Whether he likes it or not, former Croatian President Stipe Mesic will officially be declared an honorary citizen of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. That was the city council's decision on February 28 despite Mesic's public statement that he would not accept the honor.
What rankles with Mesic are the circumstances that led to the decision, following an embarrassing about-face by the local authorities.
This year, the honorary citizenship was meant to have been given to award-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. The seven-member selection commission had voted unanimously to back the nomination, put forward by Buybook, the Sarajevo publisher of the Bosnian translations of the Nobel laureate's books.
However, the vote was repeated two weeks later and this time resulted in 4-3 opposition to the proposal. On second thought, the commission reasoned, Pamuk "had not done much for the city of Sarajevo."
The award is given annually, and foreign nationals are eligible if they are deemed to have contributed to Sarajevo's advancement, "the improvement of international relations, and the values of solidarity, democracy, humanitarianism, and mutual tolerance." Previous recipients include Austrian politician Valentin Inzko, currently the high representative for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and U.S. journalist Christiane Amanpour.
Damir Uzunovic, the owner and director of Buybook and the original proponent of the idea to honor Pamuk, sees the city council's reversal of its decision as driven by fear of angering an increasingly assertive Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"It's clear that the members of the commission wished to spare the current Turkish regime a decision that would have been contrary to its wishes," he told RFE/RL's Balkan Service.
Others saw it as a local power play, a way to show precisely who's in charge.
"It's not about Orhan Pamuk's standing in Turkey, or the popularity of his works; it's a signal to the people of Bosnia, not Turkey or the Turkish government," said Nedzad Ibrahimovic, a philosophy professor from Tuzla, northeast of Sarajevo. "If someone is going to be honored, and the world media report on that impending award, and suddenly that decision is reversed, the message to Bosnian citizens is clear: If we can prevent you from honoring Pamuk, we can also stop you from thinking with your own head."
The withdrawal of the honor will not hurt Pamuk, Ibrahimovic said, but is definitely Sarajevo's loss. "It's simply a shame. It's embarrassing to read about it in the media," he said on RFE/RL's Balkan Service's Most program.
The president of the Bosnian PEN Center, Goran Simic, also reacted to the Sarajevo authorities' decision, issuing a "sincere apology to Orhan Pamuk" in the name of the country's writers "for the deep state of xenophobia that plagues Bosnia."
"It would have been an honor to call Pamuk a fellow citizen, as someone who has spoken out on the Armenian genocide, and who, in his literary works drawing on different periods of his own country's history, has addressed the suppression of the freedom of speech by those in power. It would have been an honor to host one of the most renowned and most read contemporary authors, as a symbol of multicultural Sarajevo and Bosnia, in the same way in which we were proud to honor American writer Susan Sontag," Simic said in his statement, adding that the city council had "brought shame" to Sarajevo with its reversal of the decision to honor Pamuk.
The decision was also described as "disastrous and shameful" by Bosnian writer Ivan Lovric. "Actions like these are proper to regimes that we characterize as repressive, closed, and undemocratic," Lovric wrote on his blog.
He pointed to the fact that a municipal commission had reached this decision to deny Pamuk honorary citizenship "in the name of a city and its citizens, many of whom had lived through its siege (1992-95), defending the city's multiethnic character, had participated in the organization of a Winter Olympics (1984), and who firmly believe that Sarajevo is an open city."
According to Lovric, the council's decision made the city seem "small and provincial."
Bosnian director Dino Mustafic sees the actions of the city authorities as an act of self-censorship and subservience to the Turkish government.
"The explanation given [about Pamuk having 'not done much for Sarajevo'] is absurd and senseless. He is a Nobel prizewinner, one of the greatest living writers, and his contribution to the global cultural heritage is indisputable. There wasn't even any direct pressure from Turkey. Merely a desire to avoid upsetting the sultan in Ankara," Mustafic told RFE/RL's Balkan Service.
Following the public outcry, Sarajevo Mayor Abdulah Skaka issued a statement defending the decision to confer honorary citizenship to Mesic, arguing that the proposal to honor Pamuk did not secure a majority of votes; it was therefore not a question of taking the award away from Pamuk to give it to someone else.
However, Mesic himself was left unimpressed, and declined the honor. "A writer and a politician simply cannot be in the same competition. It's clearly a political decision, and I did not want to be a part of it. I am still a friend of Sarajevo and Bosnia, but I cannot participate in something like this," he said.
Despite the protestations from city hall, with their change of heart the Sarajevo authorities have angered not only those who consider Pamuk a worthy champion of the civilizational values that the city itself symbolized during its siege, but also the man they chose to honor instead. An own goal, it seems, no matter how one looks at it.
