The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  And the station was, of course, a total wreck. The facade was normal enough, except for some old shell damage. Inside a few stores were working, and there was a desultory crowd waiting, as if in a Samuel Beckett play, for something—a train, a bus, a long-lost friend—that never seemed to turn up. Once under the tracks and up the stairs to the platforms, however, the sadder reality of Sarajevo station became readily apparent.

  There were six tracks, and grass grew up from all of them. The station clock stood still, unwound, unpowered: It was stuck at some minutes after five, the time one of the shells struck home in 1992, just when the siege began. A few carriages stood idly, their paint peeling, their windows shattered, as if they were waiting for restoration in a rail museum. In one corner a large diesel truck had been coupled with rusty steel cables to a carriage, and someone said that it might leave later that afternoon, its tires straddling the railway tracks, and make a journey to one of the city suburbs, half an hour away.

  At first I thought there was no one there, that the station was quite dead. But behind a coal heap I found four miserable-looking men, all from Sri Lanka, who said they had been living on the platforms for the past six months. They spoke English, and explained that a middleman in Colombo, to whom they had each paid six thousand American dollars, had promised them he would smuggle them into Germany and find them work.

  They had been brought west by cargo ship and by freight train to Turkey and then—of all places—to Banja Luka, which is where the middleman himself had wanted to go. They had eventually wound up here in Sarajevo, where the agent had left, had given them the slip. They had been on the platform ever since, with no money, no prospects, no work, no passports, no friends. Except they knew a man named Bobby, one said—he was a Nigerian, a student at Sarajevo University, and he came down from time to time and brought them cigarettes. They begged for food in the station square.

  I felt desperately sorry for them—though heaven knows, I suppose I should have felt sorrier for the Sarajevans themselves. I let one of them use my cell phone to call his mother in Colombo, and when the number rang and a familiar voice replied in Sinhalese, his friends crowded around him, smiling, laughing, trying to pass on messages to friends and relatives, reassuring everyone back home that all was well even though it manifestly wasn’t, and that all would be well even though it clearly wouldn’t be. I couldn’t see that they had much reason for optimism, though they seemed to cling to the memory of the promises made by the man who had brought them here, There was no work to be had in Bosnia, there was no money. Nor was there much by way of law or due process or some structure by which they could get redress and hammer their lives back into order.

  I gave them a little money, and when I walked back down the steps toward the tunnel I saw that one of them, the boy who had called his mother, was weeping. “I am so homesick,” was all he said, and waved and turned away.

  Sarajevo is a town given over almost entirely now to “the internationals”—the aid workers and the foreign financiers and the staff of the man who essentially runs the town and who is called, with true Gilbertian flummery, the high representative. I would receive letters for some while after I left Sarajevo from functionaries who worked at the Office of the High Representative, and I imagined them to be courtiers to a man who wore spurs and a cuirasse and a plumed hat, and ran all Bosnia as his personal fief. In fact he was a rather modest Spaniard named Carlos Westendorp, and those who worked for him were similarly unassuming. They worked to rebuild the wrecked country and its capital in the businesslike way of true Eurocrats, wearing suits as they did so, keeping rigidly to an eight-hour day, being chauffered around town in long white four-wheel-drive cars, living in apartments that were no more or no less modest than those they had left behind in Brussels, London, or Rome, and taking leave at frequent intervals and traveling to do so always in business class. There were said to be thirty thousand such “internationals” in Sarajevo—seven hundred alone in Mr. Westendorp’s office. The Bosniaks who did not work for them, who remained outside the charmed circle, seemed to hate them, or at least envy them; and those who had managed to find work with the international community—as translators, drivers, functionaries—found their working habits strange, their approach irritatingly demanding.

  Rose had a friend in town, a young woman named Anja, who had fled during the worst of the war and had gone to live in Paris. Now she was back, with two languages, working as an interpreter for the high representative. She was paid a handsome salary in convertible marks to translate technical documents into and out of Bosnian, and out of and into English and French. But she didn’t like her job, and nor, she said, did many of her Bosnian friends. It was simply too hard.

  “I think we are a pretty lazy people,” Anja told me one day, as we drank coffee in one of the tiny and impossibly crowded bars that have recently sprung up like weeds out of the ruin. “It is part of our Ottoman heritage, I guess. All I do is drink coffee, get my hair done, talk. We Balkans like to talk. We’ve never had a tradition of working like this. And so you see what happens here now. There’s no energy to do anything real. There are just a lot of get-rich-quick schemes. Lots of sponging off the internationals. Black markets. And drugs—lots of drug smuggling. And girl smuggling. And people—workers to Germany, that sort of thing.”

  I told her about the four men I had found at the railway station. “Typical,” she replied. “Everything in transit, nothing permanent, anything that’ll make quick money. That middleman—bound to have been a Bosniak. I probably know the guy. Cute, if you like that sort of thing. We may see him tonight in Jez [a café, named for a local type of hedgehog, and much favored by the current Bosnian mafia]. You know, Sarajevo’s not a good place. It ruins itself with fighting, and then it gets ruined again by all these foreigners. They mean well, but they don’t understand. Maybe the foreign soldiers do. Maybe people with guns understand this place. But not many others. It doesn’t work by normal rules. There’s a sort of anarchy here. And then there’s all the anger, one people against another, and those against a third.

  “You have it in Ireland, yes? It goes back years, yes? But in your case it only concerns two sets of people. Here it concerns three, at least. And the foreigners too. And all the groups you’ll have forgotten about long ago.”

  She went on to tell me about an old boyfriend, a young jeweler who had come from that strange area of Bosnia known as the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a fingerlike extension of longtime Turkish rule sandwiched between Kosovo and Bosnia. It was still largely Muslim—not because its inhabitants were Albanian (as they were in Kosovo itself), but because its people had become Islamicized after so very many years of living under Ottoman occupation. These people had a long history of being ostracized too, she said, had been caught up in the fighting because they were “different,” because they were Muslim, because they were sharp traders who made money and, in her words, “behaved like Jews or Chinese.”

  Her own boyfriend, wearying of threats by the Bosnian Serbs and the jealousy even of the home-grown Bosnian Muslims and Croats around him, had emigrated to Istanbul. There, she said, he felt safe—others from the Sanjak had been going to Turkey for years, and there was now a more sizable Balkan community in the city than one might imagine. She urged me to go and see him; I promised that I would.

  I felt at first that I didn’t much care for the Sarajevo internationals. They all looked so smug and well-dressed, I thought; they took all the tables at the city’s few good restaurants; their numbers drove up the prices of the best flats; and their shiny white Range Rovers and Land Cruisers rode just that little bit taller than all the other cars in town, lending them a hauteur which I thought they didn’t much deserve. Parasites, I thought unkindly, not helpers in the real sense. These weren’t the people who dirtied their hands bringing help to a benighted place, like the doctors of Médecins sans Frontières, or the vanguard teams from the UN Refugee Commission. These were the assistance commissars, and I resented them. But then again I
knew only too well that I was an international too, and I lived far better than most of the inhabitants, and that I was hardly dirtying my hands with the reality of this town or any other. So how could I talk?

  The Independent Media Commission, which was set up to try to give some direction to the stripling country’s fractured and fractious press and broadcasting industries,* struck me as probably offering an example of the internationals’ schtick. It had been set up in 1998, the language of its establishment hinting at the bureaucracy involved, since it had been done “…under the Authority of Annexe 10 of the General Framework Agreement for peace, and Article V of the Conclusions of the Bonn Peace Implementation Conference 1997….”

  The thinking behind the commission was simple enough: The output of the various radio and television stations in what in 1998 was a three-year-old country is, not surprisingly, deeply and intensely partisan, to the point of becoming dangerously inflammatory—so let a body of neutral observers, the commission, monitor the stations’ output, try to curb the excesses of the wilder members of the fraternity, and use persuasion, sanctions, and perhaps even force to oblige them all to behave. A perfectly laudable aim: The idea that a new country should have a robust but responsible press can be nothing less than the universally acceptable wish of reasonable men.

  The offices are on the third floor of a half-wrecked building close to the front line, beside a threadbare riverside park. A dozen white cars were parked outside, and a chauffeur was polishing the windows of the largest of them. Inside all was tidy, quietly busy. The air-conditioning hummed; secretaries, dressed as they might be in Brussels or London, stepped in and out of offices, looking serious. I was eventually shown into the office of a former sergeant in the British army parachute regiment, who laughed and shook his head when I asked if knew anything about the press or broadcasting, but whose desk was now covered with memorandums, in a Babel of tongues, giving those few back up in Brussels or Geneva or New York who might be interested news of the latest skirmishes in what he called “Bosnia’s war for truth.” He appeared outwardly calm but said that he was in fact perplexed, overwhelmed. He had his work cut out for him.

  “Sometimes it is hard to take these broadcasts seriously,” he said, waving a sheet of paper at me. “Look at this—it’s a transcript of a station in the Serb Republic—TV St. George, run by Radovan Karadzic’s daughter, as it happens—which claimed the other night that, listen to this, Mujaheddin fighters on the Muslim side are kidnapping Serbian children, and feeding them to the lions in the Sarajevo zoo! I ask you! This is the kind of thing we deal with all the time.

  “We’ve got Croatian TV, with huge transmitters down in Herzegovina, just up in the hills beyond Dubrovnik—great waterskiing, by the way!—uttering all kinds of bilge, which the Serbs get terribly worked up about. There is RTV-BiH, which is hopelessly Muslim-biased. The Serbs don’t like that either. Canal S is very pro-Serb, and so is STV, which we want to shut down because it broadcasts endless stuff directly from inside Serbia about how wonderful Milosevic is and how cowardly NATO is.

  “Some of it we permit, because we’re all for free speech. But some of it becomes too irresponsible—just rabble-rousing. That we try to take a hard line about—but we have to follow procedures, of course, and it all takes time. It takes eight, nine steps, so far as I know.

  “First we ask those stations that break our code—and it’s mainly TV stations; the people here are fanatic TV addicts—we ask them to say they’re sorry. Then we issue a warning. Then we make an order against them. We can fine them. We can suspend their broadcasting license. We can go into their building, seize their equipment, close them down, take their license away forever. It is all very formal—but we do have the power.”

  But I put it to the former soldier that all of this wasn’t going to do much good if, moments after a broadcast like the one he told me about, a gang of Serbs came down to the Sarajevo zoo bent on killing young Muslims who might look as though they had thrown Serbian children to the lions. He shook his head wearily. “That’s what I mean. We behave like reasonable people here. Not everyone else does.”

  Later in the day I drove a couple of miles west out of town to the sprawling and scrupulously well-guarded headquarters of SFOR, the huge multinational armed force that is charged with trying to keep the peace inside Bosnia. After an hour spent acquiring permission—during which I had to stand directly in front of a Turkish armored car that trained its 50 mm cannon directly onto my windshield—I found myself in the Ops Room, with a dapper Argentinian brigadier who clicked his heels and said how sorry he was about the Falklands War, and with his colleague, a young British colonel who was also an Irish hereditary earl—and who might have stepped straight out of an Evelyn Waugh novel.

  We sat in the sun and drank tea—no beer before seven, SFOR rules—and I told him about the troubles that the IMC had enforcing anything. “It falls to us, then,” said His Noble Lordship. “Very simple, really. If push comes to shove we don’t bother to go through the whole rigmarole of warning them and asking them to stop. We don’t go to their offices—no point, really, if you want to act decisively. We just go up to the hill where they have the transmitter—there’s usually no one there, or perhaps just a chokidar and we find the switch, and flick it up. Bingo! Turns everything off. And then we put a couple of sentries there so they can’t go back and turn it on, and if they do, we blow it up. Quite simple, really. Miserable for the sentries in winter, of course. But it’s the only kind of thing some of these chaps understand. A bit of decisiveness.”

  So, were the internationals a good thing, on the whole? “They mean well. That chap Westendorp—good fellow, reasonable man. But he’s dealing with terribly unreasonable people. I think they sometimes forget that. That’s where we come in. We keep the three sides apart. And we make sure that everyone behaves. Who’s the bigger dictator—the high representative, or the general, the SFOR commander?” he asked rhetorically.

  “I guess they’re both pretty much dictatorial in their powers. The civilians are the benign ones, I guess. They don’t have the muscle to be malign. We do. It’s not very easy to argue with us. Have you seen some of our tanks? And we can whistle up planes in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

  “No—a strong hand is needed to run a place like this. To keep the lid on the pressure cooker. And for now we’re the strong hand. Us in Bosnia. Our chums down in Kosovo before long, I guess. You seen any news today?”

  In a bar later that evening I met two policemen, dressed in navy blue uniforms and with an impressive array of badges, flashes, and medals. They were Americans, one from Kansas City, the other from Wichita Falls, Texas. They had been seconded to the UN and had spent the past twelve months in Bosnia, trying—“yes, trying”—to train young Bosniak policemen. The biggest problems had to do with drug smuggling and passport scams. The pair thought that Sarajevo was probably now one of the largest drug-smuggling centers in the world. The raw material came on what they called “the Mujaheddin highway” from Afghanistan or the Burmese Golden Triangle, and it was refined and distributed from warehouses among the ruins of central Bosnia. “Everyone’s in on it,” drawled the Texan in a tone of languid desperation. “It’s not just a Muslim thing, you know.”

  But anyway, he continued, it wasn’t his problem anymore. He was leaving Bosnia the very next morning and going home to Texas. He had just had his final plate of kebabs, the raznjazici, and now he was going down to the Turkish bazaar by the old library, to buy one of those “darned cute carved shell cases.” A small cottage industry had developed at the east end of town, and merchants peddled the intricately worked cylinders of brass, 155 mm being the largest and most expensive. He thought he might take two. One for each side of the fireplace in the den. “Then I can tell the story. Don’t get much better than that in Wichita Falls, I can tell you.”

  Near to the restaurant was what used to be known as Princip’s Corner. Rose and I had argued heatedly that morning as whether the more important event
in Sarajevo’s history was the five-year siege of the 1990s or whether it was what happened eighty years before, on June 28, 1914, at this corner, at the end of the street to the north of second bridge across the Miljacka River. (I was for the earlier event, which, after all, I pointed out, involved the whole world. To the siege, most of the world turned its back.)

  The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his morganatic* wife, Sophie Chotek, had just been driven there after a meeting at the town hall, now the ruined National Library. A man named Gavrilo Princip fired at the couple with a small pistol, killing them both. A black tablet was later erected at the spot, noting that “Here, in this historical place, Gavrilo Princip was the initiator of liberty, on the day of St. Vitus, the 28th of June, 1914.”

  What the tablet omitted to say, of course, was that the two victims who fell here in 1914 became the eight million that fell all across Europe in the Great War triggered by their assassination. And what it also chose not to say was that Princip was a Serb, and the most extreme of nationalists. The date he chose was itself pregnant with significance: June 28 is not merely Saint Vitus’s Day—it is the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje, when all Serbs celebrate their battle with (and defeat at the hands of) the Ottoman Turks—the date also chosen by Slobodan Milosevic, seventy-five years later, to begin his own Serb campaign, which culminated in so much contemporary bloodletting.

  But all this, for the tourist, was now moot. Those who once came to read the tablet and to ponder the notion that Princip had somehow initiated “liberty”—that he had somehow performed some noble deed—no longer have no opportunity to do so. The tablet is gone, torn down by the Bosnian government in 1996 simply because Princip was a Serb nationalist, no different in his way from the artillerymen and the snipers who, in the name of Greater Serbia, made life for Sarajevo’s Bosnians so wretched and so dire.