In Europe (116 page)

‘That's the way this country is too: it's sitting paralysed on an ice floe, doesn't know what to do, and meanwhile the ice is floating away on the current.’

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF MARSHAL TITO ROSE FROM THE GRAVE? ON
my last evening in Novi Sad, žZelimir showed me one of his short documentaries, a fascinating experiment. He'd had an actor made up to look exactly like Tito, he put Tito's sunglasses on him, and then he walked around all day with this fake Tito through the shopping streets of Belgrade.

The film went like this: ‘So tell us what has been going on in our beautiful country,’ Tito asks his old driver – the real one – after he has risen from his mausoleum and got into the back of his Mercedes – the original one. ‘It fell apart, sir,’ the man sighs. ‘They destroyed the federation, they took down all the red stars, and then the war started.’

As soon as Tito gets out of the car in the middle of Belgrade, a crowd gathers. For the first few minutes the crowd plays along, but soon they become bitter. ‘Traitor!’ a few angry passers-by shout. ‘But I left a lot of reliable people behind, didn't I?’ Tito murmurs. ‘Forget it. It's your fault. You were the leader of a bunch of bandits, those are your successors. When you go back to the hereafter, please take them all with you. I'm not even allowed to build a pigsty nowadays!’

Tito walks past a bookstall: ‘What are these weird symbols? And why are we using German money?’ A young man, overwrought: ‘The young people loved you. We learned poems about you, you were the sun shining down on us. We formed an honour guard in front of your portrait when you died!’ A woman: ‘I wept, too. You took wonderful trips to foreign countries, you lived in villas, meanwhile I worked shelling peanuts in a factory, but I still wept. God, do I ever regret that now.’

A man, beaming with joy, pushes his way to the front of the crowd.
‘So you're back again. We used to have one Tito. Now we have a dozen of them. Great to see you back again!’ Tito: ‘There certainly are a lot of people just hanging around. Don't any of you have to work? Do you all have the day off?’

žZelimir:‘Then the police came and arrested us for disturbing the peace. Me, Tito, the whole crew. We were lucky. The police officer at the station had a sense of humour, he snapped to attention right away: “Mr President. What an honour to meet you again. Of course, this is all a misunderstanding, we'll take care of it right away.” A few minutes later we were back out on the street.’

Nothing can create new order out of poverty and chaos, nothing but the story, and the belief in that story. As though it were a royal wedding, Serbian television has devoted a whole day to the marriage of the arch-criminal Arkan, leader of the notorious Arkan Tigers paramilitary organisation, to the singer Svetlana, also known as Ceca. Ceca's newest hit – she sings what they call ‘ethnofolk’ – has been echoing in the cafés for weeks now.

A few headlines from the popular weekly
Twilight Zone
: ‘Jacques Chirac, whose support played a definitive role in the war against the Serbian nation, will die on Christmas Day’;‘Creatures from outer space kidnapped a man for 300 years’; ‘America to fall apart on 17 January, 2000!’; ‘During the solar eclipse on 8 August, a new Hitler was born’; ‘The young wife of Václav Havel, the man who supported the war against the Serbian nation, does not have long to live’;‘Will China conquer America in 2008?’

It is Sunday afternoon, and I have been invited to tea by a little group of female intellectuals. I find about a dozen women sitting around in a spacious nineteenth-century apartment; most of them are over sixty, they are writers, journalists and professors. The walls are covered with paintings. The group holds its salon here every second Sunday of the month and has been doing so for years, right through all the revolutions and bombardments, with home-made cakes. Today there is even Ukrainian champagne. The curtains have been drawn, the street is far away for the moment.

The women's group is worried about the hundreds of thousands of homeless people wandering the country after the war, and about all the young people who are leaving. ‘We're not talking about semi-mafiosi or
frustrated soldiers; these are doctors, engineers, lawyers; the professional people this country needs to build itself up again.’ ‘There are even young writers leaving the country, we've never seen this before!’

‘I'm so tired of these never-ending complaints from Western Europe,’ a lady growls. She has just returned from an international conference on Kosovo; the French representative had stated her concern about all the inexpensive Yugoslav streetwalkers upsetting the neatly organised prostitution in Paris. ‘“Well, what are they supposed to do?” I asked her. “Being a prostitute in the West is an excellent way to earn a living these days for a poor, intelligent Yugoslav girl!”’

The next morning at breakfast, I see a boy walk past the window of the hotel, his head shaved. Suddenly two men in leather coats come running up, they jump on him, a fight ensues, two policemen arrive and the four of them force him onto the ground. The boy lies face down on the pavement, motionless as a cornered cat. Now the policemen are on the phone. Two unmarked cars appear. They boy is kicked a few times, then carried away by two plainclothes gorillas, God only knows why. The whole arrest has taken two minutes at most.

‘You caught a glimpse of Miložsević's Praetorian Guard,’ my guide, Dužsko Tubić, tells me later. ‘A large portion of the population of this city has just come back from the war: refugees selling matches, former soldiers from the front lines, policemen … those may have been the men in leather coats. They were probably catching a thief, but it could also be something else, you never know.’ Nothing surprises Dužsko any more, for years he's been working as a fixer for Western journalists and camera crews, guiding them along fronts of every hue. We drive past the burned-out television tower and the partial ruins of the city's police headquarters, past offices and government buildings with huge holes blown in them. The main road to Zagreb is more or less abandoned; after a while we turn off towards the south, and by nightfall we're in Bijeljina, Dužsko's birthplace, not far from the Serb-Bosnian border.

That night I sleep in an ethnically cleansed town. Of the 17,000 Muslims who lived here in 1991, there are no more than 1,000 left. All of the mosques have been wiped away. The spot where the biggest mosque stood is now a gravelled lot with a few cars and rubbish containers. On the
site of the second mosque, a church is now being built. In the third, Jamia Pero – the tricky snake – has opened a shop selling pots and pans. And mosque number four is now a market square with rusty stalls. The youngest children in Bijeljina don't know that the town ever had four mosques. The commercials shown by the local TV station crow and cheer as though none of it ever took place: women whisk away stains, cheerful families gather around a tasty meal, little elves polish kitchen floors.

After 1992 the local graveyard tripled in size, today it is an expanse the size of eight football pitches, full of shiny new marble. Most of those who lie here died between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, almost all of them between 1992–5. The portraits of the dead have been painstakingly etched in the marble. Faces stare at you, serious, laughing, some of the men are sitting in jeeps on their way to the hereafter, others are raising a glass in camaraderie, a young paramilitary soldier stands life-sized atop his gravestone, his machine gun clenched in both hands, squeezing off rounds all the way to heaven.

The next morning we make our way into Holbrookeland, a curious collection of mini-states stitched together at an airforce base in Dayton, Ohio in late 1995 by American negotiator Richard Holbrooke. To the south lies the federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is in turn an amalgam of the former Croatian and Muslim republics. Lying somewhat curled around it, to the north and east, is the Serb Republic. This separate little republic leans on Serbia, but the Serbs themselves want little to do with it these days; it has become something of an estranged little brother.

Until 1991, Bosnia was seen as the most ethnically balanced part of Yugoslavia: of over four million inhabitants, forty-four per cent were Muslim, thirty-one per cent Serbian and seventeen per cent Croatian. The capital, Sarajevo, had developed into a cheerful, cosmopolitan city. More than forty per cent of all marriages were mixed. Given a few more years, little would have been little left of that multi-ethnic community.

The Bosnian war lasted three and a half years and claimed more than 200,000 lives. Two million people were left homeless. The war was more or less a continuation of the Croatian conflict, when Serb paramilitary organisations began using certain parts of Bosnia as their base of operations. In autumn 1991 the Serbs announced that ‘their’ areas were now five separate autonomous regions, and not long afterwards the Croatians
did the same with that part of Bosnia in which they formed the majority. The Yugoslav Army, a Serb Army for quite some time already, began digging in heavy artillery at strategic spots, including the hills around Sarajevo. In a referendum held in late February 1992, an overwhelming majority of Bosnians voted for independence. That, after all, would keep their country unified. Two thirds of registered voters went to the polls, most of them Muslims and Croatians. The Serbs boycotted the referendum: their leaders propagated a Greater Serbia, and the idea of an independent Bosnia was at loggerheads with that. They decided to set up their own Serb Republic in the Serbian sections of Bosnia. At Pale, a ski resort close to Sarajevo, they formed their own government and their own parliament. Then they went on to seize some seventy per cent of Bosnia by force, and in late April 1992 laid siege to Sarajevo from the surrounding hills. After all, it was to be their own capital one day.

That summer the Croatians established their own little republic as well, with Mostar as its capital. The praesidium of the Bosnian republic had little choice but to set up its own army then, which was in effect the army of the Muslims.

The first major fighting took place around Sarajevo, but the stand-off soon resulted in a siege which lasted forty-four months. The Serb/Yugoslav Army did not have enough manpower or munitions to take the city, and the Bosnian Army was not strong enough to break through their blockade.

In the areas they occupied, the Serbs immediately began the process of ethnic purification. All over north-western Bosnia, non-Serbian villages were attacked and plundered, and thousands of Muslims and Croatians were interred. The most notorious camps were Trnopolje and Omarska, an abandoned mining complex not far from Banya Luka. The women were held at Trnopolje under barbaric conditions, and were systematically beaten and raped. The men of the police and militia jeered that this way they would at least bear ‘Serbian babies’. Omarska was discovered in summer 1992 by Ed Vulliamy of the
Guardian
. He visited the camp ‘canteen’ and watched in horror as thirty emaciated men were given three minutes to gulp down a sort of piping-hot gruel. ‘The bones of their elbows and wrists protrude like pieces of jagged stone from the pencil-thin stalks to which their arms have been reduced,’ he wrote. ‘They are alive but decomposed, debased, degraded, and utterly subservient, and
yet they fix their huge hollow eyes on us with looks like blades of knives.’

All these camps were part of a strategy of terror and intimidation that soon began having the desired effect: within six months, most Muslims and Croatians had left the Serb territories. Europe experienced the biggest refugee crisis since the one right after the Second World War. By late 1992, almost two million Bosnians had fled, with more than half a million of them seeking asylum in Western Europe. The Serbs were almost satisfied: they now had their hands on most of the country, and almost all of the Croatians and Muslims had disappeared from their territories. The only problem they had left had to do with Sarajevo, the capital of their dreams, and with the handful of remaining Muslim enclaves, towns filled with refugees that had until then been able to repulse the Serbian attacks. Towns like Goražzde, žZepa and, most famous of all, Srebrenica.

The old village of Srebrenica was once an idyllic place which had grown up around a silver mine and was, from the nineteenth century, a fashionable spa. In fact, it was nothing more than a single long street at the end of a deep valley. There was a boulevard where the young people strolled, a café with a terrace where you were served by waiters in bow ties, the ‘Bosnia’ cinema, an excellent hospital and, at Hotel Guber, a world-famous spring ‘for healthy blood’. Around 1990 there were 6,000 people living there, a quarter of them Serbs, the rest Muslims.

Srebrenica, however, lay in the middle of the area which the Serbs had claimed for themselves. And when they also began their campaign of ethnic cleansing here, a well organised local movement began offering strong resistance.

One of the most important Muslim leaders was Naser Orić, a former bodyguard to Miložsević. Orić and his gang, in turn, began terrorising the surrounding Serbian villages. At first these Muslim militias did their best to conquer entire sections of countryside, and even to link up with the Muslim area around the city of Tuzla. But that did not work out. Around Srebrenica itself, however, a huge Muslim enclave soon arose in the middle of Serb territory. Orić became the local hero. In summer and autumn 1992 he attacked a large number of villages and farmhouses in the surroundings, murdering Serb families who had stayed behind and plundering their stores.

In the course of time, these forays became vitally important. The Serbs had blocked all roads into the enclave, and as winter approached the food supply became a major problem. The inhabitants of Srebrenica were forced to live on feed corn, oats and dandelion salad. At night the town was plunged into total darkness: the only electricity was generated by a series of primitive waterwheels in the nearby stream. At a certain point the Muslims even proposed an exchange of prisoners: one live Serb for two fifty-kilo sacks of flour. During winter 1992–3, dozens of men, women and children in the enclave died of starvation.