In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  The snow keeps falling. We have settled in at Pension 101 on Kasima Efendije Dobrace. The street was renamed recently, like others all over the city, this time after a Muslim cleric. The Gavrilo Princip Bridge no longer exists either, it has become the Latin Bridge again, just like before 1918. The other guests at the boarding house include two representatives of a German pump manufacturer, someone from the ING bank, a French camera crew and an Italian diplomat.

  The next morning, the city is deathly quiet. The only sound that carries in the freezing air is the clatter of shovels, and now and then a voice. All of Sarajevo lies beneath a white layer at least a metre deep. Cars become stuck, some roads are blocked by fallen branches. Halfway through the morning the electricity goes out, an hour later it suddenly pops back on again. The airport is shut down tight. Everyone is jammed together in the little departure hall: aid workers, businessmen, journalists, tired Bosnians off to visit family in the West, American GIs with big duffel bags full of Christmas presents. I kill some time with Captain Gawlista and Sergeant Niebauer of the Bundeswehr; they've been down here for six months in the service of peace, and now they have precisely ten days’ vacation, their wives and children are waiting for them in Frankfurt. A tour in these parts is no picnic, every snow cloud in the Balkans drops its load in this miserable valley. Then the electricity goes out again, but everyone remains in good spirits: Christmas will be here in three days, surely then this will all be over.

  We are living in the aftermath of the fourth Yugoslav war. The television at the hotel shows endless relief convoys that have been stranded for days at the border, in the mountains of Macedonia. For reasons of some bureaucratic harassment or other, they are not being allowed to enter Kosovo. That was to have been my final destination as well. I still have people to meet in Skopje and Prižstina, but this snowstorm is making a complete mess of things. Instead I end up spending a melancholy afternoon at Café To Be or Not to Be, with Hrvoje Batinić, journalist, Sarajevo expert and professional pessimist. ‘For me, pessimism is a way of life,’ he claims. ‘So whenever my expectations turn out wrong, I'm always pleased. During the siege, I felt great. Friends who came by would always say: “Batinić is a complete mystery. He's lost all his gloominess. It's as though he likes it!” But to feel free, all I had to do was look at the clouds. These days my depressions are back.’

  He talks about the first year of the siege, and about the army unit in which he served: ‘Serbs, Croatians, Muslims, there was no difference. We all saw ourselves as citizens of Sarajevo, normal people being attacked by madmen in the hills. But then, in September 1992, all the Serbs were kicked out of the Bosnian Army. That's when it started, that thinking along ethnic lines, even among us Muslims. And now we're right in the middle of it. Today there is only one thing to which no financial limitations apply: the building of mosques.’

  According to Batinić, these are the days of the great game of peek-aboo. Bosnians of every party hide themselves in the crowd, behind a stronger and wealthier leader. ‘During the election campaigns, no one talks about the normal issues any more, only about vague things like the “universal question” and the “nation”. That keeps you from being accountable for anything. That way it's always the other guy.’ Many of his fellow citizens still have no idea what has happened to them.‘Everyone's confused. At first, people blamed the war for all their problems. Now they're noticing that they've also lost all the economic security that socialism brought with it: jobs, health care, housing, education. Right now, unemployment here is at around seventy per cent.’

  A legion of Western relief workers has descended on Sarajevo and the rest of Bosnia. They drive around pontifically in their expensive Land Cruisers, make calls to all over the world on their mobile phones, stay at the Holiday Inn to the tune of 350 marks a night. They are the heralds of wealthy Europe and America, the humanitarian activists and flashy ‘nation builders’, the media heroes hopping from one cause to the next. Batinić leans over and looks me straight in the eye. ‘Tell me, Geert, honestly: what kind of people are you sending us anyway? The ones at the top are usually fine. But otherwise, with only a few exceptions, the people I have to deal with are third-class adventurers who would probably have trouble finding a job in their own country.’ It makes him furious. ‘To them, we're some kind of aboriginals. They think they have to explain to us what a toilet is, what a television is, and how we should organise a school. The arrogance! They say Bosnians are lazy people, but it takes them a week to do a day's work. And you should hear them chattering away about it! At the same time, everyone sees how much money they spend on themselves and their position. They put three quarters of all their energy into that.’

  We order another drink, and Batinić starts complaining about the corruption in Bosnia, the rise of religious leaders in the city, the enthusiastic discussions at the university about ‘the Iranian model’. ‘Sarajevo isn't Sarajevo any more. The city has filled with runaway farmers. Of the people who were here during the siege, maybe twenty per cent are left.’

  Batinić's pessimism has had the upper hand again for some time now. ‘When our children grow up,’ he predicts, ‘there's a great chance they'll be even more fanatical than the people who started this war. That thought is more than normal people can bear. We still remember how it was, the Yugoslavia of ten years ago, a normal European country. And look at it now. We lost everything we were good at, and we kept everything that was bad. Is it easy for you to look at yourself in the mirror? Do you dare to admit that you've ruined everything, even for your children and grandchildren? That kind of courage, that's what's missing here. But let me tell you: we've had the wars, and now nothing is moving any more, nothing changes, it's all just standing still!’

  It's been snowing for days, and now a cold, heavy fog has blown in as well. No planes are leaving. At a certain point, though, you notice that it is something after all, just to quietly watch the snowflakes fall outside the window of the To Be or Not to Be.

  Then suddenly, that same evening, I have the chance to get away. I catch a ride with Esad Mavrić through the winter night, to Split; don't ask me how he does it, but he does it. We go slipping into the mountains, weave around an avalanche, wait behind a bogged-down SFOR convoy. ‘Now we're thirty-five kilometres from Sarajevo,’ Esad says after three hours. It has stopped snowing.

  Esad was once a civil engineer and championship sharpshooter, but that was in a past too distant to measure. He has two families to support. We talk about the siege, about what you could do with one plastic bottle full of water – make tea, brush your teeth, wash your shirt, even take your Sunday bath – and about the never-ending cold, about the thick pile of blankets under which you spent your days. ‘I had the loveliest dreams back in those days, I've never had dreams like that since,’ Esad sighs as he manoeuvres around a stranded bus. The moon is shining over the mountains. The villages are asleep beneath the thick layer of Balkan snow.

  He talks about the secret tunnel, the lifeline to the free zone, and the smuggling that went on. Water was extremely precious. ‘One time I saw an older man who had tapped too much water at the spring beside the brewery, two ten-litre jerry cans. They were so heavy that he couldn't move quickly any more. He was crossing a field and they got him right away. Two boys saw him go down. They took a gamble: one of them drew the sniper's fire, the other one risked his life by running to where the man lay, grabbing the jerry cans and then racing off. They left the man lying there.’

  Esad reminds me of the statistics: of the 400,000 inhabitants of Sarajevo, 11,000 were killed during the siege, including more than 1,100 children.

  Then suddenly we are out of the snow and approaching Mostar. Ruin after ruin looms up in the silvery night, one scorched and blasted housing block after the other. The river thunders past the world-famous remains of the sixteenth-century bridge. How lovely it must have been once, how impressive, how powerfully built. Those who blew that ancient span to rubble – and that must have been quite a chore – knew
what they were doing: they were breaking down what had been built up. It is the same mentality which lay behind the destruction of Dubrovnik and the famous library at Sarajevo. ‘It was the farmers getting back at the city,’ Esad mumbles. ‘That's what happened everywhere during these wars. It was maybe even the heart of the matter.’

  The next morning there is the warm sun on the quayside in Split, the sparkling sea, the hissing of the waves rolling in from Italy. And that evening, as though it were the most normal thing in the world, I find myself wandering around the Christmas market in Strasbourg again. African men are selling socks with little coloured lights on them. A busker is singing Yiddish songs. Turkish boys are sweeping the streets. For a handful of francs, a travel agency is offering a weekend in New York. The Alsatian gingerbread smells of Christmas, 1900.

  Epilogue

  THESE FINAL LINES ARE BEING WRITTEN IN SUMMER 2006. IT WAS only six and a half years ago, on Friday, 31 December, 1999, that the headline in De Telegraaf, the Netherlands’ highest-circulation newspaper, crowed: ‘We're rolling in it! Party-going Holland smothered in luxury.’ The champagne was no longer sold by the bottle but by the crate, the Dutch were dressing ‘chicly and eccentrically’ for the party, and the traditional New Year's Eve beignet was steadily losing ground to ‘exclusive delicatessen products’. When I came home from my travels, everyone was talking about a television series in which one could follow, around the clock, the activities of a group of young people who had been locked up together in a house for three months, with no contact with the outside world. What the viewers saw was, above all, themselves: people hanging around in boredom on the couch, in the kitchen or the bedroom. No other television series had ever been received with such enthusiasm. A young man by the name of Bart, from the town of Roelofarendsveen, won the contest and became the nation's sweetheart.

  And a great deal has happened since. Kosovo has once again become a forgotten corner of the globe, and these days we can hardly find Bosnia on the map. Slobodan Miložsević died in a prison cell in the Hague, during his trial before the International Court of Justice. What we talk about now is 9/11, about the terrorists and the European Constitution, and about Iraq, America and the international rule of law.

  Meanwhile, almost everyone in Western Europe has grown accustomed to the euro. The introduction of coin and banknote went virtually without a hitch; only in the minds of older people do guilders, marks, francs, pesetas, shillings, escudos, drachmas and liras swarm stubbornly on.

  With the success of the Union, Europe's attractiveness continued to increase as well. One quarter of the population of Amsterdam's city centre now consists of ‘expats’. In London, English is no longer the mother tongue of one in three children. Immigration and integration – necessary in themselves for the vitality of the continent – are increasingly coming to be seen as hindrances. The problems surrounding certain groups of newcomers have in this way become a European issue – although the symptoms are different from one country to the next. With this, the chances increase that a permanent underclass will arise which, for whatever reason, will be unable to take advantage of the upward social mobility offered by European prosperity. In this way the global divide between rich and poor can slowly grow into fault lines that will tear apart European cities and regions.

  The attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, Bali in October 2002, the bombings in Madrid in March 2004, the murder of controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in November 2004, the bloodbath in London in July 2005: all these expressions of religious extremism have had their effect on the political climate. In some countries, politicians and others have wondered aloud about the extent to which Muslim immigrants in particular have been integrated into society, and in some circles the phenomenon of immigration itself has become a bone of contention: ‘Own People First!’

  At the same time, unrest has grown among Europe's seventeen million Muslims. Are we still welcome? Do we truly belong? In this way, Europe has in recent years become the unwilling front line in a conflict that must ultimately be fought out within Islam itself, a conflict concerning how such a traditional world religion must deal with secularisation, globalisation, individual liberties, women's rights and all the rest that goes with a modern society.

  In the Balkans the circus of international aid workers is largely gone. The biggest war criminals, Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, are still free men. The bombed bridges of Novi Sad are pulled carefully out of the river by the Dutch titans of the Mammoet salvage concern. Summer 2000 was a hot one. Little Gypsy boys, dangling their feet in the water, watch from the broken blocks of concrete, dreaming of far away. Meanwhile, the city has filled with the new homeless: the tens of thousands of refugees who, after years in the West, have been sent back to Serbia. The youngest among them do not even speak the language, the older children have experienced an orderly life as pupils at schools in Germany or the Netherlands. There is no work or housing for any of them. In Sarajevo, the sixteenth-century Begova Dzamija mosque has meanwhile been ‘renovated’ with piles of Saudi cash: antique decorative tiles have been removed, ornaments have disappeared, the walls have – in true Arab fashion – been covered in white plaster.

  When I visited Turkey in 1999, the newspapers there were full of reports about a Muslim activist who had been imprisoned only for reading aloud an Islamic-nationalist poem. Today, this same man, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is the prime minister, and is carefully steering his country towards European membership. On 1 May, 2004, the European Union was expanded with no fewer than 10 new members: Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Malta and Cyprus. In one enormous leap the population of the EU suddenly rose to more than four hundred and fifty million. Yet unity was nowhere to be found. The leaders of some member states still saw the EU as a source of peace and stability, particularly in the long term. Others were attracted primarily by the market. Others still were drawn by the huge funding distributed by Brussels. For the new members from the former Eastern Bloc, the EU was above all the best way to escape the former Soviet Union's sphere of influence, and to make the definitive step to the West. They were not at all interested in the kind of European super-state that inhabited the dreams of the French, the Germans and the Italians in particular, with the euro and a new constitution as its most important symbols. They, after all, had only recently recovered their freedom as nations. For them, the British, Polish and Scandinavian model – one in which the EU was seen more as a free economic zone, managed by arrangement between the various member states – was more attractive than a distinct, cohesive political identity.

  On 17 June of the same year, 2004, the first summit meeting of that new Union immediately ran aground: the twenty-five members could barely agree on a new leader. In an atmosphere grimmer than any experienced before, the Portuguese José Manuel Barosso was chosen at last. Barosso immediately took the opportunity to state that he was not allied with any of those ‘naïve federalists’. With that, the feud between the ‘federalists’ and the ‘intergovernmentalists’ had, in fact, been settled. Outside, as usual, demonstrations were held by tens of thousands of people to whom no one listened.

  One year later, the slumbering unrest erupted. In a referendum held on 29 May, 2005, a majority of French voters rejected the proposed European ‘constitution’ – which was, in fact, more a package of existing treaties, supplemented by a number of hardly controversial improvements in the fields of administration and democratic procedure. Two days later, on 1 June, the Netherlands followed suit with a resounding ‘no’. To add insult to injury, the European summit held barely two weeks later was also a fiasco. Even when it came to budgetary matters, the differences proved almost irreconcilable.

  Now it was no longer the small, new or somewhat marginal member states that were causing the problems. No, the core of this profound constitutional and financial crisis lay with the traditional member states, the founding members themselves. The old solidarity seemed to have
run its course. The prime minister of Luxembourg and temporary President of the EC, Jean-Claude Juncker, warned that – now that the memories of the Second World War were fading – there was not much time left for the current generation of political leaders to develop a sound structure for the EU. ‘I don't think the generation after us will be able to put together all those national biographies in such a way that the EU will not be split back into its national components – with all the dangers that entails.’ The cover of The Economist showed the corpse of the French revolutionary Marat in his bath, murdered by citoyenne Charlotte Corday: ‘The Europe that died. And the one to save.’

  I leaf again through the 1906 edition of Bellamy's In the Year 2000:‘Workers’ issues. Solved in the year 2000 … Bankers no longer necessary under new arrangement … Dickens, the most popular author of the year 2000 … Prisons now obsolete … Music, public concerts transmitted by telephone …War, done away with in the year 2000.'And, concerning Europe: ‘The major European countries, along with Australia, Mexico and parts of South America, have an industrial structure based on the model established by the United States. Peaceful relations between these peoples is assured by means of an ad hoc league of states stretching out all over the world.’

  What really has happened, in and around that once so auspicious year 2000? Some elements of Bellamy's utopia have actually been realised and more. European unification was – and is – above all a unique peace process. From Charlemagne to Adolf Hitler, leaders have tried to create a Europe unified as one people under one ruler. This time, however, the United Europe was a joint construct, and that changed everything. It brought to the heart of the continent – particularly to the two, eternal antipoles of France and Germany – a stability that had been lacking for centuries. In the last sixty years there have been no more wars throughout most of Europe, a situation unparalleled in history.