In former Yugoslavia all manner of ethnic, religious, and cultural minorities were fully empowered—with guns.
I watched as Serbian Chetnik nationalists tried to take the village of Golubic from Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims. The unspellables were shooting the unpronounceables.
I was in a slit trench on a hill behind Bosnian lines. Golubic is—or was—a trim group of tile-roofed stucco houses set in little gardens along the Una River. A rail line ran beside the riverbank, with engine and freight cars blown up on the tracks. The Una was the shade of blue that children color rivers, and its waters were speckled with rapids like dabs of white enamel. The afternoon was without wind or cloud. No leaf turned or branch swayed along Golubic’s tidy lanes. The place seemed to be a miniature of itself, and the war, a war on a model-train layout.
I had a perfect view of the fighting, except there was nothing to see. High-power weapons and high-speed fire scatter modern soldiers, and camouflage and smokeless explosives render those soldiers invisible. If artists still painted pictures of battles, a battle would look like an ordinary landscape with small pockmarks and some large, charred holes. Nor is there “din of battle” anymore. No trumpet calls or rallying cries or even shouts and screams could be heard in Golubic, just desultory gunfire. The putter of a machine gun would echo between the house walls. Then a pause. Then some answering thumps and pops. The Serbian artillery was a couple miles away. I could hear it go off. Later I’d hear an explosion, but usually I couldn’t see where. Sometimes a shell would whistle overhead. Now and then a puff of dust would rise in the valley but with the sound of impact so delayed that cause and effect seemed disconnected. A few rifle shots were coming in my direction, I guess. Flying bullets don’t, in reality, make noise. Though once in a great while I’d hear the adventure-movie sound of a ricochet in the rocks nearby.
Golubic is in a corner of northwest Bosnia known as the “Bihac Pocket,” a Muslim enclave some forty-five miles in circumference containing 320,000 people who were being shelled by Serbs. To the east and south of Bihac were the rebellious Bosnian Serbs who controlled two-thirds of Bosnia. To the west and north were the rebellious Croatian Serbs who controlled one-third of Croatia. The Muslims were surrounded. But, then, so were the Serbs. Beyond the Croatian Serbs were Croatian Croatians, and beyond the Bosnian Serbs were more Bosnian Muslims. Thus it was across the map of ex-Yugoslavia: concentric circles of combat, murder, and rapine.
I drove to Bihac with London Times reporter Ed Gorman, a television reporter I’ll call Tom Lamson, and a Croatian translator, Kadi, who pretended to be Serbian when we were stopped by Serbian soldiers. It was easy for Kadi to pretend to be Serbian because Serbs and Croats are so much alike that they can only tell each other apart by religion. And most of them aren’t religious. So the difference between Serbs and Croats is that the Serbs don’t go to Eastern Orthodox services and the Croats don’t attend Mass. And the difference between Serbs and Muslims is that five times a day the Muslims don’t pray to Mecca.
On the fifty-mile drive from Croatian-held territory into Bihac five kinds of armies had set up seven checkpoints. In the very middle of these was the United Nations Protection Force, UNPROFOR. Most UNPROFOR troops come from nations that don’t normally teach lessons in civic order to Europe—Jordan and Nigeria, for example. In this particular sector the UN soldiers were from Czechoslovakia, which at that time was itself disintegrating. The Czechoslovaks doubtless wished to be home shooting each other instead of here unable to shoot anyone. UN peacekeepers aren’t allowed to fire their weapons unless they come under an attack so severe that they’re probably already dead. What UNPROFOR is protecting isn’t clear. Certainly not itself. The UN checkpoint was on a hill with no cover, exposed in every direction and within a Daisy air-rifle shot of both Muslims and Serbs. The Czechs had AK-47s and a formidable-looking armored car. But their helmets were baby blue and the armored car was painted toilet-bowl white.
Inside Bihac was another UN group, a six-man military observer team. The officer in charge was testy. He’d been under fire for seven weeks. “It’s been quiet today,” he said. There was an explosion several blocks away. “Right on cue,” said the officer. We tried to ask him about the strategy of the civil war. Were the Serbs trying to occupy Bihac or neutralize it? Was the siege a bargaining ploy, something to be given up so Europe would turn a Neville Chamberlain eye on a partitioning of Bosnia? Would the Bosnians … “I’ve given up trying to figure out why. I just report,” said the officer. The UN observer team’s mission in Bihac was to talk to the Serbs by radio phone and arrange a cease-fire, the officer said. But the Serbs weren’t returning his calls. “Sitting here, getting shelled, waiting for the phone to ring,” he said, “that about sums up our situation.” The observers had a logbook recording the assaults, bombings, and artillery attacks on the area. Each page was ruled in vertical columns: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, DAMAGE, CASUALTIES. The column headed ACTION TAKEN BY THE UN was empty.
Bihac proper has a population of forty-five thousand, plus refugees. Farms butt against the business district, and beyond the farms is a spread of outlying villages such as Golubic, three miles away. The villages and the town have yet to grow together in modern suburban sprawl. Bihac looks cute to American eyes, as if built in the three-quarters scale of Disneyland’s Main Street. The architecture is worth a picture postcard—vaguely antique and Palladian, though not much of it predates New York’s Museum of Natural History. The atmosphere is generalized European. Bihac could be in Austria or Bavaria or Tuscany or, for that matter, in the new Euro Disney theme park in France. The mosque seemed out of place. So did the artillery damage.
The civilian response to the shelling in Bihac was appealingly civilian. All the windows in the center of town were sandbagged, but the sandbags were made from pillowcases in paisleys and plaids and bold geometric prints. A protective barrier around the Bihac Hotel had been built out of old refrigerators filled with sand.
Bihac had been under siege since April. Casualties among civilians had been fairly light to date: 315 dead and 1,500 wounded. The farmers in the Una valley were still getting in crops. Factories still operated. Red Cross and UN relief convoys were making it through. Everybody in Bihac said Bihac couldn’t survive the winter, but nobody talked about surrendering. All the shade trees had been girdled and would be dead and ready to cut for firewood by the first snowfall. A little bit of ammunition was arriving on night flights from Croatia. Mortar shells were being manufactured in local machine shops using shotgun shells for detonators and explosives scavenged from bombs left behind by the Yugoslavian air force. The land mines also looked homemade—rusty metal objects the shape of Mallomars and the size of hubcaps with precarious spring-mounted trigger mechanisms on top. The Bosnian soldiers set rows of these across the highways. To let our car pass they would boot the mines aside with a nonchalance combining kick-the-can with kick-the-bucket.
Gorman, Lamson, and I drove to the outskirts of Golubic. A few shells were falling, but it was hard to say how close. The locals weren’t diving under things. We had flak vests. But wearing a flak vest only makes you realize how much more there is to vestments than a vest. The areas of my body that I like best weren’t covered at all. I wanted flak briefs and flak mittens and flak socks and a flak bag to stick my head into.
A Bosnian soldier led us up a farm road to the trench above the fighting. He was wearing a Yugoslav National Army uniform with a little blue ribbon tied to his left epaulette to show he was in the Bosnian forces. The road ran along a ridgeline behind a hedgerow. The Serbs held the other side of the valley. Years ago TITO had been spelled out in painted rocks on the hill over there. The enormous letters were still faintly visible. The four of us trotted in a crouch—the soldier nimbly, the three reporters less so and making the trumpeting breath noises of chain smokers. Running in a flak vest is like going for a jog with your mattress box spring. The vest weighs thirty pounds and is made of solid Kevlar plates which ring like dinner dishes when rapped with your knuckles. The vest front is formed in one smooth carapace and is not meant to be worn over a whiskey gut. I know why there are no fat turtles.
Every couple hundred yards there was a gap in the hedge, and here we’d have to run across one at a time. We’d pull up in a crowd before the opening, politely trying not to be the third or fourth to go. The theory is that snipers don’t see the first two runners in time to shoot.
It’s not a good idea for a journalist to wear khaki pseudo-military journalist clothes in a war zone. You look too much like something that’s supposed to be shot, such as a journalist. On the other hand, white ducks and a madras shirt catch the eye and I wish I’d packed my duck-hunting camo duds.
Gorman, Lamson, and I spent all afternoon in the slit trench, peering through the shrubbery at the indiscernible mayhem in Golubic. At one point a haystack caught fire. Later a couple of stray pigs wandered down a street. And an hour or two after that, in the middle of a fusillade, a farmer left his house and ambled over to his barn. Except for various explosions, this is all we saw. But we weren’t bored. Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to more worthwhile journalism.
We spent the night at the fridge-fortified hotel. It was a splendid fall evening with amber light on the horizon blending off into cobalt blue around a waning moon and air as cool as clean sheets (something the hotel didn’t have). We stood outside drinking the local beer, leaning against the refrigerators, and listening to the shells hit around town. The cars on the street drove by fast, keeping their lights off so as not to attract snipers. When it was dark we went into the hotel bar and ate goulash by candlelight. “When there’s electricity, there’s no water,” said the waitress, “and when there’s water, there’s no electricity.” We commiserated. Life must be very difficult. “It’s hard to make espresso,” she said.
Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, is even more of an ordinary European place than Bihac. The driving is just as frantic but the cars aren’t being shot at. The service is mediocre but due to socialism, not siege. There is an old town of regulation charm, a hilltop cathedral inspiring the standard awe, and the usual handsome public square with a statue of a brave dead guy where you’d expect it to be.
You don’t see many soldiers in Zagreb, not as many as you saw in peacetime Eastern Europe under communism. Some of the snapshots displayed in the instant-photo store windows are from the front—groups of men arm in arm next to something blown up. A few buildings have their windows X-ed with masking tape as though giants had been playing tic-tac-toe. At the newsstands the gun magazines are on the front racks. Those are all the signs of war in Zagreb, and the fighting is only thirty miles away. Maybe Europeans have greater sangfroid than Americans. But there’s a lot of fighting in Detroit and things are quiet in Bloomfield Hills.
In the evening everyone goes to the cafés that line the steep streets near the cathedral. The cafés are chic. Numerous young men of military age were sitting around in fancy jeans and sneakers. I asked Kadi the translator whether these guys felt any duty to join the Croatian army. “No,” she said.
It is a peculiar feature of the contemporary era that a large portion of our horrors are optional. A couple of days later I was on the Bosnian border in Slavonski Brod, a Croatian city being shelled by the Serbs. I was in the Arcade Bar drinking in the middle of the day with the twenty-six-year-old owner, Vinko. A lean-to made of timbers as thick as railroad ties shielded the front window. Vinko wore a diamond stud in his left ear and pants with enough pleats to make a concertina. Some music more current than I am was on the stereo. “War makes no sense,” said Vinko.
“There’s no pressure on young men to go fight,” said a girl at the bar.
“I’d go fight if everyone else would go,” Vinko said.
I’d talked to a soldier in Bihac, a captain in the Bosnian army who was from Serbia and not Muslim. He had been in the Yugoslav Federal Army. He said he sat out the war in Slovenia and sat out the war in Croatia and sat out the first part of the war in Bosnia “until Bosnians decided if Bosnia was just for Muslims. When they said it was for everybody who would fight, I joined.” Then he told a virulently anti-Gypsy joke.
As the war repels a certain number of Yugoslavs, so it attracts a certain number of foreigners. The government press office in Zagreb was full of chirpy volunteers from places like Cleveland, Ohio. College-age children of Croat emigrants, they were skinny, Gap-clad citizens of a 90210 planet in some other solar system than gory Balkan peasant feuds. Nonetheless they were willing to come back and help Yugoslavia destroy itself.
A blond Bosnian guerrilla fighter from Las Vegas seemed to live in the bar of my hotel. He wore steam-ironed battle dress with an ascot and a beret. His hair was combed into a ducktail. He told a lot of war stories, carried maps to illustrate them, and claimed he was about to lead a supply convoy into central Bosnia. He’d be leaving very soon, as quickly as possible, any day now. In the evenings I’d hear his voice above the tavern din, “Did you see me on Good Morning America?”
A freelance journalist cornered Gorman, Lamson, and myself one night. He’d been shot in the leg. In Sarajevo. Just a few days ago. “In these very jeans.” His Levi’s were, indeed, torn at the knee. He’d had quite a lot of other adventures in Sarajevo. And before that he’d been in Lebanon. He’d had his throat cut and been thrown down a well there. Or was it shot and pitched off a building?
Many of the other soi-disant journalists had had no previous experience at all. I met one photographer who was just out of college and on assignment for an avant-garde Swiss art magazine named NKKKK or XOX or some such. He’d driven his daddy’s car, alone, into Serbia, across Croatia, down into the middle of Bosnia, and back out again. He looked twelve, which is all I can think of to account for his not being entirely dead.
Mixed with the liars and greenhorns was the usual war-side crowd of UN bumf shufflers, international aid agency deadwood, and other people who tangle up humanitarian assistance and get in the way of charitable help, plus the shills for peace—Greens, Buddhist monks, members of U.S. congressional fact-finding missions, and, of all things, an Iranian human rights group.
There’s another kind of person who comes to a war, though not often enough. Ed Gorman and I met him at a UN checkpoint, standing beside a tractor-trailer with vast red crosses painted on the side. His name was Mick Rhodes and he was waiting for some fighting on the highway to end so he could deliver a load of food and medical supplies to beleaguered Muslims. Rhodes was a Yorkshireman, a long-haul truck driver by trade, as wide as he was high and with a serious belly. He had any number of tattoos, hair as short as Sinéad O’Connor’s, and, across the bridge of his nose, a scar shaped like the business end a broken pint mug. Mick Rhodes looked like a football hooligan. He’d been listening to BBC radio back in Yorkshire and heard an interview with a Yugoslav Red Cross official who said drivers were needed.
“They were asking for drivers to cross the lines,” said Mick, “because they can’t use their own guys. That’s why we’re all expats.” He motioned to some fellow drivers, every one of whom looked like he could clear the foreign fans from a European Cup match with a sidelong glance. Mick’s company had given him six months off, and here he was. “I’m away from home ten weeks at a time normally,” he said. “The only difference here is that this time I’m getting shot at as well.” I asked him which was worse, that or the road traffic in Turkey. “Turkish traffic,” he said. He had a wife and six kids at home. His wife was a bit nervous but “knew this was what I wanted to do.”
“Have you ever done anything, any volunteer things, like this before?” asked Gorman.
Mick laughed. “No, not me. That is, not counting a few loads of donated food for Romanian orphans during the civil war there.”
Gorman and I went for a Sunday drive in the pokey Croatian countryside. The land north of Zagreb is hilly but well populated, as clean as Switzerland and as dull as Idaho. Prosperous, compact, and photogenic farms cover the slopes. Heidi and her dotty granddad could have sauntered out of any one of them, although nothing that interesting happened. Ed tried to make a case that the countryside was “eerily quiet.” But Ed has never been in Boise on a Sunday. Besides, the graffiti on the battlements of Ptuj castle belied him: LED ZEPPELIN, DOORS, JANIS JOPLIN.
We came to the border of Slovenia on a two-lane road in the middle of nothing. Here were a pair of prefabricated metal buildings of the cheaper kind, looking like they’d come from Ikea Home Border Posts. The border guard had to lock up his kiosk and crossing gate and unlock his office and sit down and do ten minutes of paperwork and three minutes of passport stamping to give me my Slovenian visa. Meanwhile, tractors and farm wagons took an unpaved detour around the checkpoint.
Inside Slovenia everything is identical to Croatia, except that the money and flags have the Slovenian coat of arms on them, as do posters, bumper stickers, baseball caps, and T-shirts. These appear to be manufactured by the same company that makes the sweatshirts, ashtrays, dish towels, scarves, and decorative ceramic wall plaques that have the Croatian coat of arms on them in Croatia. Ditto for Bosnia. And ditto, no doubt, for Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, and whatever other pieces this country is falling apart into. There may be a dark capitalist conspiracy behind the war in Yugoslavia but it’s led by the world’s tchotchke industry, not the international arms cartel.
We were back in Croatia twenty miles later and had to go through another complete set of border formalities and currency exchanges. Ed asked for imported beer at a roadside café. “Well,” said the proprietor, “Slovenian beer is imported now.” Next we stopped at Kumrovec, Tito’s birthplace. Kumrovec is a supposedly authentic restoration of a nineteenth-century Balkan farm village—a Marxist peasant hero’s version of Colonial Williamsburg. Nobody was there. A tour guide rushed out and showed us around in several languages we didn’t speak. The souvenir shop was closed. The guest book in the Tito homestead was nearly devoid of recent signatures. One man had printed, in large, slashed pen strokes, “VUKOVAR!”—a Croatian city where 264 people had been massacred by the Serbs. But was this inscription a message of Titoist resolve, a plea to Tito’s spirit, or a curse on Tito? At any rate, ex-Yugoslavians weren’t flocking to Kumrovec in gratitude for the thirty-five years that Tito spent keeping them from killing each other.
Tito kept Yugoslavs from killing each other by doing it for them. This is the same technique used by the Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Nazi Germans, and everyone else who’s had the misfortune to rule the Balkans. The locals have to be provided with an ample supply of new grievances, otherwise old grievances come to the fore. In Tito’s case, one of the new grievances was Tito.
Although Tito himself was of mixed Croat/Slovene/son-of-a-bitch background, his World War II partisan troops were mostly Serbs. In 1946, 100,000 anti-Tito Croat refugees were handed over to Tito by the British. Tito’s partisans then killed something between 40,000 and all of them, with the usual number of women, children, and old people included. Of course, the partisans had their reasons. The Croats, under raving nationalist Ante Pavelić, had established a Nazi puppet state in 1941 and killed as many as 350,000 Serbs.
Tito tried to eliminate Balkanization in the Balkans by proscribing the nationalism of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro while, at the same time, carefully apportioning the number of government and Communist Party jobs given to each nationality. Everyone was supposed to be a Yugoslavian (“South Slav”) and get together and sing one national anthem, “Hej, Sloveni” (“Hey, Slavs”). This worked about as well as you’d expect a country with a national anthem called “Hey, Slavs” to work.
Now, in the bookstores of ex-Yugoslavia, you can buy maps showing—with pie graphs, color lithography, and percentages worked out to the third decimal place—precisely how many people of each ethnic group live exactly where in this place that used to be a country. And in a Zagreb souvenir shop I saw an Ante Pavelić poster for sale, his portrait embellished with cartography showing the extensive boundaries of “Greater Croatia 1941–1945.”
If you look at a topographical map of the Balkans, you’ll see nothing that would serve as a natural boundary and no area—no plain, valley, coastline, or mountain fastness—coherent or extensive enough to put a boundary around. It was a confused region before nations or even people existed—not big enough to be a subcontinent, too big to be a peninsula, wrinkled, creased, puckered, the cellulite thigh of Europe.
To this bad hash of terrain came a worse omelet of population. The Balkans separate Asia from the West, divide the steppes from the Mediterranean, lie athwart the road from Baltic ice and snow to Adriatic topless beaches. Most of the roving bands, nomadic tribes, pillaging hordes, and migrating populations of Western history have passed through the Balkans. Every time they did, they’d tell their most objectionable members to go camp around the corner. Then the band, tribe, horde, or population would sneak off.
The Christians hate the Muslims because Christians were peons under the Ottomans. The Muslims hate the Christians because Muslims were pissants under the Communists. The Croats hate the Serbs for collaborating with the Communists the same way the Serbs hate the Croats for collaborating with the Nazis, and now the Bosnians hate the Montenegrins for collaborating with the Serbs. The Serbs hate the Albanians for coming to Yugoslavia. Everybody hates the Serbs because there are more of them than anyone else to hate and because, when Yugoslavia was created in 1918 (with the help of know-it-all American president Woodrow Wilson), the Serbs grabbed control of the government and army and haven’t let go yet. And everybody hates the Slovenes, too, for getting out of this civil war after only ten days.
Yugoslavia’s ethnic wounds are also, unfortunately, infected with idealism. There’s a surplus of intellectuals in the region. Yugoslavia, like the rest of Eastern Europe, has more artists, writers, and teachers than it has art, literature, or schools. In the resultant mental unemployment, idealism’s bad ideas flourish.
First, there is the bad idea of nationalism, that every little group of human twerps with its own slang, haircut, and pet name for God should have a country. Then there’s the bad idea of what the government of that country is supposed to do: kill everybody whose hair looks different. And finally there is the worst idea of all, a belief common to the benighted people in underdeveloped areas everywhere from the Bosnian hills to America’s universities: that nationhood is a zero-sum business. The thing that makes Croatia rich makes Serbia poor. But Japan is powerful without natural resources. Singapore is important without physical territory. And Luxembourg wields enormous influence and barely has people. Modern nations do not triumph by conquering territory or dominating strangers. War doesn’t work anymore. To become major players upon the international stage, Yugoslavians would be better off selling Yugos.
Between Zagreb and Belgrade the Serbs and Croats fought their war on the turnpike. It’s an ordinary-looking toll road with guardrails, median strips, service plazas, and long, straight lanes of pavement. The guardrails have been crushed by tanks, the median strips dug up for trenches, the service plazas reduced to ruins, and the pavement gashed with shell holes. The Croatians still give out toll tickets at one end of the road, but the tollbooths at the other have been blown to pieces. Ed Gorman and I drove ninety miles east on this thoroughfare to Slavonski Brod. There was no other traffic, just an occasional UN blue hat or Serbian Chetnik waving us over to check our papers. The highway runs down toward the Danube through the flat, open country of the Sava River valley. The scenery, except for tile roofs and Lombardy poplars, is exactly Midwestern.
Someday, maybe, the various constituent parts of America will become “empowered” the way Serbia and Croatia are. Someday Aryan Nation, NOW, the VFW, Act Up, AARP, Native Americans, Right to Life fetuses, people with Hispanic surnames, the blind, the deaf, the rest of the differently abled will have their dreams come true. Having made the drive to Slavonski Brod I now know what America will look like when it happens.
Slavonski Brod is a city of seventy-five thousand on the Croatian side of the Sava River. The Croatian-allied Bosnian Muslims were still holding a couple dozen square miles on the opposite riverbank. The Bosnian Serbs had been shelling Slavonski Brod since March. The downtown was even more boarded-up, empty, and burned-out than the downtown of an American city that size. But quieter—until shells landed. Those were loud as hell. Since the city was escapable, an unsurprisingly large number of its residents had escaped, and the rest stayed off the streets during intervals of artillery fire. The shells arrived mostly in the daytime and mostly on the hour. The day before we arrived there had been eleven separate barrages—a total of 130 shells, 60 of which landed in the city and 70 in the surrounding villages. Sometimes the artillery fire was supplemented with Soviet-made Frog missiles or MiGs dropping cluster bombs.
The attacks seemed to have no particular target and no specific purpose. The rail line and the river bridges were being ignored by the gunners or missed by remarkable margins. I suppose the Serbs were trying to frighten and demoralize the people of Slavonski Brod. And, of course, kill them. The locals were good at keeping their heads down. So far only seventy-two civilians had died, although twenty-five of those were children.
The people of Slavonski Brod couldn’t seem to make up their minds about whether they were frightened and demoralized. “You want to ask us if we see the end,” said a woman in the Croatian government press office, one of the few businesses still operating downtown. “We don’t,” she said. “There is very little hope.” Then she told us morale was high.
The people of Slavonski Brod were certainly irritated that Sarajevo was getting so much media play. “All attention is paid to Sarajevo. All the supplies and all the aid goes to Sarajevo,” the president of Slavonski Brod’s executive council said peevishly. Gorman and I did our best to explain that there is a big difference, in terms of journalistic melodrama, between being surrounded on three sides and being surrounded on four.
Outside the gates of Slavonski Brod’s hospital the tree trunks were covered with black-bordered pieces of paper announcing deaths—Post-it notes from the grave. Casualties from the fighting across the river are brought here—Croats, Bosnian Muslims, captured Serbs—some 6,500 of them in the past year, 752 of whom have died. Heavily built wooden barriers covered the hospital doors, and sandbags blocked the lower windows. All the patients and medical equipment had been moved into the basement. A few ordinary sick people were there, but most of the cases were the gory infirmities of war—young men who’d had large chunks of something blown off or blasted into them. Their beds were lined up end to end down the smelly, narrow basement corridors, making a kind of Lincoln Tunnel rush hour of mutilation and pain. The operating tables were in the furnace rooms with barely enough space below the pipes and ducts for the surgeons to stand upright. X-ray machines, autoclaves, and oxygen bottles were jammed hodgepodge between plumbing and electrical fixtures. Every spare corner was filled with the cots, hot plates, and hanging clothes of doctors and nurses who stay for three-day shifts. Coming and going was too dangerous to do it more often than necessary. The hospital had taken eight direct hits, and two staff members had been killed on the grounds. Most of the work—not only medical procedures but cooking and laundry—was done at night when the danger was less. And every night the hospital tried to evacuate twenty to thirty patients, driving them out of town at top speed in blacked-out ambulances. No one said so, but I’m sure a certain number of those patients must have wound up back at the hospital, that much the worse for a traffic accident.
The chief janitor’s office had been taken over by the hospital administrator Dr. Ivan Balen. He was in his forties and looked like an American doctor, but more tired, and he smoked.
“Everything is very sad and terrible,” said Dr. Balen—the answer to every question I had meant to ask him.
Tom Lamson and I thought we’d better visit Serbian territory. What with besieging Sarajevo, shelling Slavonski Brod, setting up concentration camps, shooting civilians, and engaging in ethnic cleansing the Serbs were not winning the war of publicity.
The Serbs controlled the old Yugoslav National Army, the JNA, and, when Yugoslavia deconstructed, Serbia and the Serb militias that Serbia supports in Croatia and Bosnia wound up in control of the tanks, airplanes, and heavy artillery. The reason Serbia has acted so viciously in this war is “why the dog licks his balls.” Because it can.
We drove on the Belgrade turnpike again about halfway to Slavonski Brod, then turned south on a two-lane road to Banja Luka, thirty miles inside Bosnia.
Banja Luka, with two hundred thousand people, is the largest Serb-controlled city in Bosnia. Back in Zagreb we’d heard dramatic tales about the drunken, thieving, trigger-happy, rape-inclined behavior of Serb irregulars at the checkpoints. But they were pleasant enough to us. One gave me a lapful of walnuts he’d stolen off some vanished Muslim’s tree.
On close inspection the Serbs are a little different from the Croats. The Serbs look more like John Belushi and the Croats look more like the rest of the cast of Animal House. Not that either are a lot of laughs. Although we did pick up one hitchhiking Serb soldier who did a comic turn trying to get both himself and his AK-47 into our tiny backseat. Or it would have been comic if I’d been sure the thing was unloaded.
Serbian territory is also distinguishable from the rest of Yugoslavia. There’s less bomb and artillery damage since the Serbs have all the bombs and artillery. And the international embargo seemed to be working. Well, not exactly working, because the fighting was worse than ever, but the Serbs have been reduced to using horse carts and bicycles to save fuel. There were more cars on the road in besieged Bihac than there were here among the besiegers.
Banja Luka seemed to be about the same kind of place as Slavonski Brod except we weren’t allowed to look at it. We were ushered to military headquarters and there put under escort. We told Kadi to ask if we could get a peek at some starving concentration-camp prisoners, ethnic cleansing, and murder of innocent Muslims. I trust she put the request in more diplomatic terms. The answer was no. But the Serbs would take us to see a mosque, just to show us that it was perfectly unmolested, which—not counting four bullet holes in a ground-floor window—it was. It was also closed. And the Serbs let us talk in private to the local representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
The UNHCR man was a very young Greek, cleanly dressed and neatly barbered but speaking with such exhausted resignation that, if you closed your eyes, you could imagine he was a refugee himself. There were twenty-five or thirty thousand Muslims left in the city, he said. The Bosnian Serbs refused to recognize these people as refugees because they weren’t, technically, in a war zone and weren’t, technically, away from home. Under UN bylaws, of which there are many, the young Greek couldn’t do much about this. The local authorities were giving him some cooperation in protecting the Muslims. “Yeah—back and forth,” he said. The Serbs needed UN help because winter was coming. “They are also sick and tired of being the bad guys in the war.” One hundred and twenty Muslims had been killed in Banja Luka since April, most of them in April and May. There were still incidents of beatings and so forth. The Muslims were afraid to come out of their houses. “My house has been robbed twice in the past three days,” said the Greek. “There was nothing there to steal. Maybe it’s intimidation.” He told us the situation was “not so bad” in Banja Luka, leaving to our imaginations what the bad places were like.
Back at the military headquarters we endured an hour-long peroration from a Serb major. He was determined that the Bosnian Serbs should achieve that status of victimhood so coveted in modern politics. The Serb major claimed that three hundred to seven hundred rockets and artillery shells a day were being fired at Bosnian Serbs from the Croatian side of the Sava. (I had driven practically the length of this river twice. No such thing was happening.) The serb major said, “These attacks haven’t been provoked, as we have no aspirations in Croatia.” (They occupy a third of it.) “Five hundred mujahideen from Iran are in Bihac.” (Keeping a very low profile.) “We are against ethnic cleansing.” The major explained that what had been reported in the international press as ethnic cleansing was just “movement of migration in some settlements.”
All this was conveyed to us through a Serbian translator, a teenage girl who seemed on the point of tears at hearing this litany of Serbian travails. Or maybe she had allergies. The major presented us with a thirteen-page document, written in English and titled “Jihad Must Be Stopped.” A sample of the text:
By and order of the Islamitic fundamentalists from Sarajevo, the healthy Serbian women from 17 to 40 years old are getting set apart and subjected to an especial treatment. According to their sick plans of many years, these women have to be fecundated by orthodox Islamitic seeds in order to make the raising generation of janizaries on the spaces which from now on surely consider as theirs/Islamitic Republic/more numerous.
The major assured us that forty thousand Serbs were being held in Muslim concentration camps in Bosnia. “Where?” said Lamson, because outside Sarajevo and Bihac the Muslims seemed barely to have enough of Bosnia left to hide forty thousand of themselves. “Many small private camps,” said the major.
The major produced a former prisoner. His name was Risto Dukis, a dirty kid of fifteen with bristly hair and large, light brown eyes. Risto seemed a bit startled, like someone brought up on stage from a quiz-show audience. He was from a little village called Jezero, which had been overrun by the Bosnian Muslim military. The Muslims had held him for two months. He didn’t know where his mother and father were and had no idea what had happened to them. He was a high school student. When he grew up he wanted to be, he said, “a worker.”
Risto said he’d been out in a field on a weekend morning when he’d been taken prisoner by some thirty Muslim soldiers. They questioned him, beat him, and made him dig a hole that they said would be his grave. They stood him on a table under a tree, as if to hang him, and shook the table. When he was properly terrified they took him away and beat him until they got him to say he was a Serbian scout. He was kept alone for three days in the basement of a school, then taken to an army barracks, where he was beaten again and forced to make another confession. He slept on a pile of old uniforms for a month. They gave him rice or beans or soup twice a day. Then he was sent to a camp where there was no solid food, only soup and tea. He was beaten by Muslim refugees and forced to do hard labor. Finally there had been a prisoner exchange, and he was released.
Risto said that he knew one of the Muslims who captured him. And this was the man who threatened his life. He was a forest worker from a neighboring village. “He knew my parents,” said Risto. “He drank coffee in my house.” Risto said that the man had told him, “We used to be good friends, and now you are collaborating with the Chetniks.”
“Did the man believe that?” asked Tom Lamson.
Risto said he thought so.
“Had you had any unpleasant experiences with Muslims before?”
“No. I wouldn’t have expected them to treat me like that.”
“Do you hate them?” asked Tom.
“So I hate them,” said Risto.
“What will you do now?”
“Well, if I catch them, I will do exactly the same.” Tom asked him if he had any idea why all this was going on. “Muslims blame Serbs,” said Risto. “I think the Serbs aren’t guilty. I blame the Bosnian president.” (Though I don’t think Risto, any more than I, could remember that august personage’s name.)
Risto seemed believable. And his story was the Yugoslavian civil war in a nutshell: past and present wrongs inspiring wrongs of the future, bigotry feeding on bigotry, violence begetting violence, and in the middle of it all the Risto Dukises—innocence defiled.
“The morning you were captured,” said Lamson, “what were you doing out in that field?”
“Oh, I was scouting for the Chetniks,” said Risto.