Part I: Sarajevo After the Battle
Gavrilo Princip’s footprints have disappeared from the bridge where he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The memorial was destroyed less than a decade ago, under orders of Radovan Karadzic, by the Bosnian Serbs who considered it a public accusation against one of their own. In the act of removing it, the Serbs left their own indelible, monstrous, and much more accusatory mark: the devastation of an entire city. The footprints are gone, but the bridge is still there, spanning the Miljacka River, with two concrete blocks sitting in the center to prevent the passage of vehicles. Today, the people of Sarajevo call it Princip’s Bridge.
Three bridges downstream, a plaque bears testimony to the hell that unfolded. Two names adorned with flowers honor the day’s first victims, shot and killed on April 6, 1992, by Karadzic’s snipers, marking the beginning of the massacre that followed. The victims were on their way home from a massive peace demonstration, unaware that above them, in the windows of the Holiday Inn, rifle scopes were trained on the crowd below.
Today, some nine years later, the people of Sarajevo live in peace. There are no more tanks shelling their homes, no more snipers in the streets. Karadzic and his lieutenant, Ratko Mladić, are fugitives from the International Tribunal in The Hague, and Slobodan Milošević, the former Yugoslav president, is in prison on charges of genocide. But here, in this city, the war seems to have ended just yesterday.
Driving from Sarajevo International Airport to the city center, the landscape is a wasteland. Walking through the city, you see the same destruction. It’s nearly impossible to find a single building not scarred by bullet holes or marred by the impacts of artillery. Even as a foreigner, it’s painful to see.
Surrounded by the ruins of the buildings that are still their homes, the people of Sarajevo cling to their city. They reclaim it every afternoon, with long strolls along the riverfront. On weekends, families walk through this city of cemeteries, this museum of infamy and madness that is Sarajevo. They do it as though they were sauntering down La Gran Vía or the Champs-Élysées; this is their city, a city in the heart of Europe, with an ancient tradition of culture and tolerance that those savages tried to eradicate. But they didn’t know the spirit of these people—a people who, in the words of Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, love their city as strongly and unconsciously as their own blood.
Bojana’s birthday
Nene serves the drinks. His wife is the center of attention. Cheerful and unassuming, but with a captivating personality, she offers food to the guests. We are celebrating the 23rd birthday of their daughter, Bojana, and we have a long party still ahead of us. Popular Bosnian music plays in the background, and there are around twenty guests: friends of the birthday girl and friends of the family.
The women sing, dance, and tell jokes. The men laugh. One of them is Vlatko, a thin man with grey hair who looks a little over 55. Bojana, he says, is like a daughter to him. “She was in my car when they shot her. You can’t imagine how I felt when I finally got her there, bleeding to death, and handed her to her father like that.” He smiles silently and after a few seconds speaks again: “Nene is one of my best friends. We got locked in here together once, in this apartment. We came by for a visit and then we couldn’t leave. The lockdowns in Sarajevo could last for weeks. The snipers were over there, on the other side. We hardly had any food, but we shared everything.”
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Vlatko’s gaze, like Nene’s and his entire generation’s, seems sad, melancholic. He shows me a photo. It’s a picture of him as a young man, with blond hair and a face free of wrinkles; his eyes are bright and his smile is wide. “That’s me, ten years ago.” This man, who looks almost 60 now, was 35 at the time.
One day, in 1993, Vlatko left home on a special mission. Hugging the shipping containers that served as barricades as he ran, he dodged the snipers and ultimately managed to cross the Bosnian-Serb line through a tunnel. There, on the other side, he procured a lamb and set off back home. It was his daughter’s birthday, and he wanted to throw her a party—with lamb. Today he tells the story in his typical register, a voice soft and low, but his eyes light up for a second and he smiles, betraying a mix of satisfaction at this heroic act and disbelief at having had to risk his life to bring a little joy to his home.
Peaceful soldiers
Cazim lives in a block apartment complex: the facade is riddled with bullet holes, the ground floor abandoned and without windows, the door always open and the hallways dark. A journalist by profession, 29 years old, he works as a radio producer for the United Nations. He lives with Semir, a Bosnian actor, along with Ratko and Vera, a Yugoslav couple who fled Belgrade during the NATO bombings. Tall, thin, and always smiling, Cazim shows me the scars on his back that he got from a grenade. “I spent two months in the hospital. Coincidentally, I was wounded on the same day that Semir’s uncle was killed.”
Cazim, like most of the city’s population, is Bosniak, which is to say, Muslim. He rarely goes to mosque, though, and he drinks alcohol, dances up close, and wears jeans and corduroy shirts. He opens a bottle of Vranac, a Montenegrin red that never lasts very long. “In America, they think all Muslims are like Bin Laden, right?” he says with a laugh. He’s a pacifist convinced of the futility of war. In 1993, like thousands of other young Bosnians, he volunteered for the newly formed army to fight back the aggressors. “If Bosnia didn’t disintegrate, it was only thanks to the Sarajevo resistance,” he says.
That night we had dinner with two of his friends, Enis and Sanya. Enis is a D.J. with long hair, wearing a T-shirt and three earrings in one ear, and he’s in love with Sanya. He asks me if I served in the Salvadoran Army. I tell him I don’t believe in war. “Me neither,” he replies. “But we didn’t have a choice. They were killing us. We couldn’t just stand by and do nothing. I hate war.”
Eternal tolerance
The crowd cheers for Bojan Zulfikarpašić. The famed pianist has just performed his masterful opening for Jazz Fest Sarajevo. After years of exile in France, he has finally returned to his country, and the people welcome him home with enthusiasm. “Is he Serbian?” I ask. “He’s Bosnian,” replies Tamara, a young woman, also Bosnian, also a victim of the war, like everyone else, who has developed a taste for jazz and tranquility. But Bojan is a Serbian name. “Yes, he’s Serbian, but he’s Bosnian, like all of us,” she says.
The war did not destroy the spirit of tolerance that made this city famous during the 1984 Winter Olympics. On the contrary, it reinforced it. One night, looking out over Sarajevo from one of the surrounding hills, I ask Semir how he and his fellow Bosnians manage to contain their hatred for the Serbs, after they tried to eradicate them. He replied, almost indignantly: “I hate the Serbs who were here, in the hills, shooting at us. But my best friend is Serbian, and he spent the whole war by my side, dodging the same bullets. We can’t hate the Serbs because that would be committing the same wrong that Karadzic’s men committed against us.” Tolerance taken to its ultimate conclusion.
In spite of the war, the people of Sarajevo still hold onto that virtue—precisely that faith in others that led them to believe that war could be avoided, even as the tanks closed in around them.
A piece of earth
On October 14, 1991, a few days after the Bosnian Parliament declared independence, Radovan Karadzic, who is neither a member of parliament nor an office-holder of any kind, but has nevertheless emerged as the leader of Bosnian-Serb radicalism, warned that very parliament that if they continued to pursue the idea of independence, there would be war. President Alija Izetbegović responded: “Muslims will not attack anyone. But if there is a war, they will defend themselves with great energy.” Words in the wind, given that the tanks are already in position and resistance is not considered a serious option. The solution, supporters of independence continue to insist, lies in dialogue. The Serb Democratic Party (SDS, led by Karadzic), however, has a different solution: wipe out all the Muslims to pave the way for Slobodan Milosević’s ultra-nationalist plans, which are already underway in Kosovo. The Croats, on the other hand, and following orders from Zagreb, are playing double agent. In public, they keep up the dialogue, but in secret, they have already made an agreement with the Serbs to divide Bosnia into three territories: the north for the Serbs, the south for the Croats, and in between, on a tiny strip of land equivalent to 3.52 percent of the country, a refuge for the Muslims. Speaking in 1992 in reference to the territory, Mate Boban, the president of the Croatian Democratic Union, will say: “We should also leave a little land for the Muslims, so they have a place to bury their dead.”
Part II: The Olympic Graveyard
In 1984, Juan Antonio Samaranch, the president of the International Olympic Committee, officiated the close of the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. It was his first time presiding over the Games as president of the committee—an experience he would never forget. The Zetra Olympic Complex was built to host the indoor competitions, together with an adjacent arena for soccer and track-and-field. At the time, the only fire burning in Sarajevo was the Olympic flame. Dozens of soccer fields dotted the area surrounding the complex, completing the city’s constellation of venues. Sarajevo had transformed into a model Olympic city, and the entire population seemed collectively determined to host the best Winter Games in living memory. And indeed, it was here that the figure skaters Jane Torville and Christopher Dean would make Olympic history, winning nine perfect scores for their legendary Bolero. Today, nine years later, the Zetra complex lies in ruins—one victim of the bombs, surrounded by thousands more whose bodies were put to rest in those same soccer fields. Besieged even as they buried their dead, in numbers so great they no longer fit in the cemeteries, the people of Sarajevo took the soccer fields that surrounded the Olympic complex and turned them into massive graveyards.
There is a strange and heavy peace here. Groblje Lev is a sea of graves. One right next to the other, Muslim headstones and Catholic and Orthodox crosses pile up like snowflakes in the depths of bitter winter. Death does not discriminate by religion.
“If we leave, no one will be here to visit [the grave], lay flowers, or place a headstone. No one will be here to light the candles,” Tarsa Petrovic said in 1993, standing in front of her son’s tombstone. A Serb, killed by the bombs of the Serbian nationalists. More than 10,000 people died in Sarajevo; 200,000 in the entire country. And of the 500,000 people who lived in the city before the war, at least one in five was injured during the siege. Today, there are 400,000 people in Sarajevo.
When Samaranch was shown images of Groblje Lev, he said, quite simply, “I feel very sad.” The Olympic flame had been replaced by the fire of artillery. And while the West closed its eyes to the horrors of Sarajevo, Samaranch made the world see his beloved city, with his opening speech at the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.
During the war, Samaranch’s speech was “sustenance for our souls,” said Ezma Hadzagic, Sarajevo’s minister of culture and sports, in an interview with The Dallas Morning News. “We were isolated. We thought we had been abandoned. You can survive without food, but not when the rest of the world has abandoned you.”
Zetra has since been rebuilt, thanks in part to the more than $11 million donated by the International Olympic Committee. Now, Sarajevo has put in a bid to host the Olympic Games again, in 2010. If the city wins, its people will no doubt throw themselves behind the event with the same collective enthusiasm they did in 1984, which was perhaps the happiest moment in Sarajevo’s history. Only this time, the Games will be played among the dead of Groblje Lev.
The survivors
Sarajevo is still struggling to return to normal. It’s difficult to find a good job, the economy is stagnant, poverty is rampant. In the rest of the country, the situation is even worse. The international community has committed billions of dollars to reconstruction, but there is no sign of it anywhere.
“Most of the money goes to salaries and administrative expenses. Another portion gets siphoned off by corruption. Very little ever reaches the people,” says Aldin Arnautović, a young Muslim journalist who currently runs the news division at Hayat TV. The best jobs—the jobs young people fight each other over—are with international institutions. Aldin’s best friend currently works as a security guard at the U.S. Embassy. “He makes twice as much money as I do,” he says.
But at least now the city has water and electricity—and even heat. There, next to the heaters in their homes, comfortable and well-equipped to cope with the sub-zero temperatures, the people of Sarajevo hug, kiss, and make conversation as they gaze out at the lights of the city, trying to return to normal, just as they have since the days of war.
Among the correspondence compiled by Sharon Machlis Gartenberg of the Coalition for Action in Bosnia—an organization active during the war that tried to convince the international community of the urgency of intervening in the conflict—I found a letter written during those years by a woman from Sarajevo named Alma: “Even though we are surrounded by death, young women like us still try to look good. Our way of fighting back is to look beautiful, and to show the beasts who are killing us that youth and life will triumph over death.”
Today, young people make up most of the local population. They go out and have fun, proving that youth and life have triumphed over death. Amid the bombed-out buildings, they celebrate, throw parties, and go dancing. Life goes on. The city’s cultural landscape is beginning to resurface, with plays, films, musical performances, and art shows. The Jazzfest and the Sarajevo Film Festival ignite the streets twice a year, highlighting the artistic and multicultural spirit that sets the city apart, reaffirming hope in a future cut from that cloth of culture and tolerance that they never threw out.
The siege was barely under way when the War Museum opened in Sarajevo, and in the days after the destruction of the National Library—the most comprehensive archive in the Balkans, and one of the best in Europe—a team of photographers was already busy creating art in its bombed-out interior. A famous photo taken at the time shows a cellist playing amid the library’s ruins.
Universities and schools never closed. With no money, teachers and students still came, every day, books under their arms, to continue their academic pursuits. They ran through the trenches to get to class. An American radio reporter interviewed a school principal named Vjekoslav Brezar. The interview ended with the principal’s reply: “Look at all these children. Can you tell me which of them is Muslim, which is Croatian, which is Serbian, and which are of other nationalities? Look at them, please. You can’t tell, and I don’t want to know, so please don’t ask me that question.”
There was an advertisement that became famous during those years. It was for a dating agency. “In a time when reason has committed suicide and madness has taken control, does anyone want war? That’s why our agency is helping you find a partner... In this world of war and death, the only thing that makes sense is making love.”
Us and the others
Sarajevo is not a reliable representation of Bosnia. After the Dayton Peace Accords (signed by Milošević), the country was divided into three parts. Despite the insistence of the Muslims, since 1992, that Bosnia should be a multi-ethnic federation, the Serbs displaced or massacred the non-Serbian populations in the north and east of the country, and the Croats did the same in the south. The Serbs named “their” territory Republika Srpska, and the Croats named theirs Herzeg-Bosna, both in the hopes of integrating them, respectively, into Serbia and Croatia. The Dayton Accords kept the territories within Bosnia and Herzegovina and divided the country into seven cantons. The agreement also instituted a tripartite presidency, with representatives from the three ethnic groups, each governing with a certain degree of autonomy over the territory where their population was ultimately concentrated.
Until as recently as two years ago, travelling to Banja Luka, the seat of Serbian government in Republika Srpska, required taking a bus from the Serbian enclave in Sarajevo. Taxi drivers from the city were not allowed to enter that area of the country, and passengers had to switch to a Serbian taxi at a sort of inter-urban border crossing. Even the license plates on the cars were different. The Croats joined the Federation, and now Bosnia is divided between the Federation and Republika Srpska. This is changing, but at a slower pace than the people of Sarajevo would like.
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The country even has two different soccer leagues, as well as different television stations and different rhythms of daily life. “In Bosnia, we don’t have peace, we have an absence of war,” says Refik Hodzic, a lanky 29-year-old Bosnian who works with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. One of Hodzic’s responsibilities is to convey the Tribunal’s message of reconciliation to the Bosnian people, but it’s no easy task.
Many Serbs in Republika Srpska still share Milošević’s dream for a Greater Serbia. But the people of Sarajevo continue to hope that one day their homeland will be reunited.
Zoran Mutić, a Bosnian intellectual who, among other things, is the leading Bosnian translator of Greek literature and runs a multimedia training center sponsored by the BBC in London, spent most of the war in Slovenia, escaping the bullets. He works in an office opposite Dom Armije, a plaza dedicated to Tito’s Yugoslav Army. From his window, in the afternoons, Mutić can watch old men playing chess on a giant board in the square. Next to them, couples hold hands and walk to universities or chat in cafés. Zoran is back in Sarajevo, his city. “Bosnia was very tolerant, but there weren’t many interracial marriages; ethnic groups simply coexisted,” he says. “The sentiments that gave rise to the war are still here. But people are tired of war.”
This is changing, too. The people of Sarajevo—Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—became much more united during the war. Today, the city is home to many interracial couples (or rather, interreligious or interethnic, since everyone is Slavic), and strives to serve as a model for the new Bosnia.
In the plaza across from Dom Armije, a poster announces an event about tolerance. It’s a pretty poster that catches the eye. At the bottom, in tiny print, it says the exhibition is sponsored by Israel. “Just what we need, Isreal coming to the heart of Sarajevo to teach us about tolerance” says a local bookseller. “They’re the ones who should be learning from us.”
Aldin, the newsroom director, also refuses to take the bait of interracial conflict. That idea, he says, came from the aggressors, not the victims. “This wasn’t a religious or civil war; this was something that was carefully planned.” Aldin was wounded one day in front of his house. “There were 10 of us talking in the street. We all got shot, some died. We were from all three ethnic groups. One year later, I joined the army and there were more Serbs and Croats than Muslims in my unit,” he says. And he stands by his decision: “I didn’t join the army to kill anyone; I joined to defend my family. My best friend is Serbian, and he was in the army with me.”
Part III: Prison of Genocidaires
“Hello? Yes, general, I’m calling from Sarajevo. We have a problem.” The voice on the line is a French captain with the U.N. peacekeeping force. On the other end, a burly British soldier answers, annoyed and angry. The call has interrupted his chess game. “And what do you want me to do? I’m in Zagreb. Where are your superiors?” All of the officers in charge of the mission in Bosnia, the captain explains, are in Vienna for a press conference.
It’s a tricky situation. On the Bosnian and Serbian front, two men, one from each side, are trapped together in a trench between enemy lines, while another man has been wounded and placed on top of a landmine. The press has caught wind of the situation, and the French captain has to take action without the support of his superiors. The captain sends for a German mine expert but neither of them speak the local language. The Frenchman, who is fairly fluent in English, doesn’t know a word of German. The Tower of Babel is in the trenches, and the confusion is insurmountable.
This isn’t a real situation. It’s from the movie No Man’s Land by Bosnian director Danis Tanovic. The film has become a sensation in Europe thanks to its brilliant and biting sense of humor in portraying the war in Bosnia, and its unsparing mockery of the U.N. peacekeepers stationed there. The real story isn’t so funny.
The international contingent in Bosnia, considered one of the greatest failures in the history of U.N. peacekeeping, stayed holed up in its offices in Sarajevo, barely able to secure deliveries of food and medicine (and only when the Serbs allowed it). Faced with the urgent need to establish an air corridor to the besieged Sarajevo, the U.N. even handed control of the airport to the Serbs, in exchange for assurances that their troops would not be targeted and food supplies would be allowed in. Their hands tied by the inaction of the Security Council, the United States, and NATO, U.N. officials were relegated to the role of mere witnesses to the massacres and carnage, with little power to do anything other than report the facts plainly and persist, unsuccessfully, in begging for help that never came.
On January 8, 1993, a popular saying was born: “The U.N. died in Bosnia.” That day, the country’s deputy prime minister, Hakija Turajlić, a brilliant economist, held a meeting with a foreign delegation at the airport. Protected by a battalion of French U.N. troops under the command of Colonel Sartre, he returned to Sarajevo in an armored vehicle. But the convoy was stopped at a Serbian checkpoint and, under orders of Karadzic’s army, the vehicle opened its doors and the blue helmets watched helplessly as Turajlić was killed. Then the killers opened the checkpoint, and the convoy continued its journey to Sarajevo.
Nearly three years would pass before the international community decided to intervene in the conflict. After the war, Turajlić’s assassin was put on trial, but he was acquitted by a court in Sarajevo due to a lack of evidence. Colonel Sartre returned to France where he was decorated with honors, and the United Nations closed the case. As the bombs fell around him, writer Marko Vešović would quip: “It is great luck that in 1939 there were no United Nations. Because if there were, Hitler would be ruling today.”
A shared table
Eating at a restaurant or café in Sarajevo is a unique experience. If a table has four seats, four people will end up eating at it, whether the guests arrived together or alone. The table is for everyone, and the custom is to share it. If there’s an empty seat, the next person to arrive will sit in it. It’s an ancient tradition. As are the ćevabdžinicas—the traditional kitchens found throughout the city. Their specialty is lamb, which is typically served with a wheat flatbread similar to pita.
In a ćevabdžinica, in the old part of the city, I shared a table with an elderly woman. Despite the language barrier between us, we were able to communicate with gestures—enough, at least, to share some polite exchanges. She wore a faint smile that revealed a set of well-cared-for teeth, which contrasted with her work-worn hands. Her sad and calm expression said more than the thousand words she must have kept to herself for lack of a listener. With gestures, she asked if I was with the group of women who were sitting at the next table over, and she smiled when I said no. She offered me some food from her plate while I waited for mine to be served. When she got up, she took my hands and nodded, smiling, but with that same sad look that seemed tattooed on her face. She did the same with the waiter.
There were four women at the table next to me. Elegant, stylish, and visibly foreign. At least one was French, another British. One had Asian features. Japanese, perhaps. The fourth, I think, was from the U.S. They were all speaking English. One dominated the conversation. In a strong French accent, she talked about how distracted her husband had been lately, her trips to the Alps, how much she missed eating out in Paris, and the ins and outs of her divorce with her first husband.
The others interjected with comments about places, vacations, husbands, as though commenting on a newspaper’s society section. They were clichés of themselves. Snobbery as a way of life. In a little over an hour, after they had finished their meal, they ordered water, desserts, coffee, more coffee. One after the other. They never once looked up at the young man who was serving them. Not once. They were here, I’m sure, with one of the dozens of international organizations now present in post-war Bosnia.
“Can you believe there are people who have been here for four or five years and they don’t speak a word of Bosnian?” says Aldin Arnautović, the TV news director. Given their track record of inaction during the siege and their attitude in the aftermath of the war, foreigners are not well liked in Sarajevo. Almost all of them work for international NGOs; there aren’t many tourists here. There is a shared feeling among locals that these functionaries are here to help a people they have no interest in getting to know.
“They think they’re here to teach us about democracy, but a lot of the people who came after the war seem to be doing it just for personal reasons, like résumés. They’re are not actually interested in the country,” Aldin says.
The locals don’t trust them, and they know it. “It’s not a question of trust, we know they don’t think very highly of us. We have a mandate and we have to fulfill it,” said one Bosnian who works for the United Nations. But, he said, he also can’t help feeling a bit resentful that, in his own office, foreigners who have been working there for years still don’t know how to say “thank you” or “good morning” in Bosnian. Bosnians who work with mine deactivators and humanitarian organizations share the same complaint. As do some of foreigners who have managed to learn the difficult language—a reminder that not all of them are the same.
One Western European diplomat stationed in the city summed it up with a metaphor: “It’s like the city is being destroyed by bombs and hunger and cold, and in the darkness, a window opens showing a brightly lit ballroom. Inside, elegant people are dancing a waltz. It’s a gala dinner for the United Nations.”
Everyone admits, however, that without the presence of the U.N. and the international special forces (SFOR), the country would be mired in chaos. “They’re a necessary evil,” says Edin, who works for a U.N. sister organization. Aldin agrees: “Our only way out is through the international community. Otherwise, there will be another war. All we can do is hope they manage to do some good.”
On trial for genocide
It’s cold in The Hague, too. Here, a few blocks from Parliament, is the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Today, the court will sentence three Bosnian Serbs accused of committing massacres in the Prijedor concentration camps.
One of them, Duško Sikirica, was the commander of the Keraterm detention camp. During the three-month period in 1992 when he was head of camp security, more than 100 people were killed in “Room 3.” So far, Sikirica has admitted to killing just one detainee, with a bullet to the head, but has denied participating in the Room 3 massacre, even though he was in charge of security at Keraterm when it happened. The other two defendants, Damir Došen and Dragan Kolundžija, were in middle management positions at the camp, which held mostly Muslim civilians.
Dressed in their robes, the judges enter the courtroom. In the area reserved for the press and special visitors, a sketch artist observes the defendants. He starts to sketch the scene. As the charges are read, Damir Došen and Kolundžija speak in whispers and gestures with their lawyers, shooting glances that scream for compassion. Sikirica, on the other hand, is impassive. Not a single eyelash moves on his face as he listens to his own testimony being read aloud by the judge—his confession to murder, his description of the conditions in the concentration camp. He’s a tough person, no doubt. On the advice of his defense team, which has assured him that his sentence will be reduced in exchange for a confession, he has pleaded guilty. So here he stands, before an African judge, in a foreign country, seconds away from learning how many years he will spend in Scheveningen, the Tribunal’s prison. He doesn’t flinch.
The judge explains the benefits of pleading guilty: “A guilty plea facilitates the work of the International Tribunal in two ways. Firstly, [it saves] the International Tribunal the time and effort of a lengthy investigation and trial. Secondly […] a benefit accrues to the Trial Chamber, because a guilty plea contributes directly to one of the fundamental objectives of the International Tribunal: namely, its truth-finding function.” Sikirica stands motionless.
The judge hands down the sentences. Three years for Kolundžija and five for Došen. Both men smile; they have already spent nearly two years in Scheveningen, and this will count retroactively towards their sentences. Sikirica is sentenced to 15 years in prison. The jury leaves the room and everyone stands up. At the same moment, Duško Sikirica brings his hands to his face, raises his head to the sky, then drops it. He takes a deep breath and puts his hands on his hips. With a tense expression, he stares at the floor, visibly agitated. A guard approaches him; it’s time to leave. He presses his lips together and is led away.
In the artist’s sketch, Sikirica is frozen, like a statue. His gaze is impenetrable, his face in shades of blue. Had the artist waited until the end, he might have drawn a human being.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was established on February 22, 1993, through United Nations Resolution 808. It was the first court of its kind created since the post-World War II tribunals in Tokyo and Nuremberg. But unlike those tribunals, the ICTY is not a court where the victors judge the vanquished. The magistrates come from countries that were uninvolved in the conflict, so the judges are not the enemies of the judged.
The tribunal is an organ of the United Nations, and while the court had to wait until the end of the Bosnian War to begin its proceedings in earnest, it is now working to facilitate reconciliation and establish historical truth in the former Yugoslavia.
In a chamber adjoining the courtroom where Sikirica stands trial, a young man, 29 years old, sits waiting. He is a witness. He doesn’t speak Bosnian and communicates in English. He is a Dane, who eight years ago, at the age of 20, living a comfortable suburban life in Copenhagen, happened to pick up a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine, where an advertisement soliciting mercenaries for Bosnia caught his eye, and he decided to sign up. At first, he fought on the Croatian side. After one year, he went back to Denmark. “I didn’t get along with anyone anymore. I got bored, so I came back,” he says. His testimony will be crucial in determining the outcome of a trial in which three Croats stand accused of massacring Muslims near the city of Mostar. He regrets his actions so much, he says, that when he started his small business, he even hired a Muslim. “He’s my friend,” he says. In any case, the witness is not a defendant. He is simply one of the thousands of witnesses who have paraded through the corridors of this court.
The main prize in The Hague is named Slobodan Milošević. The former Yugoslav president is finally behind bars. He has entered a difficult stage of his life, and seems incapable of acknowledging the crimes for which he stands accused. No one wages war thinking they will end up in prison. Milošević refuses to recognize the tribunal’s jurisdiction and complains that he is being accused of causing the war “instead of being recognized for having made peace.” He faces charges of murder in Kosovo and Bosnia. His silence has been interpreted by the judges as a declaration of innocence, because he refuses to answer any questions from prosecutors, and even from his own defense. His trial could take several years.
The tribunal’s special prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, has already succeeded in arresting Milošević and Biljana Plavšić, the former president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia (Republika Srpska), who turned himself in voluntarily and is currently under house arrest. But Del Ponte has two other culprits in her sights: Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladić, the ultra-nationalist political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serb troops. In Sarajevo, people say they are living in a monastery near the border with Yugoslavia.
In any case, locating the men is not Del Ponte’s priority. Every week, she speaks about the importance of bringing them to trial, in any forum, and pleads for the political will to do so. In Sarajevo, people say that the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia, included an unwritten clause that the Serbs demanded from the international community: no one will touch Karadzic and Mladić. Today, the men remain free, with the deaths of 200,000 people weighing over them.
Nevertheless, and despite the notable absence of the two main perpetrators of the crimes committed in Bosnia, the court in The Hague has made significant progress toward achieving its objectives: “It’s a question of individualizing culpability,” explains the tribunal’s spokesperson. This, he says, supports reconciliation by holding individuals, rather than entire peoples or ethnic groups, responsible for the crimes committed. It also helps establish the truth of what happened. Is it working? “This is part of my job,” says Refik Hodžić, who also works at the tribunal. He travels frequently to Bosnia and Croatia, to Republika Srpska, spreading the tribunal’s message and stressing its importance, and the importance of bringing charges. “We’ve made a lot of progress there [in Republika Srpska],” he says. But he admits they still have a long way to go to achieve true reconciliation. For now, the U.N. tribunal is the one institution working the hardest and making the most progress toward building a new country: Bosnia and Herzegovina, for which Sarajevo hopes to serve as a pillar and model of coexistence and tolerance, of development and hope.
Remembering Tito
Independence came at a high cost for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The years of war, the 200,000 dead, and the fallout have been devastating. But the country marches forward. Despite the thousands of guns still in the hands of civilians, there are no gangs of kidnappers in Bosnia, and organized crime is a mere shadow of the Russian mafia, though strong ties exist between them.
On top of this is the growing problem of Islamic fundamentalism—Muslims from outside the country who arrived during the conflict to wage a holy war in Bosnia, obtaining citizenship papers through irregular means. Some of them are still here, living in the mountains and villages outside Sarajevo. They are few in number and, apparently, very discreet and disciplined. Then there are the landmines, which continue to kill people, mostly children. But there is very little crime, and most of it involves vendettas between mobsters that don’t directly affect the rest of the population. There is also, unsurprisingly, a considerable number of suicides, especially in the harsh winter months. The psychological scars left by the war run deep. During the years of siege, a phrase circulated in the city: “So much madness; only madmen can do these things.” The person who spoke it was a patient in Kosovo’s psychiatric hospital, who was admitted because his screams at night were so loud they would wake his neighbors.
Despite the poverty that now plagues the country, there are no beggars and no one sleeping on the street. There are homeless shelters and programs to care for orphans, and a shared sense of pride in the city’s spirit of peace and tolerance. But the population has seen few if any improvements in quality of life, which has declined noticeably since the breakup of Yugoslavia. And while people take pride in their heroic resistance and the independence that it won, they miss the Yugoslavia of Tito, the father of their nation. “When Tito was in power, we could travel, we had the best universities, we were privileged,” says Semir, an actor. “The Czechs and Hungarians would come to camp on our beaches, saving up their entire lives so they could visit. And we would flood their cities, sleeping in nice hotels; we were their greatest aspiration. Now they’re the ones who go on big tourist vacations, and we can’t even travel.”
Today, people long for a return to that very federation from which they sacrificed so much to break free. Paradoxically, they were already mourning the old Yugoslavia even as they set out to fight for independence. “We pursued independence because this was no longer Tito’s Yugoslavia. We had already seen the killings in Kosovo, and we knew what was coming next,” says Ćazim Dervišević. In other words, independence was an act of self-defense. Milošević took away the provinces’ autonomy—the very autonomy that, as Tito well knew, ensured the unity of the Federation and the peaceful coexistence of its peoples.
During World War II, the Yugoslav leader won the nation’s heart by commanding an army of peasants from the Bosnian mountains—the partisans—to drive out the invading armies. Of Croatian origin, Tito knew that the only way to unite the Slavic peoples was to allow them to preserve their traditions, their lifeways, and their cultures. After his death, Tito’s Serbian communist heirs destroyed in a matter of months what had taken years to build.
“The first Eastern European country to publish Solzhenitsyn was Yugoslavia,” says Zoran Mutić, referring to the Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the rare and extraordinary freedoms enjoyed by the former socialist federation. “As long as you didn’t directly attack the system, you could publish anything, even anti-communist books.”
Everyone feared Tito’s Yugoslavia. As a socialist republic, it refused to bow to the Kremlin’s dictates and pursued its own foreign policy. It had enough power and wealth to do so, and enjoyed overwhelming popular support. In Yugoslavia, people had a good standard of living and the government even allowed small-scale private enterprise. Unlike other communist countries, the economy was not totally nationalized. Everything was in the hands of the workers, not the state. At the time, the federation was the envy of Eastern Europe.
“We all miss Tito,” says Aldin. “When he was in power, we had everything. Tito was the only one who could keep those dogs [the nationalists] on a leash. There wasn’t full freedom of expression, but we didn’t need it. Now we have it, but that’s all we have.”
This nostalgia is not exclusive to the people of Sarajevo. Many Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes also long for Tito’s Yugoslavia. The hundreds of thousands of deaths that continue to result from the federation’s breakup could have been avoided, and everyone would be better off, they say, if Tito had stayed at the helm.
Not only are the people of Sarajevo united in this assessment, they pay homage to it, 24 hours a day, with the Eternal Flame for the fallen partisans, and by keeping alive the spirit of interethnic tolerance that Tito consolidated, even as others failed to understand it. The people of Sarajevo see themselves as the heirs of this spirit of tolerance, and have sacrificed their lives to defend it.
As you walk across the Princip Bridge, it’s worth imagining the scene of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. To picture it, even, as the writer Alexander Hemon did in his short story The Accordion: A royal coach pulled by horses, people waving and the Archduke watching as they “wave little flags and cheer in some monkey language (“Would it be called Bosnian?” wonders the Archduke).” He chats with the Archduchess, who sits next to him, but is suddenly distracted by a man playing an accordion. The music moves him to deep thought, distracting him from the assassin’s approach. And thus, to the rhythm of the accordion, he collapses in death, dreaming of the instrument’s notes.
The assassin’s footprints may no longer appear on the bridge where Archduke Franz Ferdinand met his end, but the music will play there forever, serenading the ruins of this city of cemeteries.
Part IV: Chronology of the Bosnian War
1990-91
Croatia and Slovenia declare independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In Croatia, ethnic Serbs and Croats begin a long and bloody conflict. The United Nations imposes an arms embargo on all members of the former Yugoslav Republic, including Bosnia.
April, 1992
Serbian nationalist snipers fire on a peace demonstration in Sarajevo, sparking the war. Bosnian Serb soldiers are officially removed from the Yugoslav army, but are allowed to keep their weapons.
May, 1992
The West recognizes Bosnia-Herzegovina as an independent state. A shell, fired from a Serbian position in the hills above Sarajevo, kills 16 people waiting in line for bread. The United Nations imposes sanctions on Yugoslavia, under the leadership of the Serbs.
Summer, 1992
Reports emerge of “ethnic cleansing”—a policy of killing Muslims or removing them from cities to create an ethnically pure region—along with reports of concentration camps and mass rapes.
Winter, 1992-93
Gas, water, and electricity services are sporadic in Sarajevo. Serbian forces block United Nations humanitarian missions from reaching Muslim enclaves, such as central Bosnia, which is teaming with refugees, causing severe food, fuel, and medicine shortages. The United Nations declares several Bosnian cities as safe zones, but this does not resolve the situation. U.S. President Bill Clinton orders humanitarian aid air drops.
1992-1993
Several ceasefires are violated. The Vance-Owen peace plan is accepted by Milosevic and Karadzic, then rejected by the Bosnian Serb Parliament. Other peace plans based on the division of Bosnia along ethnic lines are negotiated, rejected, and renegotiated. The Croats, originally siding with the Muslim against the Serbs, begin their own campaign of “ethnic cleansing.”
1993
Artillery gunfights erupt in Sarajevo and the Serbs withdraw from strategic positions, while the U.S. and NATO threaten aerial bombardment. Artillery fire resumes when it becomes clear that there will be no air strikes.
Fall, 1993
The army of the Bosnian government advances into territory held by Croatian separatists. Fighting breaks out between the regular armies of Yugoslavia and Croatia in Bosnia.
January, 1994
France, which has the largest number of U.N. troops in Bosnia, asks NATO to use aerial bombardment to alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Bosnia. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levi and other intellectuals launch a political party called “Europe Begins at Sarajevo” to compete in the European Parliament’s upcoming elections. The party’s sole platform is that European humanity and civility are challenged by inaction in the Bosnian crisis.
February 4, 1994
The “Marketplace Massacre,” which leaves 68 dead and more than 200 wounded in Sarajevo, sparks public outcry against this and other atrocities, forcing NATO to issue an ultimatum for the Serbs to withdraw their artillery positions 20 kilometers from Sarajevo, and for all parties involved to surrender their heavy weapons to the United Nations.
Summer, 1994
The army of the Bosnian government successfully advances against Serbian separatists, recapturing some territory around Bihać, in northeast Bosnia.
Fall, 1994
Ceasefires in the Sarajevo area are sporadic but hold. Bosnian Serb forces are supported by Serb Croat forces in the neighboring region of Krajina, putting pressure on the Bosnian government and recapturing the Bihać region. Bihać faces relentless bombardment. NATO attacks the runways at the airport in Krajina, which is occupied by the Serbs, who are using it as a base of attack. The Serbs detain over 300 United Nations troops in an attempt to prevent further bombing.
December 1994
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter arrives in Sarajevo to negotiate a four-month ceasefire with the warring parties. The ceasefire does not stop the Croatian Serbs, who continue their offensive on Bihać.
January 28, 1995
The 1,000th day of the siege of Sarajevo.
February, 1995
Bosnian Serbs repeatedly violate ceasefire agreements. United Nations observers report helicopters flying into Bosnia from Serbia, presumably to deliver weapons to Bosnian Serb positions. This violates a promise made by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to internally isolate the Bosnian Serbs. Croatian President Franjo Tudjman asks UN peacekeepers to withdraw from Krajina, a region of Croatia primarily occupied by Serbs. Renewed fighting reigns terror in the region when UN troops withdraw in the spring of 1995.
February 13, 1995
The United Nations tribunal on human rights violations in the Balkans indicts 21 Bosnian Serb commanders on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. This action marks the first time that a Western political body openly accuses Serbs of genocide.
February 15-22, 1995
Under pressure from European allies, the United States agrees to lift economic sanctions against Yugoslavia in exchange for President Milosevic recognizing the territorial integrity of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Milosevic refuses.
March 9, 1995
According to The New York Times, a CIA report completed earlier this year concluded that “90 percent of the acts of ‘ethnic cleansing’ were carried out by Serbs and that leading Serbian politicians almost certainly played a role in the crimes.” The report is considered the most comprehensive U.S. study on the atrocities committed in Bosnia.