No Man's Land and the Comedy of Observers

Two soldiers are stuck in a trench between the lines. One Bosniak, one Serb. A third man is lying on a bouncing mine: if he moves, everyone dies.

The first thing Ciki and Nino do when they realize they’re stuck together is threaten each other. The second thing they do is share a cigarette. The third thing is argue about who started the war. Then they help each other. Then they nearly kill each other again. The oscillation is the entire film and, I think, the entire point.

Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land (2001) is usually described as an anti-war comedy about the failure of international intervention. I think it’s about something more specific: what happens when groupthink meets the individual. Ciki and Nino can’t sustain their enmity face to face. They keep defaulting to being normal with each other. The hatred only works at a distance, at the level of “Serbs” and “Bosniaks” as categories. In the trench, they’re just two guys who speak the same language and know the same people.

The Same Country

The thing I kept thinking about while watching is how recent the division was. These aren’t ancient enemies from separate civilizations. Yugoslavia was a functioning multinational state with real integration. Intermarriage rates in Bosnia were significant. The 1984 Winter Olympics were held in Sarajevo. The Yugoslav People’s Army, the JNA, was deliberately multi-ethnic: officers rotated across republics, units mixed, the whole structure designed to prevent exactly the kind of fracture that happened eight years later.

Ciki and Nino reflect this. They speak the same language. They know the same references. There’s a moment where they realize they almost certainly know the same girl. The trench between them is a recent invention. Everything else about them is shared.

The mine under Cera is a PROM-1. Yugoslav manufacture. I looked it up after watching. Bounding fragmentation mine, launches a meter into the air before detonating, shrapnel at chest height. Built by the country all three of them used to share. The mine doesn’t know which side it’s on because there weren’t sides when it was made.

Manufactured Enmity

The standard narrative about the Bosnian War involves “ancient hatreds” boiling over after Tito’s death. I’ve been reading around this and I don’t think it holds up. The hatreds weren’t ancient, or rather, they were ancient and also inoperable for decades. What changed wasn’t that people remembered they hated each other. What changed was that the hatred was deliberately reactivated from above.

The violence was organized, not spontaneous. Paramilitary groups like Arkan’s Tigers were deployed to terrorize mixed communities. The point wasn’t to win battles. It was to make coexistence impossible. Burn a few houses in a mixed village. The remaining residents flee. The community that existed there is gone. You can’t reconstruct coexistence after the coexisters have been expelled or killed.

This is what the film captures without ever stating it directly. The groupthink required for the war to work had to be manufactured because people like Ciki and Nino weren’t naturally inclined to kill each other. Left alone in a trench, they share cigarettes and argue about girls. The categories “Bosniak” and “Serb” only produce violence when there’s an institutional structure enforcing them: armies, paramilitaries, propaganda, chain of command. The trench strips all of that away and what’s left is two people who have far more in common than not.

Milosevic needed paramilitaries precisely because ordinary people wouldn’t do it on their own. That’s the thing the “ancient hatreds” narrative obscures. The hatred had to be built. It was a project, not an eruption.

The Observers

Then there’s everyone outside the trench.

The UN peacekeepers want to help but need authorization. The commander wants to avoid an incident. The journalist broadcasts the situation, which forces action, which produces a circus, which resolves nothing. Each layer of observer adds another layer of paralysis.

Sergeant Marchand, the French peacekeeper, is the only person who tries to do something. He drives to the trench. He talks to the soldiers. He calls for a bomb disposal team. At every step he’s blocked by his chain of command. The mandate doesn’t cover this. Pull back.

I found myself laughing at these scenes. The bureaucratic language is absurd because the situation is absurd. A man is lying on a mine and the institutional response is to check the mandate. But then I started reading about UNPROFOR’s actual mandate and the comedy stopped being funny. “Safe areas” that weren’t defended. Protection forces that couldn’t use force. Srebrenica was a UN-designated safe area. Dutch peacekeepers were there when Mladic arrived in July 1995. They requested air support. It was denied, delayed, denied again. 8,000 men and boys were killed.

The film’s comedy comes from the gap between what everyone can see and what anyone is authorized to do. That gap is real. It killed people.

The Trench as the War in Miniature

What I think Tanovic is doing, and why the film works better than most anti-war films, is compressing the entire structure of the conflict into one location. The trench contains everything:

The shared humanity that had to be erased for the war to happen (Ciki and Nino defaulting to being normal with each other). The manufactured enmity that keeps reasserting itself (they pick up their guns again, because the war is still there even if the reasons for it dissolve up close). The Yugoslav infrastructure that became the mechanism of its own destruction (the PROM-1 under Cera). And the international community that watches, documents, and leaves.

The bobsled track from the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics was used as an artillery position during the siege. I don’t know what to do with that fact except put it next to the PROM-1 and let them sit together. A country builds an Olympic venue and a bounding mine. Eight years later, one is used to kill the people who cheered at the other.

The Last Shot

The UN declares the situation resolved. The bomb disposal expert says the mine can’t be defused. Everyone leaves. The cameras leave. The soldiers leave. Cera is left alone in the trench, on the mine, alive, in a wide shot that holds for a long time.

Tanovic served in the Bosnian Army. He shot documentary footage during the siege of Sarajevo. He knows what it looks like when institutions decide a problem is unsolvable and move on.

The Dayton Agreement ended the war by freezing the ethnic cleansing in place. The Republika Srpska, the entity created through genocide and displacement, was recognized as part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Karadzic wasn’t arrested until 2008. Mladic until 2011.

The situation was declared resolved. Cera is still on the mine.

Notes

• The 1984 Sarajevo Olympics bobsled track on Trebevic mountain is still there, covered in graffiti. It was used as a firing position during the siege.
• Tanovic’s first feature. Beat Amelie for the Academy Award in 2002.
• The PROM-1 is Yugoslav People’s Army standard issue. All sides in the Bosnian War used JNA equipment, because all sides were, organizationally, fragments of the same army.
• I want to read more about intermarriage rates in pre-war Sarajevo. The numbers I’ve seen vary but consistently suggest a city where ethnic categories were background noise, not identity.
• Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell covers the international response. David Rieff’s Slaughterhouse is angrier and more specific.
• Compare to Underground (Kusturica, 1995): similar absurdist comedy, but Kusturica’s politics are murkier. Tanovic is more precise about who failed and how.