‘Not Welcome at the Holiday Inn’: How a Sarajevan Hotel Influenced Geo-politics

ABSTRACT

During the reporting of the 1992–95 Bosnian War, the bright yellow Holiday Inn played host to many of the most renowned characters involved in documenting, resolving and perpetuating the conflict. It provided the visual background for numerous television broadcasts, provided the infrastructure to send the reports around the world via satellite and created the environment to negotiate agreements and hold conferences and briefings. But the building has never been regarded as anything more than a neutral or slightly bizarre backdrop to the events that took place there before, during and after the conflict. Closer examination reveals three ways in which the hotel needs to be considered as co-constitutive of the conflict: (1) in the conflict geography and conflict epistemology; (2) in the forging of a common international subjectivity; and (3) as a material, symbolic and informational resource. Taken together, this also contributes to considerations of how the built environment is an integral part of understandings of contemporary conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Hotels
• materiality
• conflict
• urbicide
• architecture
• built environment
• liminality

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks to Ivan Štraus, Lejla Kresevljakovic and all those who took the time to speak with me with regard to their experiences with the Hotel Holiday Inn. Thanks to Sara Fregonese, Klaus Dodds and Anna Stavrianakis for their helpful comments on the draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author/editor.

Notes on Contributor

Lisa Smirl was Lecturer in International Security in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex 2009-2012. Prior to that, she wrote her PhD at the University Cambridge, after six years working for the UN in Bratislava, Kigali and New York. She died in early 2013. Her book, Spaces of Aid. How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism, was published posthumously by Zed Books in 2015.

Notes

1. Interview, 25 May 2008, Dili, East Timor.

2. Hoffman's (2005) ‘radical ethnography’ of the Brookfield's hotel in Sierra Leone remaining a rare exception.

3. Because of the sensitivity surrounding the hotel—both during and after the war—the names of most of my informants have been removed.

4. Interview, anon, Chamber of Commerce

5. http://realtravel.com/h-236674-sarajevo_hotel_inn_sarajevo (accessed 23 January 2011). The precise number of rooms is not easy to assess. Different documents and sources say different things at different times.

6.  Interview, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

7. Interview, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

8. Simpson is somewhat misleading here as the Jewish cemetery is more than ‘a few hundred yards away’ according to the comments of an anonymous manuscript reviewer.

9. Interview, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

10. Interview, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

11. Interview, Chamber of Economy Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

12. Interview, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

13. Interview, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

14. Interview 17 June 2010 and http://www.rethink-dispatches.com/essays/paul-marchand-1962-2009/ (accessed 8 April 2011).

15. http://www.rethink-dispatches.com/essays/paul-marchand-1962-2009/ (accessed 8 April 2011).

16. Interview.

17. Interview, Štraus.

18. Interview.

19.  Interview with Chamber of Economy, Sarajevo, 17 June 2010.

20. It was used for many different things over the years. In March 1992, the very same Holiday Inn hosted the Congress of Serbian Intellectuals (about 500 participants) organized by SDS, at which there was ‘open talk of ethnic maps for partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and letter of Dobrica Ćosić is read out [sic] with proposal that Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats separate and redraw borders “so that we may eliminate the reasons for hating and killing each other”’. Plavšić was, in 2001, sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes. She was released from jail in 2009.

21. Of course, not all residents of Sarajevo would have access to ‘Western’ news channels. Štraus, in his wartime journal, describing his sickened amazement at the anti-Muslim propaganda being televised from Belgrade and Pale (Štraus 1994).

22. The length of the siege is also a potentially important factor.