The Trigger (13 page)

My expectations were not particularly high, remembering the Baedeker guide’s description of the inadequacies of Bosnian accommodation in the early twentieth century. ‘Travellers who do not expect too much will, on the whole, find the inns very tolerable,’ it said. I was too tired to be fussy, grateful to hear from the waiter that, although normally closed, the old guesthouse in the town centre could be opened up just for us.

I hoisted my bag onto my back one final time and set off, Arnie now hobbling at my side, just as the first drum roll of raindrops announced the storm’s arrival. The lights at the guesthouse were off, but a man emerged from the dark, sharp-eyed and shrewish, to open up just in time, fumbling his keys under a strobe of lightning flashes. As he opened the door we jostled in out of the deluge, gratefully taking keys for rooms up on the first floor. At the top of the stairs was a picture that made me feel nicely at home, a kitsch oil painting of a local landmark: Mount Šator.

Piscatorial Imams, Muzafer Latić, left, and Kemal Tokmić

Memo from Winston Churchill, authorising Fitzroy Maclean’s Mission to Tito

The walk from Glamoč to Bugojno, where Gavrilo Princip caught the train to Sarajevo, took five more days through a landscape that was sometimes wild, often beautiful and always charged. Crossing a high pass in the mountains one morning, we glimpsed the tufted, pale-eyed mask of a wolf watching us intently from the edge of a clearing. Long enough for us both to see it, not long enough for me to take a photograph before it ghosted away to the cover of wooded darkness. On another day we hiked through country the like of which I have never experienced, a boundless, exposed dragon’s back of a plateau without a single tree, its pelt of long grass combed backwards and forwards by the shifting wind. ‘Middle Earth,’ declared Arnie, surveying a scene that could easily pass for Tolkien’s fantasy world. I looked at my mobile phone and registered a modern-day indicator of remoteness: no signal.

Formidable mountain ranges kept coming, occasional rainstorms washed through and we both had periods of footsore exhaustion. But the magic of the journey for me came from the rich overlay of history we touched on, the metronome click on the ground of our hazel sticks marking progress not just along Princip’s trail but through terrain where other key episodes had played out.

I relished the sense of sharing the same physical setting that framed Princip’s journey in 1907: skylines, forests, pastures, medieval ruins that he would have been familiar with. Baedeker’s 1905 travel guide recorded a daily stagecoach, or ‘diligence’, all the way to Bugojno from the valley where Princip was born, a one-way ticket costing ten crowns in the currency of the Habsburg Empire. The price appears to have been too much for him and his father, as they trudged all the way, as we did, on foot. Princip would have recognised the high-sided valleys concertinaing the land that we traversed, the summer heat and the rural simplicity that lay all around us. We skirted north of a town called Livno, where a poster advertised a highlight of the 2012 summer season: a scything competition for local farmers.

Under Austro-Hungarian rule, Livno was the administrative centre for the area where Princip was born, and it was here that a police report was compiled by local officials after the assassination in 1914. The form comprises a list of boxes where standard details are recorded: name, occupation, parents’ particulars. Under the ‘reputation’ category, a colonial officer had written simply: ‘a weak boy’. Another of the boxes indicated the extent to which the colonisers from Vienna had failed to improve conditions for Bosnia’s peasantry at the start of the twentieth century. The typed rubric demanded to know ‘to whom does this serf belong?’. This time the official recorded that Princip was the feudal subject of two local lords, one named Jović, the other Sierćić.

It was during Princip’s overland trip that his rage against the foreign ruler took root. He saw how the poverty he had known in Obljaj was replicated right across the country, regardless of the ethnicity of the rural community. The Austro-Hungarian authorities used to boast of how, under their rule, Bosnia benefited from new schools, industry and infrastructure, and they even goaded Princip at the trial that followed the assassination into describing the quality of life for Bosnian peasants. His answer leaves no doubt about how he regarded their plight:

‘Of what do the sufferings of the people consist?’ he was asked by a lawyer.

‘That they are completely impoverished; that they are treated like cattle. The peasant is impoverished. They destroy him completely. I am a villager’s son and I know how it is in the villages,’ he answered.

The natural beauty I found impressive but what really moved me was that latent sense of charge in the landscape, the knowledge that we were crossing through an area powerful enough to have impacted modern history not just at the start of the twentieth century but at other, later turning points. Tension rose when for the first time we passed through a minefield. On the opening day, we were deep in a forest when we spotted red plastic warning signs nailed to tree trunks on both sides of the track, each bearing a skull and crossbones in white along with text printed in both Latin and Cyrillic script: ‘Warning – Mines’. A less tangible sense of unease would manifest itself whenever we passed through towns. The skylines indicated Bosnia’s three-way mix, with Catholic bell-towers, Islamic minarets and Orthodox spires often clustered in the same view, but the nationalist war of the 1990s had had the polarising effect of leaving only one group dominant in any particular place. Just as like electrical charges repel each other, so these south-Slav communities, which shared so much history, are now driven away from each other.

Before we even set off, the atmosphere in Glamoč gave us a strong sense of how fierce ethnic loyalties remain in the twenty-first century. Even though the town lies some way inside Bosnia, the flags of the neighbouring country of Croatia hung from shop fronts around the town square, and the peal of bells from a huge and newly-rebuilt Catholic church swamped completely the call to prayer from a local mosque. The guesthouse where we spent the night was right in the town centre where three roads merge around a small, paved triangle shaded by plane trees and surrounded on all sides by houses, bars and corner shops clad in the pale, weathered masonry that is common in nearby Dalmatia. Rinsed by the previous night’s rain, the whole scene sparkled in the early light of a hushed summer Sunday. Insects flew holding patterns in air too still to even waft the flaccid flags with the vivid red-and-white chequerboard shield of the Croatian coat of arms. With the bells and muezzin falling silent, the peace was broken only now and then by the sound of a badly-tuned motorbike engine being gunned nearby by some teenage off-road riders. I watched as a nun parked her boxy Yugo car next to the triangle before bustling off purposefully in the direction of the town’s large Catholic church.

There is a mild schizophrenia about the Balkans, a sense of identity that swings between Oriental and Occidental, old world and new. On a gentle summer morning in a town such as Glamoč one could be forgiven for believing you are deep in western Europe. The town square, with its corner shops and pavement cafés, would not look out of place deep in the south of France or high on the Spanish sierra. The owner of the guesthouse, Zdravko Lučić, sat with me that morning on the terrace while I ate a breakfast of eggs sunnyside up or, to use the local wording, ‘on your eyes’. A Bosnian Croat, originally from the town of Bugojno, Zdravko had served as a soldier in bitter fighting there.

When the Bosnian War began in 1992, the conflict had initially been a two-way struggle between Bosnian Serbs and all other Bosnians – that is to say, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Surprised by the speed of the Bosnian Serb land-grab, the two other communities were forced into a working alliance, one that went as far as the two sides fighting alongside each other. But tensions worsened steadily between the Bosnian Croat and Muslim allies, and eventually became all-out war. Just as Serbs reminisce about the glories of medieval Serbia, so Croats venerate their own long history, one that records with pride the existence of an independent kingdom of Croatia. No matter that the nation effectively lost its freedom 900 years ago, becoming first a vassal state of Hungary and later a component of the Habsburg Empire, legends of self-rule were kept alive over the centuries by Catholic Croats just as keenly as stories of early Serbian nationhood were preserved by Orthodox Christian believers.

Epic tales of past glories would be told in Croat hovels, as they were in simple Serb dwellings like the ones in Obljaj. Peasants from both communities then relied on the same zadruga system, gathering families into parish groups where issues could be worked through and burdens shared. They were also the platform where resentments against feudal overlords could be vented and self-pity could fester, occasionally erupting into rebellion. Just as the Ottoman occupiers of Bosnia faced occasional uprisings from disaffected locals throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the various elites imposed on Croatia by Hungary and Austria often faced revolts. In both cases the response was very similar: peasants executed, villages burned, communities destroyed, anger fuelled.

In its fundamental details Zdravko’s family story was identical to that of the Princip clan, two days’ walk away on the other side of Mount Šator. The only difference was that one was a narrative of Croat victimhood, the other of Serb. Much as the local communities here in recent times have sought to emphasise their differences, this shared experience shows how the south-Slav peoples of the Balkans have a common historical narrative of suffering, one that is transitive between the different communities.

It was largely a sense of righting past historical wrongs that led to the founding of an independent Croatia when Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s. In 1991, a year before the Bosnian War began, the Croatian War had started, as the Croatian republic that used to be part of Yugoslavia broke away in a struggle that would eventually lead to the creation of today’s independent country. In the flush of this success, a small but influential contingent of extreme Croat nationalists saw the subsequent war in neighbouring Bosnia as an opportunity to grab land that might restore what they held to be their birthright, a Croatian state reaching far into Bosnia, as history shows was the case at its territorial zenith roughly 1,000 years ago. When these ultra-nationalists made their move in late 1992, following months of plotting and preparing, there was only one possible outcome: the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims turned their guns against each other.

Throughout 1993 the Bosnian Serbs largely sat back and watched their two once-united opponents rip each other apart. Some of the most hateful atrocities and episodes of ethnic cleansing took place that year between these two former allies – incidents that I covered as a reporter. On one occasion I had to drive away wild dogs from eating a corpse in the village of Stupni Do, where Bosnian Croat extremists had slaughtered Bosnian Muslim farmers on an autumn day. An already complex war had become a lot more complicated, something that made reporting it a challenge. For example, in the central Bosnian town of Vitez a small pocket of Bosnian Muslims in the old town centre found itself surrounded by a hostile enemy made up of Bosnian Croats, who were then themselves surrounded by more Bosnian Muslims, who were in turn confronting a wider Bosnian Serb enemy. Newspaper stories became more and more convoluted and, inevitably, mistakes were made.

In October 1993 I was one of the last foreign correspondents to see up close the famously graceful bridge in Mostar. This southern city was then torn apart by some of the worst fighting between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. One morning I cowered inside a Spanish armoured personnel carrier from the UN peacekeeping force being driven into the Bosnian Muslim half of town, where I was to spend one of the most terrifying nights of my life. My diary recorded that the city’s airfield was a no-man’s-land separating the two sides, so we roared across the tarmac at high speed from the Bosnian Croat frontline positions to find:

… the first Bosnian Muslim trenches, First World War-style with tin helmets bobbing up and down every 15 ft and mounds of earth, barbed wire and timber. One nice touch was several feet of trench that were crowned with grapevines sending their tresses down and round the men.

Mortar shells were raining down so heavily that the personnel carrier did not move for the entire duration of its twenty-four-hour-long deployment, parked for safety under the protection provided by an overhanging building. Pumped with adrenalin, I ventured out on foot to an improvised hospital set up in the basement. An old Mercedes taxi roared to a halt outside just as I arrived, its passenger door already flung open as a Bosnian Muslim civilian desperately dragged out a woman who had been hit by mortar shrapnel. As she was bundled out of the car I can remember my reflex of embarrassment at seeing her left breast exposed in the bloody confusion. She made no move to cover herself. She would not move again.

The beautiful single-span bridge was then barely recognisable, crudely covered with a roped web of old tyres, a forlorn attempt to protect the 400-year-old masonry. To cross it was to risk your life, so you had to sprint, doubled-over, all the time knowing that you might be in the cross-hairs of Bosnian Croat snipers hidden in houses just a few yards away on the west bank.

A few days later the bridge came tumbling down, a catastrophically symbolic moment when a dream died – the dream of all southern Slavs living as one. The tyres could offer no protection against a salvo of shells deliberately aimed by a Bosnian Croat tank. So deep ran the hatred between the two former allies that Bosnian Croat commanders ordered to be destroyed anything that hinted at a Bosnian Muslim cultural connection to this land. The bridge had been built by Ottoman occupiers in the late sixteenth century and, in the poisonous atmosphere of the 1990s, that was enough to condemn it through historical linkage – no matter how disingenuous – to the Bosnian Muslim side. Bosnia’s Muslims are just as much southern Slavs as Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs, the key difference being their faith. They were not foreigners and certainly not descendants of Turkish Ottoman occupiers.