Balkan journal

This is the first in a series of articles.

by Chris Braithwaite

I found Sarajevo deeply frightening.  That was the second surprise this shattered Balkan city had in store for me.  The first was that I was there at all.

By the time I got to Sarajevo in early September my nine-month stint as a Knight International Press fellow was officially over.  I had spent it working with small, independent newspapers scattered across the six republics of former Yugoslavia — all of them except Bosnia and Herzegovina.  (That's the full name of the small country of which Sarajevo is the capital city.)

I had worked with a paper in Croatia to the north, with four papers in Serbia to the east, and with two in Montenegro to the south.  I'd made a couple of working trips to Macedonia in the southeast corner of former Yugoslavia, and my home base was in the northwest corner in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana. 

Had I arrived in Sarajevo straight from West Glover in November last year, there would have been reason to fear.  At the very least, I would have run the risk of making a complete fool of myself. 

At that point I was just starting to get the major players in the Balkan tragedy clear in my mind.  I had read a book or two, most usefully Tom Gjelten's Sarajevo Daily about Oslobodenje, the newspaper that published every day during the four years the city was under siege.

But like almost every North American I know, I had only the dimmest perception of the complex political geography of the Balkan region, of the ethnic and religious lines which divide it, and of exactly who had done exactly what to exactly whom. 

We are like a bunch of Slovenians at a Super Bowl party.  On the screen, men are doing violent things to each other on the other side of the world.  We have no grasp of the rules of the game, and only the dimmest notion of what the opponents are trying to accomplish.  The men in striped shirts are constantly stopping the action and admonishing the players.  But the senseless violence continues. 

(“Football” in Europe is the game we call soccer, and people in the Balkans have no taste for the American game.  The analogy would not work for basketball, less because it is not such a violent sport than because the people of the Balkans are avid fans who follow the NBA closely.  My daughter Martha began to cipher out the Cyrilic alphabet in Belgrade so she could read the NBA scores in the daily papers.  On her second visit in June, we took an overnight bus from Ljubljana east through Croatia to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.  At about 3:30 in the morning the bus paused for a rest stop at the Serbian border.  Martha was astounded to find game six of the NBA finals, live, on the restaurant's TV set.  Her fellow passengers were no less astounded by the transformation of this silent young woman with the mass of curly blonde hair to an avid and rather noisy Chicago fan.) 

Television compounds our ignorance by its very nature. What it does best is provide vivid, haunting images of man's inhumanity to man, and the Balkans provided more than enough of those.  What television does worst is explain the boring political and historical context which lead to such atrocities.  So we are left with the certain knowledge that terrible things are happening over there, and with the vague impression that the Serbs are responsible for most of them. 

By the time I finally landed at the Sarajevo airport on September 2, I had a somewhat more complex view of the situation.  It wasn't that I had read more books.  I had met too many Serbs, shared too much of their brandy in too many taverns, talked too long about the enormous problems they encounter when they try and do there what I have done here for almost 25 years, even worked with them on finding a small part of a possible solution to one of the biggest of those problems.

I could no longer see the Balkan tragedy in the straightforward outlines of black shadows cast against a white sheet.  It had become something more like a tapestry, rich with color and minute detail. 

If I had less reason to fear making a fool of myself by September, where was this fear coming from? 

It could hardly be for my physical safety. If there had been a time for that, it was past.  In mid-June, Martha and I found ourselves in Podgorica, the capital city of Montenegro, with no way home.  That was when NATO was sending its warplanes on “demonstration” flights over the borders between Kosovo and its neighbors, Macedonia and Albania. Though it combined itself politically with Serbia in the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Montenegro has been reluctant to play any role in the war in Kosovo, and relations between Podgorica and Belgrade have become difficult.  Nevertheless, Martha and I were in a country that might come under fire from U.S. missiles and warplanes. 

Montenegro Airlines provides service to Ljubljana.  But it only has one plane, which only flies to Ljubljana on Wednesdays, and as of Monday the plane was full. 

Early in February we had found our way home from Montenegro on a ferry that sailed up the Adriatic Sea to Slovenia's tiny stretch of coastline.  But that boat, too, only sails once a week and we had just missed it.

The only other exit I knew of was via train or bus, back towards Kosovo, through the heartland of Serbia to Belgrade, and from there another long bus ride home through Hungary.  If we were worried about encountering angry Serbs, we would be setting off in precisely the wrong direction. 

We could only wait, watch the World Cup soccer games on a huge TV that had been set up on the terrace of the Hotel Montenegro, and hope we wouldn't still be there Thursday, when Yugoslavia played the U.S.

(We watched the U.S. lose that game in Ljubljana, thanks to a very helpful travel agent named Ana Raicevic, who found us two seats on the Wednesday flight.)

And in early March, just after the massacre of an Albanian clan by Serb police had brought Kosovo sharply into focus on the world's television screens, I crossed that disputed territory by bus.  That amounted to a rejection of the strongest four words of advice I ever got from my colleague in Ljubljana, Sanja Vojinovic: “Don't go to Kosovo!”

But I was just passing through on my way from Novi Pazar in Serbia to Skopje in Macedonia, and it wasn't much of an adventure. We were stopped at several Serb police checkpoints, and at one of them I was summoned off the bus to demonstrate that my big, bulging suitcase wasn't full of guns.  I was tempted to snap a photo at one sandbag-fortified checkpoint because the guy sitting in the turret of the tank parked beside it was idly reading a newspaper.  But I didn't.  I carried no press credentials, and Balkan governments take a dim view of western civilians who take snapshots of military equipment.

I don't hold these out as moments of either bravery or folly.  But if an American is going to get into trouble in the Balkans, it will probably be in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (which I will refer to as FRY from here on, to avoid confusion with Yugoslavia, the larger nation that no longer exists).

This is the only Balkan nation that labors under onerous economic sanctions imposed by the west.  It is also the only Balkan nation Americans can't visit without first obtaining a visa.  These are not automatically granted, like the pretty Macedonian visas that an official sticks into your passport when you arrive in that country.  To travel to Serbia or Montenegro I had to have good reason, and a newspaper's invitation that would pass muster at the FRY consulate in the nearby Italian city of Trieste.  I have six FRY visas in my passport, but I was turned down a couple of times. 

There aren't very many Americans in the country, and in smaller cities than Belgrade or Podgorica I got the distinct sense that my mere presence was something of an event. 

In contrast, Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter BiH) is brim full of westerners in and out of military uniform, and a substantial portion of these are from the United States.  After a day or two on the streets of Sarajevo I got over the habit of stopping in my tracks whenever I heard English spoken in American accents.  It was too routine to be worth noting. 

And though the people in BiH live pretty much under the political and military authority of the west, one is not aware of the sort of sullen resentment of our presence that one might expect to encounter in an old-fashioned colony.  (This is at least true in the Muslim-Bosniak and Catholic-Croat Federation, which includes Sarajevo.  On the Orthodox-Serb side of the invisible border drawn by the Dayton Accords, in Republika Srpska, the mood is rather different.) 

So the question remains:  What was so frightening about Sarajevo? 

Everyone who studied world history in school knows that the First World War started in Sarajevo when the Habsburg Crown Prince, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a young Serb nationalist. 

Everyone who is old enough to remember the 1984 Winter Olympics will recall the celebration of Sarajevo as the host city.  Television commentators treated it as a personal discovery — a communist society with a smiling face, a remarkably tolerant mixture of religious and ethnic backgrounds. 

Sarajevo is still a beautiful city, despite the fact that it's hard to find a public building that hasn't been shelled; a house or apartment building that isn't at least pockmarked by bullets.  The mortar holes in the streets and sidewalks are called Sarajevo roses because, I was told, the fresh ones so often ran red. 

The people in the city are friendly and seem energetic, even though so many of their family and friends lie buried in the cemeteries and, after those were full, under the playing fields and here and there in the parks.  I spent an hour in one cemetery, its carved wooden headstones marking the remains of Bosniaks, as the Muslim Bosnians are now called.  I started idly calculating dates, then looked long and hard to find a single soul who had lived as long as I have lived, so far.  Most were born in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.  All had died in the early ’90s. 

Sarajevo sits in a quite small valley and the hills are beautiful.  But I found it impossible to look up at them without thinking of the guns that rained so much destruction down on the city for so long, while the world looked on and did so little. 

On my second of three visits to Sarajevo in September, I sat down to catch up on my daily journal and wrote this:

I wander through the city.  It gives me an eerie sensation which, as I think about it, is not a sense of impending violence but of past violence.  As if this city with its pockmarked, roofless buildings, empty staring windows and mortar-spattered streets and sidewalks is a living reminder that the veneer of civilization we paste over our lives is just that.  In Sarajevo, it is transparently thin. 

Now that it is October and I am back in West Glover, I find it difficult to improve on that quick note, when I try to understand the fear that settled into my bones in Sarajevo. 

Coming to the city after nine months in the Balkans, I could not dismiss its destruction as the inexplicable act of a twisted and blessedly unique culture.  I could not dismiss the perpetrators as people so bloodthirsty, so driven by the ancient hatreds of their ancestors, as to have only a tenuous claim to membership in the human race. 

This is the comfortable reaction, of course.  It lets us turn our back on the whole distasteful business and go on with our lives.  It spares us any study of how ordinary people can descend to these depths, because these are not ordinary people. 

I only wish I could believe it.  The alternative is frightening indeed.  If what was done in Sarajevo and so much more of the Balkans was done by rational, civilized beings then I am compelled to question my understanding, not only of culture, ethnicity and organized human society, but also of human nature itself.  I am finally compelled to drag all this baggage home and try and make it fit into the empty dresser drawers I left behind. 

As a Canadian I have followed Quebec’s “quiet revolution” with interest, and rejoiced in the French-Canadian minority's success in preserving its language, its culture, its religion on a continent dominated by English-speaking Protestants.  I still rejoice.  But I can no longer see the move to divide Canada and create a separate French nation as an interesting experiment.  It now strikes me as a dangerous and destructive idea.  I see the politicians behind it as either naive fools or, far more likely, as cynical as the men who led their respective republics out of Yugoslavia and into the catastrophe that followed.  The reassurances they offer their followers are lies.  They know very well that the process must end in bloodshed, and the sooner it starts to flow the happier they will be.