War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning

by Chris Hedges

  But in the end it had come down to this: The Bosnian government had just reclaimed this town from the Serbs, and nothing had changed except the victims. As a result of this reversal of fortune, Dursuma Medić, a Muslim, would now have to watch over her two Serbian friends—who for the last three and a half years had taken care of her.

  “We are three old women trying to survive a war,” said Burka Bakovik, fifty-two, a Bosnian Serb. “We have been friends since childhood. None of this hatred ever touched us. We all protected Dursuma when the Serbs ruled. Now she protects us. The only news we wait for is peace, and that hasn’t come yet.”

  As we spoke I could see Muslim soldiers busy painting over the slogans left by the Serbs on the walls outside. “Only one Bosnia, all the way to the Drina” and “Victory is our destiny,” they wrote.

  “The war began with words,” said Seka Milanovik, sixty-eight, the other Bosnian Serb woman, “but none of us paid any attention. The extremist Serbs and Muslims were misfits, criminals and failures. But soon they held rallies and talked of racial purity, things like that. We dismissed them—until the violence began.”

  The women said the extremist groups soon partitioned the city and surrounding villages into Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim areas. And each religious group turned to thugs for protection.

  “I live in this apartment for two reasons,” said Medić. “One is to protect my Serb friends. The other is because the Serbs burned my house down. I know what can happen when desperate people seek revenge. This is why I have to always be here.”

  “My daughter and two grandchildren fled with the crowds,” said Bakovik. “I did not even have time to say goodbye. In a moment they were gone. Now I am alone and afraid. I do not want to be by myself in my apartment, so I stay here. We are all women; we all felt the same pangs in childbirth. We do not believe in war.”

  The loss of such social ties, the dependence on the state to dole out homes or property that was stolen, has an insidious effect on even the good and the just. Many must live with guilt and shame. They feel powerless. And those who have been abused and humiliated often search for those even weaker than they to vilify and blame for their predicament. In ethnic warfare this response feeds the racist cant of nationalist warlords who are with one hand thieving on unprecedented scales and with the other blaming the hapless minorities they are persecuting for the economic collapse and misery.

  Displacement is one of the fundamental tools warlords and states use to prosecute a conflict. This is why ethnic leaders are so displeased when members of their minority group remain behind. The Croat and Serb and Muslim leaders in Bosnia often made secret deals to “trade” minorities, whether these families wanted to leave their homes or not. Such disruption helped fuel the conflict and sever communal ties with other groups.

  “No one ever forgets a sudden depreciation of himself, for it is too painful,” wrote the Bulgarian essayist Elias Canetti. “And the crowd as such never forgets its depreciation. The natural tendency afterwards is to find something which is worth even less than oneself, which one can despise as one was despised oneself. It is not enough to take over an old contempt and to maintain it at the same level. What is wanted is a dynamic process of humiliation. Something must be treated in such a way that it becomes worth less and less, as the unit of money did during the inflation. And this process must be continued until its object is reduced to a state of utter worthlessness. Then one can throw it away like paper, or repulp it.”18

  In the Bosnian town of Višegrad there is a graceful 400-year-old bridge, hewn of large off-white stones, that spans the emerald-green waters of the Drina River. The Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić centered his novel, The Bridge on the Drina, around the pumice structure, which he could see from his window as a boy. The book chronicles, over 350 years, the turbulent and often violent history of Višegrad and Bosnia. And as Andrić pointed out, the bridge has served as a kind of public theater in times of war and upheaval. Brigands and criminals were once impaled and executed on its stone flanks. “In all tales about personal, family or public events,” Andrić wrote, “The words ‘on the bridge’ could always be heard.”19

  The steep wooded hillsides that plunge to the river have for centuries produced killers of appalling magnitude. During the Bosnian war the latest arose from Višegrad, Milan Lukić, along with his group of some fifteen well-armed companions. They too used the bridge as a prop to exterminate a Muslim community that had been there for centuries. Of the 14,500 Muslims who lived in Višegrad before the war, 3,000 are missing or dead. The others are scattered around Bosnia, many living in poverty in overcrowded rooms and refugee centers.

  In April 1992, when the conflict between the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims began, Milan Lukić returned from Serbia to his hometown. He gathered together a group of men, including his brother Miloš, his cousin Sredoje, and a waiter, Mitar Vasiljević. Lukić, who often went barefoot, called the group the Wolves. He set about robbing Muslim homes. The plunder quickly turned to killing. On May 18, Lukić burst into Dzemo Zukić’s home and shot his wife, Bakha, in the back, according to neighbors who saw the shooting. He drove the terrified husband away in the family car, a red Volkswagen Passat. Zukić was never seen again. But the car became a harbinger of death.

  The killings quickly became frenzied and common. On one occasion, Lukić used a rope to tie a man to his car and dragged him through the streets until he died. On at least two occasions, he herded large groups of Muslims into houses and set the buildings on fire. Zahra Turjacanin, her face and arms badly marred by the flames, escaped from one burning house on June 27 and raced screaming through the streets. Townspeople said she was the only survivor of seventy-one people inside. She now lives in France.

  Lukić and his followers raped young girls held captive at the Vilina Vlas spa outside Višegrad. Jasna Ahmedspahić, a young woman, jumped to her death from a window of the spa after being raped for four days. Then Lukić began to drive his captives to the center of the bridge. Lukić and his men taunted their victims, who were made to stand on the walls of the bridge, before pushing them into the water and opening fire with automatic weapons. He stuffed pork in the mouths of his Muslim victims and began to beat them to death with metal rods. Bodies, bloated and discolored from beatings and knife slashes, floated down the river, getting caught in the undergrowth along the banks. In one village, Slap, twelve miles down river from Višegrad, the villagers said they buried 180 bodies that floated up on the banks. One man was found crucified on the back of a door. On another occasion they found a garbage bag filled with human heads.

  Human beings become pawns, manipulated and moved around a board like chess pieces. Those struggling to survive in a morally bankrupt universe find that there are few restraints left. The perversion seeps into the behavior of those who came with noble sentiments to help. The U.N. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, just as aid workers in Africa did, used the money and power they wielded to frequent or even run prostitution rings. The most notorious prostitution ring in Sarajevo during the war, one that catered to the peacekeepers, the foreign community, and the gangsters—all those with hard currency—was run by Ukrainian troops. They had also cornered the market on black market diesel, although they had the annoying habit of mixing it with water.

  The reporters, diplomats, aid workers, and peacekeepers who travel into war zones, without the restraint of law and amid a sea of powerless people, often view themselves as entitled. They excuse immoral behavior because of the belief that the work they carry out is for a greater good—the rescue of those around them—which outweighs impropriety. They become giddy with the admiration and social status that come with being protected and privileged. Diplomats who entered Sarajevo restaurants would be applauded. They had servants, new jeeps, nice houses, and clout. And they had power unlike anything they experienced at home.

  The conflict created a new elite, foreign class. It was a class that fed off of war’s lawlessness and perversion. Students who spoke English in Bosnia and l
ater Kosovo were soon making in a week more money than their teachers made in a year. Many lost all desire to study. It was not worth it. They paraded the new clothes and sunglasses they could buy with their dollars. Some began to look down on those around them with the same arrogance of those they worked for.

  To those who are hungry, who spend all day in cold, gutted homes with no running water, who sleep on the concrete floors of overcrowded schools set up as refugee centers, who wake up and spend hours hunting for food or standing in long lines outside aid distribution centers, a little more humiliation is not much to endure. Many longed to enter the easy world of the elite. They would pay any price.

  Many of those who set out to write their memoirs, or speak about the war, do so with shame. They know war’s perversion. It corrupts nearly everyone. To be greeted by an indifferent public, by people who would rather not examine, in the end, their own darkness, makes the effort Herculean. After each war some struggle to tell us how the ego and vanity of commanders leads to the waste of lives and needless death, how they too became tainted, but the witnesses are soon ignored. It is not a pleasant message.

  As would be the case with war literature in the millennia following its creation, The Iliad describes the bonds of honor between fellow warriors. Soldiers, while describing the closeness they feel in combat as friendship, are, as J. Glenn Gray wrote, probably deceived. The battlefield, with its ecstasy of destruction, its constant temptation of self-sacrifice, its evil bliss, is more about comradeship. The closeness of a unit, and even as a reporter one enters into that fraternity once you have been together under fire, is possible only with the wolf of death banging at the door. The feeling is genuine, but without the threat of violence and death it cannot be sustained.

  There are few individual relationships—the only possible way to form friendships—in war. There are not the demands on us that there are in friendships. Veterans try to regain such feelings, but they fall short. Gray wrote that the “essential difference between comradeship and friendship consists, it seems to me, in a heightened awareness of the self in friendship and in the suppression of self-awareness in comradeship.”20

  Comrades seek to lose their identities in the relationship. Friends do not. “On the contrary,” Gray wrote, “friends find themselves in each other and thereby gain greater self-knowledge and self-possession. They discover in their own breasts, as a consequence of their friendship, hitherto unknown potentialities for joy and understanding.”21

  The struggle to remain friends, the struggle to explore the often painful recesses of two hearts, to reach the deepest parts of another’s being, to integrate our own emotions and desires with the needs of the friend, are challenged by the collective rush of war. There are fewer demands if we join the crowd and give our emotions over to the communal crusade.

  The only solace comes from simple acts of kindness. They are the tiny, flickering candles in a cavern of darkness that sustain our common humanity.

  There is a spiritual collapse after war. Societies struggle with the wanton destruction not only of property and cities but of those they loved. The erosion of morality and social responsibility becomes painfully evident in war’s wake. Many feel used. By then it is too late. Those who drained the society flee, are killed, or live on in luxury from the profits of modern wars. Lethargy and passivity plague the populace that no longer has the energy or the moral fortitude to reconstitute society or fight back.

  In the wake of war comes a normalization that levels victims and perpetrators. Victims and survivors are an awkward reminder of the collective complicity. Their presence inspires discomfort. So too with perpetrators, whose crimes were witnessed and even supported by many. But it is often the victims who suffer the worst bouts of guilt and remorse. They feel in debt to those who died. They know that it is not the best who survive war but often the selfish, the brutal, and the violent. Those who abandoned their humanity, betrayed their neighbors and friends, turned their back on their family, stole, cheated, killed, and stomped on the weak and infirm were often those who made it out alive. Many victims grasp, in a way the perpetrators do not, the inverted moral hierarchy. They see this inversion in their own struggle to survive. They realize, in a way that the perpetrators again do not, that the difference between the oppressed and the oppressors is not absolute. And they often wonder if they could have done more to save those who were lost around them.

  “I might be alive in the place of another, at the expense of another; I might have usurped, that is, in fact killed,” wrote Primo Levi, himself a survivor of the Holocaust.22

  The physical marks of war are nearly erased from Sarajevo. Sheets of glass have been fitted into the high-rises, and the shell holes have been plastered over. The newly painted trolleys rumble noisily down the tracks of the central boulevard Zmaja od Bosne, known during the war as Snipers’ Alley. Water, a commodity once so precious that mothers dashed under artillery fire to reach water trucks, gushes miraculously from the taps.

  But the Bosnian capital, which once held together a blend of Muslims, Croats, and Serbs and hung on to life during almost four years of siege by the Bosnian Serbs, is a cultural wasteland. The city, once an artistic center, had a cosmopolitan feeling and a rich cultural and intellectual life. Marriages and friendships that crossed the ethnic divides were commonplace. Today, the ethnic mix and the liveliness it created are gone, along with hopes that the city would rekindle its old identity—hopes that have been disregarded by all three ethnic groups.

  The $5.1 billion international reconstruction effort, which has physically mended Sarajevo, masks despair. The smooth, plaster facades of apartment blocks, painted purple, red, blue, and yellow, shelter people who for the most part survive on the beneficence of others.

  Beneath the physical rehabilitation, however, there is another reality. Men, out of work, often wounded physically or emotionally, waste hours in dingy coffee shops. Many of the young gather in the lines for visas outside foreign embassies. At night they meet in jammed, smoky clubs like Fis or The Stage where they can buy marijuana, Ecstasy, and heroin. An army of war invalids lies trapped indoors. Most of them lack proper medical attention, and many spend their days alone in rooms, tended by elderly parents.

  “My son is inside,” said an angry seventy-year-old man, who would not give his name, as he stood outside his small house fitting new aluminum drainpipes to the roof. “He can’t get up. Every night my wife has to go in and turn him over so he can go to the bathroom.”

  Thousands in the city, where half of the work force is jobless, live in apartments that belong to someone else, someone who lives across the ethnic gulf, still a universe away in this partitioned country.

  Muslims now account for more than 90 percent of the population in this city of 3 50,000 and with the widespread uprooting of people during and after the war, only 20 percent of the city’s residents are natives of the city. The siege and the drastic changes that followed it have left behind exhaustion and bewilderment that makes routine life daunting.

  “I will never again be able to live such a strong, horrible, and wonderful life,” said Boba Lizdek, thirty-two, a book translator. Lizdek, a Serb who stayed in Sarajevo through the war, said that since then she had lost her focus and purpose. “It is as if I see life through pieces of a mirror that lies in fragments,” she said.

  The suburb of Dobrinja, built as the athletes’ village for the 1984 Winter Olympics, was on the front line during the war. Sections of the town are in ruins, the walls and roofs gone, the bricks and cement chewed up by shell and bullet holes. Crude grave markers poke up at odd angles from tiny, overgrown parks and lonely patches of ground.

  The renovated buildings, often next to the ruins, gleam with spotless white plaster and terra-cotta tiled roofs. The balconies hold boxes of carnations. The streets are quiet.

  Murdija Badzić, fifty-one, lived in a small apartment that she and her husband rebuilt for $ 10,000. It was clean, with new carpets, a semicircular blue sofa in the liv
ing room, and freshly painted walls.

  In June 1992, Serbian troops occupied the Dobrinja area. Badzić was herded barefoot along with her children to a prison camp, where they were held for two weeks.

  The family stayed away for four years out of fear, she said, and when she returned in 1996, all the mementos of her life, her photos, the children’s favorite toys, the wedding gifts, and the collection of trinkets that remind couples of the passage of time together, had vanished.

  The two-room apartment held nothing of the old life. The only photo on the wall was of her eldest son, Husein, a soldier killed in the war. She and her husband lived with their remaining two sons. The young men, unemployed since the end of the war, had applied to emigrate to the United States. When Badzić spoke of the war, her youngest son, Aladin, twenty-four, abruptly left the room.

  “Forgive him,” she said. “He cannot talk about the war. He cannot hear about it.”

  During the family’s detention, Aladin, who was sixteen at the time, was severely beaten by Serbian soldiers and threatened with mock executions. He did not speak for two months after he was released.

  In the empty street below, Huso Kovač, fifty-eight, swung himself forward with the help of hand-held aluminum crutches. He said he disliked spending days in his apartment, which previously belonged to a Serb. He moved laboriously about the neighborhood, resting at times on the cement walls and staring at the road.

  Before the war Kovač worked in Sutjeska, the national park that was the site of a major Partisan battle against the Nazis in World War II. When he spoke of the yearly anniversaries, which always saw the arrival of Tito, the dictator, his eyes lit up. It was the only time he smiled.