Art Funding Bolsters Bosnia’s Ethnic Divisions

Navigating the maze of state arts and culture funding departments in post-war Bosnia requires uncommon determination. Be prepared to knock on many doors and still come away empty-handed.

Unless, that is, you are happy to capitalise on your ethnic identity. Ensure your project has a definite Bosniak, Serb or Croat flavour and you might just have found a shortcut to a cash injection.

In a country devastated by inter-ethnic fighting during the 90s, arts and culture funding seems designed to reinforce ethnic divisions at the expense of supporting the highly contentious notion of a national identity.

“Most of the mainstream cultural production in Bosnia has the role of legitimising the process of constructing separate ethnic identities and to confirm the theory that they [different ethnic groups] cannot function together,” says Aida Kalender, a Bosnian cultural policy and arts management specialist.

“Culture spending decisions are usually made on an ad hoc basis and depend on the preferences of individual ministers.”

In a country with a population of around four million, there are no less than 13 different culture departments and ministries operating to hugely different agendas.

This extraordinary number of state arts and heritage departments is a direct result of the highly complex, multi-layered system of government introduced by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement which ended the country’s three-and-a-half-year war.

Under Dayton, Bosnia was split into two largely autonomous entities – the Serb-majority Republika Srpska and the Bosniak and Croat-dominated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Fractured funding

The central government – which links the two entities - provides a small amount of funding to cultural institutions, such as national museums, through its civil affairs ministry. However, it is not obliged to fund particular institutions and does not have sufficient resources or the authority to support national projects.

Indeed, the central government’s key goal is to ensure money earmarked for arts and culture is divided equally between ethnic groups, often at the expense of national – even international – events and institutions.

Both the Serb and Bosniak-Croat entities have their own government and individual arts and culture ministries. The Bosniak-Croat region is further divided into ten separate cantons – each with its own local government and individual culture department.

This fracturing of arts and culture funding within both entities makes it “impossible to secure high-quality cultural events,” says Goran Dujkovic, director of an animated film festival in Banja Luka, the de facto capital city of Republika Srpska.

Nihad Kresevljakovic, director of Sarajevo’s annual Small Experimental Stage Theatre Festival (MESS), agrees.

“Even if your project does not have an ethnicity, they assign one to you. I guess we are considered Bosniak because we are based in Sarajevo,” he says. 

According to Kresevljakovic, the fact that MESS productions are staged across Bosnia and its members were the first to initiate co-productions with colleagues throughout the former Yugoslavia has not helped to remove this “ethnic label”.

MESS is the longest-running southeast European festival and will celebrate its 50th anniversary this October. Some of the world’s leading theatre artists, including American avant-garde stage director and playwright Robert Wilson and Belgian dramatist Jan Lauwers, feature in this year’s programme.

Despite this, MESS might receive the same amount of state funding as an amateur performance troupe of another ethnicity.

In 2007, when MESS performers included the legendary Denmark-based director Eugenio Barba and his company Odin Teatret, the festival organisers received 2,500 euro from the state budget. Exactly the same amount of money given to a small Serb folk dance outfit.

However, MESS is comparatively well off given it qualifies for canton-level grants – even if that funding is dramatically lower than might be expected.

‘Collateral damage’

The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina is in Sarajevo but, as a national cultural institution in a country that does not have a national arts and culture ministry, it does not ‘belong’ to either of the largely autonomous entities.

“We are the collateral damage of different political approaches to shared cultural heritage,” says Adnan Busuladzic, the museum’s director.

Founded in 1888, the museum houses the country’s most important archaeological and ethnological artefacts. It is unable to secure permanent state funding and relies, instead, on ad hoc grants from the civil affairs ministry.

This year, the museum got 430,000 euro from the ministry – or around two thirds of the money Busuladzic says he needs to adequately maintain the collection. He says next year the federal government “may decide to give us as little as 10,000 convertible marks [5,000 euro]”.

“It’s a pity that nobody cares. After all, the heritage we are keeping here is the heritage of this country, but also of its individual ethnic groups,” Busuladzic says, pointing to the museum’s extensive collection of traditional Bosniak, Serb and Croat dress.

A spokeswoman for the civil affairs ministry said it recognised the importance of institutions like the national museum and is “helping as much as we can”.

“It depends on available funding… we never know how much money will be made available in the state budget for this purpose,” she added.

Genuinely supporting an independent cultural scene that is not solely devoted to underpinning separate ethnic identities is vital if the country is to have a lively, relevant and critical cultural life, says independent arts and culture management specialist Kalender.

She warns that unless Bosnia acts to de-politicise its arts and culture funding, artists portraying - and their audiences seeking - a cosmopolitan cultural life outside the boundaries of particular ethnic groups will continue to be neglected and ignored.