In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century
Page 89
Sarita's parents welcome me warmly to their home again. Father Matijević still believes whatever the Serbian television tells him. Our conversation always returns to talk of plots and spies. The Serbian war crimes never took place, and within an hour father and daughter are fighting like cats again. During the bombardments, Sarita's parents had worked together to build a new brick shed in the garden, they went on working no matter what, it was their way of making a stand.
After dinner, Sarita takes me to the beauty parlour down on the corner. It is already dark, almost closing time. Two girls are still sitting under the hairdryers. I ask all the women in the place what has been on their minds most this week. Marita, thirty-five, has a fifteen-year-old son who wants to go out tomorrow night, but she doesn't have a cent to give him. Gordana, the thirty-three-year-old beautician, wants a new lover. ‘How else can I find the inspiration to go on?’ Mirjana simply wants to go away, far away.‘I was seventeen when this misery started, now I'm twenty-three. I've lost the best years of my life to this stupid war.’
Mirjana is dazzlingly beautiful, beside her I suddenly feel old and fat. She has an office job at the state oil company; it's Serbia in miniature, she says. ‘The idiots, the brown-noses, they take everything. The people who think about things and do their work well are the ones who get left behind.’ Gordana says: ‘Almost all my old friends have left. The ones who stayed are all crazy.’ She laughs, but she means it.
Her brother Goran, twenty-two, comes in and eagerly joins the discussion: ‘There were five of us, friends. Three of us have already left, and that's all we talk about now.’ Ten buses now leave Belgrade each night for Budapest, he tells me. ‘That's 500 people a day! If things keep on like this, the whole opposition will be living outside the country before long. And all our girls want is a husband with a mobile phone!’
Mirjana stares dreamily into space: ‘Canada, that might be nice, don't you think? Or Holland, maybe?’
‘They asked a colleague of mine, a playwright, whether what was happening to this country was a drama. He said: “No, this isn't material for a drama, it's material for a comedy.” And he was right. All the big countries of the world going to war against this weird little Yugoslavia. All the evil of the world suddenly gathered together in this poor country. The 100,000 Albanians the Western papers say were murdered by the Yugoslav Army … but now, suddenly, they can't find the graves. Of course, horrible, terrible things have happened. But in essence it's a comedy, not a tragedy.
‘Every poor man is a fool, you know. Simply because he's poor. His clothes don't fit, his hair isn't styled, he's dirty, foolish. And in that way we're fools as well. We are the village idiots of the world. We live in a ghetto, we don't have any contacts with anyone any more. We used to have excellent ties with France and Holland, for example. But the NATO planes which bombarded us came from those countries too. They're on the other side now as well. Everyone's on the other side, except for us. That's not sad, that is, above all, foolish.
‘This can't be serious. You can't believe this is really happening. I still have the feeling that these things are not really going on, that it will be over tomorrow, like a head cold. But I'm afraid it's going to last a long time. Because there's no way out. We lost the war in Kosovo, we signed for our defeat, but everything has stayed the way it was. No politician can pull us out of this quagmire.
‘The bombardments were sort of like a comedy too. They bombed day and night, you got up with it and you went to bed with it, but you knew they didn't want to kill civilians, you could tell that from the targets they chose. So I wasn't afraid of a bomb falling on my house. Everything in the city kept on going, the cafés, the shops, even when the air-raid sirens were blasting. The farmers simply came into town to the market, the way they always had, and their prices weren't any higher. The run of the mill Yugoslavs weren't thinking about their role in history, mostly they were just flabbergasted.
‘When I was young, Novi Sad was more or less the same city it is now. Of course bits have been added, but life was the same, the mentality too. People here aren't interested in things that happen outside their own street. They're cool, and they're also a little dumb. The people who have put together these policies and caused all this trouble, they don't come from here. Radovan Karadžzić, Miložsević, Ratko Mladić, they're all mountain people. Those of us from the flatlands suffer under the things that happen, but we're not active in them.
‘This is a tolerant place, though: during this war there wasn't a single Albanian, Muslim, German or Dutchman harassed. But we're not cosmopolitan. We'd like to be, but no one is interested in us. We don't produce anything that's worth their while, no clothes, wine or meat. We don't have anything others want but don't have. We write books, okay, but that's for a tiny little group. Besides, as you know, people who read books don't make politics. They stay at home, they read and think about things.
‘Sure, a lot of intellectuals supported Miložsević. And now they support him even more; with his defeats, he has now become the symbol of this tormented nation. He has become a fool, they have become fools. He's no longer allowed to travel in Europe, they're no longer allowed to travel in Europe. More and more, they're becoming just like Miložsević. We share the same fate now, because of this war, and because of our isolation.
‘Under Tito, the legends were forgotten. Tito wasn't a Serb, even though he was pro-Serbian. After he died, everything went wrong. The Serbs panicked and started fantasising about their past. Suddenly they remembered that there had once been this big empire, and that they'd had kings, things like that. The poverty, the country's disintegration, all those uncertainties created a reality in which it was almost impossible to live. And from that myths were born, the one more fantastic than the other. So that's an answer to a situation, but that's not how it begins. What else can we do but tell each other stories?
‘And that foolish poor man? He still believes in it, after all these years, and at the same time he doesn't believe in it any more. He needs those stories to comfort his soul, but he doesn't believe that they will save him. A resurrection of Serbia, dreams like that, no one believes in them any more. That poor man is in a state of shock.
‘I once had a dog named Jackie. One winter's day that dog ran away, along the Danube, and somehow he got out onto an ice floe. Some children from the neighbourhood came and got me. “Mr Tižsma, your dog is going to drown!” I ran down there, called to it, all the dog had to do was take one little step, but it just sat there as if it were paralysed. The animal was in a complete state of shock. Finally the children were able to get a hold of him, and everything turned out all right.
‘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.’
Chapter SIXTY-FIVE
Srebrenica
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!’
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 a
nd 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.