Tales of vengeance and renewal in the Balkans
The past remains close to the surface
Unlike the cataclysmic last decade of the 20th century in the Balkans, when 140,000 Muslims, Orthodox ethnic Serbs and Roman Catholic ethnic Croats died violently, this new century has been peaceful in the seven mini-states that Serbian-led Yugoslavia reluctantly gave birth to.
Still, for how much longer peace can prevail is an enduring question in a part of the world where for generations, if not centuries, hate has begotten hate.
That was the stark lesson I learned early in the Serbian-Croatian war when I sheltered with a Croatian family in the basement of their home in a village on the Adriatic coast. As Serbian artillery crashed into houses around us, a cluster of spellbound children listened for hours as their parents and grandmother regaled them with bloody stories about what Serbian “Chetniks” had done to their kin during the two world wars and before that.
I heard virtually identical tales of murder, mayhem and vengeance a few weeks later when I had dinner in a smoke-filled room with a large Serbian family in the deeply divided Bosnian town of Brcko. But in this family’s telling, those committing the atrocities against their long-dead relatives were Croatian “Ustasha” and Muslim fanatics.
I have witnessed how terrifying, and at the same time comical, life can be in the Balkans. The worst example may have been the time, near Sarajevo, when I saw a group of elderly farming women wearing peasants’ smocks and kerchiefs stone a dump truck full of equally elderly women who were being “cleansed” from the postcard-beautiful mountain village that they had likely shared from birth. To this day, I don’t know whether these were Muslim grannies attacking Serbian gran-
I have witnessed how terrifying, and at the same time comical, life can be in the Balkans.
nies or vice versa. Or Croats attacking Muslims or vice versa. Or Croats attacking Serbs or vice versa.
The point is, I guess, that it does not really matter. When passions boil over in these mountain valleys, many otherwise sensible people can reveal an abominably cruel streak. I have always wondered how those women, who must now be octogenarians and nonagenarians, have managed to coexist in their new country.
Sarajevo is not a village, but it often feels like one. Enmities run as deep here as in the boondocks. About 14,000 people died during the Siege of Sarajevo. But these days, all parties to the conflict are too busy trying to extract what they can from the European Union’s dwindling coffers. Which isn’t much, but is more than they have, which is almost nothing.
Although the three rotating presidents of Bosnia-Herzegovina and other politicians are loath to speak about it, Bosnians of every faith acknowledge there could be more butchery at any time. Most Bosnians are adamant that they want no part of it. But then, with a grim laugh, they often mutter they will never be able to trust the other communities in their midst.
It is often said in Sarajevo that the future will be better because young Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats have a more tolerant world view than their parents and grandparents, and that proof of this was how they formed friendships and married across religious lines. From what I have observed during my first visit here in 20 years, this is true. But I also remember that when I came to Sarajevo to watch some alpine downhill racing in 1983, the “Yugoslavs” who lived here then claimed to be much more tolerant than their parents and grandparents, whose ideas about their neighbours had been shaped by the world wars. As proof of this they boasted that friendships and marriages involving members of the three religious communities were fairly common.
This was true back then, too. And then all hell broke loose.
Even if Sarajevans have sometimes had no personal experience of the siege or have never heard family remembrances of that time, it is impossible to avoid seeing what happened to Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996. With no Marshall Plan to help Bosnia-Herzegovina recover after the conflict, the official unemployment rate is nearly 50 per cent. There are a few slick new high-rises downtown but there are far more crumbling buildings that bear the scars of war. One of them is an apartment block in the suburb of Grbavica where bullet- and shrapnel-pocked balconies are a constant reminder that savage room-to-room fighting once took place there.
Sarajevo’s quaint Old Town, with its gorgeous medieval mosques and churches, has been spruced up. But cemeteries are the predominant new architectural feature in the city. Gravestones cram what were once football fields and cover hillsides used not so long ago by snipers during their reign of terror.
The portents for the future are murky. Serbs are generally cheered by Russia’s naked demonstration of power in Ukraine and believe that if another war comes, Russian President Vladimir Putin will do far more for his Orthodox cousins than Boris Yeltsin did.
Sarajevo’s Muslims are not keen that Iran has established a cultural centre on the city’s main pedestrian thoroughfare. But if Russia were to ever become involved, even indirectly, in the conflict here, Islamic extremists who had not gone international 20 years ago would undoubtedly now take a keen interest.
The Balkans have been a hub of intrigue and violence since long before the assassination 100 years ago of Archduke Franz Ferdinand sparked the First World War. Yet even here, unpredictable new elements could stir the pot.