The Fracture Zone: My Return to the Balkans

by Simon Winchester

  The town government had long ago torn up the paving stones bearing Princip’s supposed footprints. So anyone who visits today will find nothing to see at the corner that bears his name. Perhaps Sarajevo has come to believe that its siege was the more important event in its history, and that what happened here on that Saint Vitus’s Day, though it may have had effects that rumbled across the rest of the world, had but little impact on this ancient Balkan town. I asked Anja what she thought: She was very much a child of her times, and said that in her opinion whatever Gavrilo Princip had done was far too long ago to be of any importance.

  People are still working among the ruins of the Oslobodanje. A long while ago the besieging Serbs had it in mind to use the building—grand and up-to-date as once it was—as their headquarters. But after their gunners failed to dislodge the workers from it, they simply shelled it into what they thought was oblivion. The crumbling sarcophagus of the main tower is still terribly dangerous, with slabs of broken cement swinging from rusty girders, and glass falling in torrents whenever there is a high wind. But the office building beside it, like the printing plant below, is still more or less intact; and if you pass through the back doors and in front of an elevator that is still peppered with bullet holes, there is a half-intact glass door and, beyond it, a scattering of desks, computers, and workbenches—a newspaper office, as messy and smoke-filled as any anywhere. It was from here throughout the war, as it still is from here today, that the bulk of Sarajevo’s more independent-minded newspapers and magazines were being edited, published, and printed.

  Zlatko Dizdarevic was the paper’s publisher when the war began, and his columns, published each week, were gathered together as one of the most moving testaments to the conflict. “This is not a war,” he wrote famously at the start of one column. “This is a horror that has no name. It is a black hole in the spectrum of all reasoned thought.”

  Dizdarevic is a Muslim, born in Belgrade, and he is married to a Serb. He looks older than his fifty years, very much a European, sitting behind his desk in tweeds and a sport shirt. He knows that the spotlight has shifted away from Sarajevo, and he understands that the world has other wars, other concerns.

  His own concern that day had nothing directly to do with Bosnia either: He was wondering whether it was right for the NATO bombers to have attacked the Belgrade television station, as had just been reported on the wire service. He wasn’t sure what view to take in his next column.

  “It is all to do with principles and realities, you know. Of course I am not in favor of anything that harms free speech, that amounts to censorship—as this bombing was meant to do. It was meant to silence the station, of course. But the reality of the situation is so different—that station was pumping out so many lies, it had to be silenced. But then again—we say they were lies. But were they? How do I know that what that nice Mr. Shea* in Brussels was saying was true? They were only bombing Belgrade to halt the spread of what they consider a perversion of the truth. So even the reality gets a little clouded at times. Often, in these parts, actually.”

  I asked him how things were in Sarajevo today. He looked downcast. He, too, had heard the Serbian broadcast about captured Serbian children being fed to the lions in the local zoo, and it made him wonder if matters were ever really going to get better.

  “At times I feel really nostalgic for the Tito era. Maybe we were less free. But Tito kept the lid on all this crazy nationalism. As a newspaperman I hate the censorship, the very idea of a government-controlled press. But so much about Tito’s time was good, compared to this. Better even than now, while we have SFOR to protect us, and that nice, well-meaning Mr. Westendorp to help us rebuild.

  “In theory I feel now that the Balkans need not be the black hole of Europe—I feel that a real mixing of the cultures here could be a good thing. They’ve mixed them pretty well in America, in London. Why not here? I keep asking myself. I am just not convinced that we here are pathologically unstable, that we need a heavy hand from outside to keep us in check. I feel that all this trouble is due simply to criminal manipulation—a few really, really bad people have made a business of stirring things up. They are profiting, and we are all losing.”

  But did he see any hope? “Not until we have something like the denazification programs they had in Germany after the war—because we do have real Nazis here, you know. Real fascists. Terrible people. They need to be found and rooted out. The politicians they control have views that are rooted in the nineteenth century. They need to be elected out of office. We need new people, a new generation. And economic recovery. Then the Balkans might have some hope. But not the heavy hand of outsiders—not for long.

  “Even I have some nostalgia for the war, you know. A terrible thing to say. But in those days there was some semblance of fatalism, all being in this together. Now we are divided again—feeding children to the lions, for heaven’s sake!—and we pretend that things are going to get better. I don’t think they are; I am afraid I truly don’t. Three years ago, when I was writing those columns, I was optimistic, and I knew that I would get my children, whom I had sent away for the siege, to come back and help rebuild.

  “But now I won’t ask them back. One of them is in Kansas City. One is in Italy. I don’t want them to come back here to live. Bosnia is not a good place, not for one with hopes and dreams. Everyone who is young and full of hope wants to leave. There is a sickness about this place. This is a place for old people now. For memories, and most of them bad memories.”

  That night was the last we spent in Sarajevo, and we took Anja out to dinner and then to a smoky bar that was filled with men she knew, all drug dealers or arms dealers, or men who could sell you an Australian passport and smuggle you across the frontiers and get you out and away. And we were going back to the hotel when I remembered that I hadn’t seen a Sarajevo rose, and I asked her what it was.

  She laughed, looked down at the roadway, and pointed at a spot a few yards away under a street lamp. “There!” she said. “Take a look.”

  A Sarajevo rose is the scar of a shell burst, a deep central core surrounded by a ring of smaller depressions made by the exploding shrapnel. Some wit had had the idea, a year or two before, to fill up all the remaining scars with pink molten plastic. There are now hundreds of them, pink road sculptures commemorating each cannonade of shellfire, pretty in their own macabre way.

  I told the young woman that I had been told to look at a Sarajevo rose and ask what it foretold about the future for Bosnia. What did she imagine?

  “A lot more like this, before too long,” she said. “This is not the end—it is just a stay. I just hope it is a very long one. But I am not so sure.”

  And she scuffed the pink plastic with her shoe, got back into her shiny white car, and sped off into the Sarajevo night.

  We sped off too, down what during the siege had been the ragged and dangerous western escape route toward the sea—and along which the internationals now left for weekends of waterskiing at Split. There were high mountains along the way, covered with snow that was melting into the road tunnels and making the road treacherous. It took two difficult hours to reach, just before the Croatian frontier, the ruined old Herzegovinan town of Mostar, where I knew we would see one of the saddest sights of all, one of the low points in this world of misery and ruin.

  5

  The Fortress by the Sea

  EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD the Muslims ever went, they left as a legacy something, most often a piece of architecture, that was and still remains entirely beautiful. The great palace of the Alhambra in Granada. The domes of Cordoba and the caravanserais of Iran. The hammam of Kiraly in Budapest. Timur’s mausoleum in Samarkand, or that of the Samanids in Bukhara. The shrine to the Imam Reza in Tabriz. And the countless mosques and minarets just about everywhere.

  Even the simpler, humbler structures in the small, unnoticed towns have an astonishing beauty, an integrity, an assuredness of style and grace. The day, some weeks before, when we had driven sout
h after being among the north Bosnian Serbs, and as we finally came to Travnik nestled in the hills, I remember remarking to Rose on the simple loveliness of all the minarets, rising as they did with such precision and economy from the more ordinary buildings of the town.

  No more graceful, precise, and economical structure could there ever have been, I used to think, than the bridge across the Neretva River, in the Herzegovinan capital of Mostar. It had given the town its name: Stari Most, the Old Bridge. It was quite a modest structure, crossing the deep and swirling green river with just a single graceful arch, no more than fifty yards across. It rose from two large buttresses that seemed to have been annealed into the very limestone river cliffs. Its underside was a perfect upward swoop of carefully chamfered and fitted blocks, its upper parapet a low-pitched roof, its walkway shining with the passage of a million slippered feet.

  From a distance it looked like a simple arabesque decorating the river valley. Up close it was a busy, teeming place, with cafés on each side, and bazaar shops selling beaten copper and brass, and in the old days stern Turkish policemen wearing the fez, and Serbian janissaries in their baggy trousers and brocaded waistcoats. It was more than four hundred years old when the latest round of Balkan wars began, and it did not survive them.

  We saw it begin to crumble, piece by hallowed piece, in the summer of 1992. The fighting here, once properly established, was between Croats and Muslims—groups that, for a short while, had actually dreamed up the imaginative idea that they might form an alliance against the Serbs. The Balkans, however, are a place where the only alliances tend to be those with parties from the outside: Within the region everyone seems bent on eventually fighting everybody else, and almost all alliances turn out to be deeply cynical, very, very brief, or, like this one, complete fictions. (The Serbs themselves had once very much wanted the city of Mostar, and indeed had envisioned all the land of Herzegovina and south Dalmatia as far as the ancient port city of Dubrovnik itself as belonging, in their wilder dreams, to some utopian vision of Greater Serbia. But in the early summer of 1992 the Croats beat them in battle here and drove them away from the bank of the Neretva for all time. The stage was then set for a war for control across the river, between the Muslims on the western side and the Croats on the east.)

  The bridge was built well, and for a while it stood up to the barrage of shellfire from the Croats on the hills above town. The Muslims, with a mixture of pride, affection, and simple economic need, tried their best to protect the old structure with automobile tires, hung over the edge as fenders, to minimize damage from shrapnel. But they were no match for the sustained and willful cannonade. One day late that autumn, and with an exhausted and exasperated roar that could be heard above the gunfire, the old bridge collapsed, its last stones—which had been painstakingly carved by Turkish masons in 1566—crashing into the river canyon and being swept downstream with the current. One should not mourn lost architecture so much as lost people, I suppose: But this was one of the loveliest bridges in the world, and it seems peculiarly terrible that it was in our enlightened times that we decided to demolish it, and to ruin a work that had survived so long.

  Rose and I stopped for lunch on our first day in Mostar at a café on the west side. The road beside us led up to where the bridge had been, and some obliging urban planner had stretched chicken wire across the entrance to stop people plunging into the waters below. The gentle curve of the mantel rose up from the stream and hung there in midair, like a broken tooth—as did its brother mantel on the far side. An old lady waved at me from the buttress on her side of the river, inviting me to her caftan shop, indicating that I might double back upstream and use the new replacement bridge—“Built by 36 Regiment, Royal Artillery, in 1994, a Gift of the British People to all the People of Mostar.” I pointed to my watch, and to the sirnica, the cheese pie that the waitress had just brought, and indicated that I would think about it.

  I saw her later, and when I chided her for greeting me in German, and said that I was in fact English, she launched into what sounded like a timetable recitative: “Ostend—Dover—Ashford—Westminster—Greenwich—Norfolk—Harwich!” She had been to England once, and had traveled by train. She thanked me for the bridge, as though I had built it personally. She explained that she had very much hoped I wasn’t German, as it was Germany that had first given formal recognition to Croatia and Slovenia, and she, as a good Muslim, could not abide the Croats. “Besides, see what they did to our bridge!”

  And to the rest of the town besides. The front line, still visible a hundred yards or so west of the Neretva, is as frightful a zone of destruction as I was to see anywhere in this war. It stretches along a wide street called the Boulevard Hvratski Branitelija, where the Croats had sited their artillery in the great buildings on its western side, and the Muslims had been holed up on the east. The scale of destruction makes it look like Dresden, or the London docks after a night of incendiaries, in World War II. Such walls as still stood were pockmarked with a million shell bursts; great jagged gaps show where building burned and crashed; there were weeds, pools of stagnant water, flies, and forgotten relics from those who lived and worked here—a sofa, a pair of spectacles, a baby’s pram, trousers.

  And in the open spaces behind there were graves, too, with hastily carved markers—Haris, Ivan, Milhija, Jovan—leaning drunkenly at all angles. This must have been a hellish place. But now the fig trees were in bloom, and blossoms drifted down from a plum tree, and in the scrubby banks leading down to a rushing rivulet there were purple larkspur and buttercups. The Balkan landscape, usually so unforgiving and harsh, can display moments of tenderness, too, and when it chooses to, nature can always reclaim the worst of human excess.

  But between Mostar and the coast the landscape is as classically unforgiving as any rain-shadow country can be—it is harsh and dry, with scrubby stands of forest and low and barren hills, and there are said to be innumerable snakes. Rocks, snakes, and guns, the locals say, are what the householders of Herzegovina know best. There was only a cursory frontier check at the town of Gabela, where we passed back into Croatia, before the car heaved up one final range of hills and then we saw, with breathtaking clarity, the coastline and the Adriatic.

  Here at last was the coast road from Split to Dubrovnik, along which I had driven on my way to India in 1977. Here at last I thought, was civilization once again. Here was normal life, and an extraordinarily beautiful one at that.

  The road onto which I was now turning left, to head down to Dubrovnik—is in truth one of the loveliest in all the world—it makes California’s justly celebrated Route 1 seem banal by comparison, because in the Pacific you are beside the ocean alone, whereas here you look down on islands. Not long ago this very coastal highway was a proud symbol of well-tempered normality. Until 1991 you could drive for four hundred miles, from Trieste to the Albanian frontier, without so much as a customs post or a police check, and certainly no need to show a passport. And yet you did all this across lands that until recently had been a muddled mosaic of once-competing suzerainties: You drove through large territories that had been variously Austrian, Italian, Roman, Venetian, Serbian, Ottoman, Slovenian, Croatian—and microscopically independent, too, as once Dubrovnik had been (when it was called Ragusa), and as poor Montenegro had been, when it had its own king.

  The creation of Yugoslavia ended all this colorful inconvenience, at least for a while. Under the astute presidency of Marshal Tito, and for eleven more years after his death in 1980, this was a single country, and once you had left the Italian town of Trieste and had passed through the relatively mild strictures of Tito’s Iron Curtain, you were on a coast road that told of his skillful eradication, or so it seemed at the time, of all the contrary statelets of the years before. Their relics were there—the churches, the mosques, the Venetian crests—but their attitudes and hatreds were not. This was a road for all the southern Slavs, and for those who cared to come visit.

  But then came 1991, and the borde
rs went up and the fighting began. Today between Trieste and the Albanian frontier, you are compelled to pass first in and out of Slovenia, then in and out of Croatia, then in and out again of a tiny strip of Bosnia near a quay-less and so quite useless port called Neum,* then once more in and out of Croatia, then in and—if the Albanians are feeling cooperative—out of Montenegro. Five frontiers, ten passport stamps if the guards are in a liverish mood, ten openings and closings of the car if the customs men are similarly inclined. An amusing inconvenience to foreigners, at worst. Another aspect of the dystopian nightmare of the Balkans, to those who live there.

  On this day, though, we had only to endure the single inspection coming in from Bosnia to Croatia—from BiH, as the Bosniaks know Bosna i Hercegovina, to Hrvatska, as the Croatians officially call their country. From the junction it was an hour to the outskirts of Dubrovnik, and to the jewel-city of the Adriatic that has been practically emptied by the war that has been raging at its doorstep all these years.

  We assumed we would stay at the Excelsior or the Argentina, both of which stand a little south of and a little above the city walls. The view from either was magnificent, magical. The entire city-state could be seen, glowing by night (when we arrived) like a golden star at sea, or by day hemmed in by blue water and with its huge walls and towers rising from the waves, majestic, timeless, and imperturbable. Of all the city-states of the Mediterranean—like Venice, Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa—and of others beyond, like Bremen—Dubrovnik still has the look and feel of being all of a piece, so compact, so contented and confident of its standing. It was subjugated by Napoleon in 1808 and turned over to Hapsburg control in 1815—but for more than a thousand years before that, this exquisite walled city, doing business either under its own name, which means “city of a grove of trees,” or until 1918 under the Italian name of Ragusa, was powerful, rich, and free to all asylum seekers (including Richard the Lionheart, who arrived after a shipwreck), a place of nobility, beauty, and style.