants’ identities, it still emphasises countries (i.e. states) of origin and settlement, nationality, nationalism, institutions and nation–state borders and underemphasise social factors and identities rooted in a particular locality and specific cultural experiences that often lie beyond—or below—the political supra identities (Halilovich 2011; 2012). As Lovell points out, ‘the interference between localised understanding of belonging, locale and identity often seems to conflict with wider national and international political, economic and social interests’ (1998: 1). These ‘wider interests’—dominated by nation, state, borders, ethnicity, religion and financial transactions—are the integral parts and core elements of transnationalism and nationalism, concepts that have much in common. As Kearney (1995: 548) argues, the ‘cultural–political dimension of transnationalism is signalled by its resonance with nationalism as a cultural and political project’. Bosnian refugees and similar forcibly displaced groups, who have 15

been victims of nationalism ‘as a cultural and political project’ in its crudest and most violent form, are highly unlikely to see themselves as part of its larger, transnational form. In contrast, rather than being diminished, local belongings may become even stronger points of reference for the collective identities of migrants and refugees outside their homeland. Thus, trans–localism rather than transnationalism may be a more appropriate paradigm for understanding the displacement and emplacement of forced migrants. As a methodological, epistemological and ontological approach complementing transnationalism, trans–localism does not advocate for an essentialist, static view of the relationship between people, place, identity and mobility. Rather, it confirms the dynamism and fluidity of the complex relationships in which identity of place as a set of embodied practices transcends its original geographical location and becomes polylocal or trans–local (Halilovich 2011; 2012). Trans–local groups like those from Sarajevo, Zvornik and Višegrad are not only concerned with nurturing nostalgia for the home lost and with the preservation of their distinct local cultures. There are also economic, charitable and even political activities that justify their existence and strengthen the trans–local communities. Charitable and fundraising events for a ‘good cause’ back home or in diaspora are the most widespread non–profit activities of trans–local groups. For instance, fundraising events are organised for building communal projects in Bosnia—like a mosque in Višegrad or a paved road in Kozluk near Zvornik—supporting individuals and families affected by illness or hardship both in Bosnia and Austria, providing material support for ‘local’ students, and similar humanitarian causes. In terms of political activism, they act as lobbying and pressure groups taking up the issues of war crimes, and return to and rebuilding of their ‘former’ hometowns into the public domain both in Austria and Bosnia. While WUS represents an exemplar of how the social and cultural capital of Bosnian Austrians was turned into a successful Austrian–Bosnian business, implementing programs that foster development, democratisation and reconciliation in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia, many other sectors have benefited from the economic potential of Bosnian refugees. These, among others, include the financial sector, with Austrian banks having a significant share in the banking in Bosnia. Many Bosnian Austrians found their employment niche in such industries. Other Austrian citizens of non–Bosnian background have also had a prominent role in the economic development and reconstruction programs of BiH, including, for instance, two High Representatives and many other Austrians holding key positions in leading international organisations present in BiH—such as the UNDP and the European Commission.13 Conclusion 13

Austrian professionals and administrators have created an expatriate community in Sarajevo and we could even talk about an emerging group of ‘Austrian Bosnians’ in Sarajevo.

The three refugee groups described in the paper demonstrate that researching the complexities affecting people on the move as well as their emplacement at new destinations cannot be solely reduced to theoretical and methodological paradigms of transnationalims and the so called ‘ethno gaze’. Displaced groups from Bosnia who settled in Austria primarily follow the patterns that are local, rather than national, transnational or even ethnic and religious. Moreover, some of the settlement patterns, like those of Sarajevans in Graz, run along professional and generational lines. All this suggests that it is impossible to talk about some standardised ‘refugee pattern’ as, like any other migrant groups, people who experience forced displacement do not remain in a stage of permanent liminality. Their ‘migration’ into new identities, even if these identities are only transitory—from refugees to migrants to citizens of new countries or to returnees—is often founded on the remnants of their earlier place–based identities and locally–embedded social networks. Such communities are not only socially (re–)constructed at the points of migration, but also increasingly (re)imagined and (re)imaged beyond real space, in the realm of cyber space. Thus in order to capture the socio–cultural complexities of displacement and emplacement, conventional research approaches, like multi–sited ethnography, need to be expanded to include the worldwide web and the so called 2.0 web tools generating and disseminating user–generated content. Even though refugees continue to represent ‘unwanted immigrants’ in many receiving countries, a large wave of forced migration, like the one seen during the war in Bosnia, will always include people with a variety of skills, resilience and resourcefulness—or what counts as ‘integration potential’ in countries of immigration. If applying the theoretical concept of social capital to forced migrants from Bosnia, it can be argued that by maintaining and increasing their human, cultural and social capital, the ‘former’ Bosnian refugees now Austrian citizens have been able to bypass the migrants’ first generation gap and to positively contribute to both their adopted country as well as to affect the socio–economic and political reconstruction of their original homeland; thus becoming more than just a symbolic bridge between the two countries. This in itself challenges the ideas of ‘brain drain’ and ‘brain gain’ as an integral part of migration, often seen as a linear one–way process, involving a losing country (of emigration) and a benefiting country (of immigration). Finally, the paper advocates for the adoption of ‘hyphenated identities’, like ‘Bosnian–Austrian’, as a recognition of migrants’ dual, or multiple, belongings and loyalties that should not be perceived as ‘failed integration’ but the exact opposite of this belief which is entrenched in countries like Austria, across Europe and more widely. References Al–Ali, N., Black, R. and Koser, K. 2001, ‘Refugees and transnationalism: the experience of Bosnians and Eritreans in Europe’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 27(4), pp. 615–635. 17

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