SARAJEVO (AP) ― Bosnia’s oldest and most prestigious cultural institutions have begun closing their doors one after another, thanks to long-standing disputes among politicians from its three ethnic groups and dwindling state funding.
In 2011, the seven institutions ― among them the 125-year-old National Museum whose collection includes the famed 600-year-old Jewish manuscript known as the Sarajevo Haggadah ― received virtually no funding from authorities in the Balkan nation and can no longer finance their work or even cover their utility bills.
The National Library is due to close its doors Friday, just days after the Historical Museum closed. The National Gallery shut down last summer, while the National Museum expects to close piece by piece in coming weeks after its power supply is cut off over unpaid bills.
“By no will of our own, we have found ourselves in the middle of a political battle and have become a political problem,’’ National Museum director Adnan Busuladzic told the Associated Press.
A main reason for the closings is the failure by political leaders of the country’s Serb, Croat and Bosniak peoples to agree on what to do with Bosnia’s shared historical and cultural heritage, and whether to even preserve it.
Founded by Bosnian state authorities at different stages of the country’s turbulent history, the top seven cultural institutions were left without a guardian at the end of Bosnia’s 1992-95 inter-ethnic war.
Under the Dayton peace agreement that ended the conflict, Bosnia was split along ethnic lines into two semi-autonomous parts linked by a weak central government.
The central government has no ministry of culture and no obligation to provide permanent funding for the institutions that are the custodians of the country’s national heritage, including precious medieval manuscripts, religious relicts, and natural history artifacts.
Bosnian Serbs, in particular, oppose giving the central government control over the cultural sites, with their leaders often insisting that Bosnia is an artificial state and that each of the country’s ethnic groups has its own heritage.
Bosniaks, meanwhile, insist that safeguarding the shared history of the Bosnian people is one way to keep the country unified instead of permanently splitting it the way many Bosnian Serbs would want.
The culture minister of the country’s Bosniak-Croat part, Salmir Kaplan, pledged late Thursday that his government will provide funding to cover the unpaid utility bills of the National Museum. But Kaplan admitted that was just a temporary solution.
So far, the national institutions have been financed through often insufficient ad-hoc grants from different layers of government. For the past decade, most of the scarce funding that had allowed them to stay open while cutting down on staff and operational costs came from the reserves of the central budget.
