The Trigger (17 page)

All societies have fault lines – rivalries, jealousies, suspicions – driven by the commonest of human frailties: self-pity and self-interest. The challenge is subsuming these fault lines and working towards a greater, collective good, one that draws a community of strangers to a shared project. To do that takes trust in a concept that is as modern as it is radical: the nation. So prevalent today is the idea of nation that one forgets how new it is. Much longer-established was order driven by obedience to a local superpower, whether it called itself baron or beg, king or emperor. The passage from coercion to cooperation, of people coming together because they choose to and not because they are forced to, is one of the greatest of human journeys. My encounters in Bosnia brought home how different countries are in different places on that journey.

A newspaper left on the bus carried an advert with a totally unexpected Princip link that caught my eye: Franz Ferdinand, a British band named after Princip’s famous victim, was to perform in the north-Bosnian town of Banja Luka. To thank Arnie for all his efforts I suggested a short detour, a trip north so that I could treat him to some live music. A man who taught himself English from British music was not going to miss this chance, so instead of heading directly for Sarajevo we changed buses. First stop was the town of Jajce – somewhere I had always wanted to visit if only because, after being dropped by parachute, Fitzroy Maclean had met Tito there for the first time. With its relic of a medieval fort high on a hilltop overlooking the cascading confluence of two rivers, Jajce also had the reputation of being one of Bosnia’s most beautiful towns. Rebecca West wrote that the town’s name meant ‘testicle’, reflecting the round shape of the hill. During the war Jajce had been unreachable, so I had to make do with descriptions of its charms from other sources, such as this from Baedeker. ‘A pavilion above the waterfall affords the best view; wraps are necessary.’

When the bus delivered us to Jajce, the town did not disappoint. Elegant houses spilled down a slope capped by the old fortress that had briefly housed Tito’s guerrilla headquarters. The hill led all the way to an old town wall that skirted the left bank of a river called the Pliva. I could see skittish trout and knots of weed being worked by the current where the Pliva spread evenly across a shallow, ornamental pool leading to a weir. There a dramatic transformation took place. Once over the weir, the water tumbled seventy noisy, churning, globular feet straight down into the Vrbas below. In the summer heat I could not resist, stripping to my shorts and jumping into the upper pool, fish star-bursting away as I thrashed through the water towards the weir and dared myself to peek over the lip. It took just seconds to dry in the July sun, and Arnie then led me to the shade of an old hall on the river bank that he remembered well from his childhood. ‘We were brought here all the time as a sort of school pilgrimage,’ he reminisced. ‘Back then it was an important national monument because it was in here in 1943 that the conference that founded communist Yugoslavia was held.’

Inside we found an elderly curator, dressed down in a replica shirt of the Dutch football team Ajax, who seemed delighted to have some visitors. He turned on the lights in the hall and shouted the old partisan wartime rallying cry: smrt fašizmu, ‘death to fascism’. I was pleasantly surprised to find the museum so well looked after with its collection of Titoist memorabilia and propaganda. In the communist era, when Arnie was marched through here as a dutiful schoolboy in the 1980s, the museum had been a place of almost religious devotion. Tito’s star then still dominated the national Yugoslav firmament. Events of the 1990s had totally changed that, however, as militant nationalism let each of Bosnia’s rival groups dwell on how illused by communism they believed they had been. The atmosphere in the museum when we visited was no longer spiritual. It was more nostalgic, even comic, like a teenager picking up a pair of granny’s bloomers and wondering how anyone ever wore such things.

From Jajce a two-hour drive along a mountain gorge cut by the Vrbas delivered Arnie and me to Banja Luka where, sometime after midnight, we found ourselves within the grounds of the town’s old Ottoman fortress, struggling against a scrummage of young Bosnian Serbs and the abnormally high summer night’s temperature. For a moment all was darkness inside the compound. There was just enough light from the night sky to make out the high curtain walls and the hulk of a watchtower, which had the same type of steeply pitched shingle roof as the old hovels back in Obljaj. Then, with a blast of sound to wake the dead, a shock of light came up on a stage, and all I could see was a thirty-foot-high picture of Princip. For its first-ever gig in Bosnia the band Franz Ferdinand was not going to miss the opportunity to flag up the local boy who gave their name such impetus.

As the crowd surged towards the four musicians, I stared at the massive backdrop of Princip’s face. It would be the only time on my entire trip through the Balkans that I would come across his likeness displayed so publicly. I recognised it immediately as the portrait taken while he was in Austro-Hungarian custody following the assassination, the fire of his revolutionary zeal doused by months of solitary confinement. His eyes are flat, moustache meagre, hair mangy. When Princip scratched his initials on that rock in the garden back in Obljaj and boasted to his friend ‘one day people will know my name’, could he ever have dreamed that the time would come when thousands of fellow countrymen would rock a summer’s night away in front of a stage decorated with his portrait.

‘The name came to me while I was watching horseracing on television,’ Alex Kapranos, the band’s lead singer, had confided earlier, after I managed to get past the security guards at the venue. They had thought I was a journalist and kept muttering ‘no media, no media’, but when I got a message through to the band that I was a British author researching Princip, the security cordon was lifted. ‘Talking history with you makes a change from talking about sex and drugs all the time,’ Alex said, shaking my hand.

‘We had been playing together for some time and, to be honest, we didn’t really have a name. It didn’t feel important back then.’ As Alex spoke he looked around for backing from the other band members, old friends mainly from college in Glasgow. Bob Hardy, the bassist, took up the story. ‘It was when a poster was being designed for a concert and the designer said, “You guys really need a name or the poster just won’t work”,’ he said.

‘We wanted a name that people could make a connection with, that people could remember, maybe because it had a significance or an alliteration or certain phonetic characteristics,’ Alex continued. ‘Duran Duran is a name that somehow sticks in your head. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why but that’s what we were looking for.

‘So I was watching TV one afternoon, like a good student wasting my time with daytime television. And all of a sudden there was a horse running in a race and it was called The Archduke. It made me think of a name we all knew from school, and that’s how we got to Franz Ferdinand. To be honest, I have no idea if the horse won.’

Later during the performance, at one of the breaks between songs, Alex half-turned and swung his arm extravagantly as if to introduce Princip to the crowd, shouting into the microphone, ‘And this next one is for old friends.’ A cheer rose, but it was not a roar of recognition. It was more a rush of enthusiasm from the audience. Shouting to make myself heard, I asked all those standing near me in the crowd, but they had no idea who the man in the picture was.

Later as I struggled to sleep, my ears buzzing after the concert, my mind dwelt on why young Bosnian Serbs in Banja Luka did not know Princip. He is, without question, the Bosnian Serb with the greatest historical impact of all time and yet it was clear, from what I had heard, that a hundred years after the assassination he was not cherished, and was scarcely recognised, among his own people.

The issue of Bosnian Serb identity was horribly corrupted in the war years of 1992–5, no more so than in Banja Luka, the dark centre of it all. A once-mixed city was culturally flattened, made ethnically one-dimensional as extremist thugs from the Bosnian Serb community seized control and made it the de facto capital of territory under their control. Mosques were blown up and Catholic congregations attacked. It was a few miles north of Banja Luka that experimentation in extreme ethnic cleansing took place, when Bosnian Serb bullies probed the lassitude of the international community’s diplomatic response, working out that in the late twentieth century they could still get away with murder on an institutional scale. Just up the road from the concert venue they established death-camps where Bosnian Serb forces bullied, killed, tortured, starved and raped Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.

Unjustifiable by any normal moral code, for Bosnian Serb apologists the cruelty had a perverse internal logic born of events here in the 1940s. While I had found exciting the wartime adventures of Fitzroy Maclean and his colleagues in the Balkans, the truth is that focusing on the experience of a few Allied agents does not do full justice to the reality of the Second World War in Bosnia. It was in Banja Luka that the fascistic Croat nationalists unleashed by the Nazis, the Ustaše, committed some of their worst atrocities. Hundreds of Bosnian Serbs were murdered in nearby villages, their religious leaders tortured, their places of worship destroyed, a brutality that gave dangerous new energy to Bosnia’s cycle of victimhood and vengeance, contributing significantly to events fifty years later.

But what influence did Princip have over the racial cruelty of the 1940s and the 1990s? Very little, it was clear to me, which explained why young Bosnian Serbs today, brought up with the rhetoric and iconography of the recent war, have such limited knowledge of him. His rationale for shooting the Archduke must have been for a very different cause from that so viciously championed by Bosnian Serb extremists in the 1990s.

The next day Arnie and I continued on towards Sarajevo by road. Up to this point my mind had dwelled on the way Bosnia had influenced the world in the past, but as the road wound its way into the Lašva valley past the town of Travnik, I began to think of its much more contemporary impact, through the actions of young jihadists who were active in this area in the 1990s.

When the Bosnian War began in 1992 it attracted the interest of militant Islam, drawing in foreign fighters, mainly from Afghanistan and North Africa, who were willing to fight in defence of the Bosnian Muslim population. At that time the locals knew very little about these forces, referring to them simply as ‘the Muj’, a group that never numbered more than a few hundred, but soon gathered a rather sinister, bogeyman status, amorphous, ill-defined and threatening. I was one of many journalists working at the time in the area where ‘the Muj’ were active although they were highly secretive and hostile to approaches from reporters.

It was only after the attacks in America on 11 September 2001 that the role of the Bosnian War in radicalising Muslim militancy became clearer. The American government’s official inquiry into the 9/11 attacks reported that Osama bin Laden’s organisation funded pro-Muslim charities in Bosnia during the war of the 1990s. The report also said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man it identified as ‘the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks’, had spent time in Bosnia during the war. And it went on to say that two of the nineteen terrorists responsible for hijacking the planes on 9/11 had also been deployed to Bosnia in the 1990s – Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi.

The ‘Muj’ from Bosnia were highly secretive during the war, but while I was researching this book I made a breakthrough by tracking down one of the foreign Muslim fighters. It turned out that he grew up a few miles from my home town. Shahid Butt was just two years older than me, born in Birmingham to parents originally from Pakistan. Working as a reporter, I had first seen him in a Yemeni court in 1999 after he had been arrested and charged with terrorist activities committed in Aden, his Brummie accent being memorably out of place at the far edge of Arabia. It would be more than a decade before I was eventually able to sit and talk to him about Bosnia at a cake-shop serving Arabic tea and pastries in a Birmingham suburb with a particularly strong Islamic community.

‘The thing you have to remember is that when I was growing up in Britain in the 1970s we had a difficult sense of our nationality,’ he said. ‘This was a time when the streets around my home would have walls painted with APL in huge letters. That stood for Anti-Paki League, and all through my teenage years people like me were being abused in the streets, getting beaten up, having dogs set on us, that sort of thing. Back then, just leaving your front door could get you into trouble.

‘When I left school all I wanted to do was to serve as a soldier – I wanted to be a Royal Marine, right. It was the time of the Falklands War and the Royal Marines were the best of the best, all over the telly and in the papers. So I went into a recruitment office and asked to join the Royal Marines. You know what they said to me? They said, “We cannot have you because you’re a fat Paki.” So do you know what I did for the next year? I ran around the streets near my home in boots and with a rucksack full of bricks, and I went back to the recruitment office twelve months later and asked again to join the Royal Marines. This time do you know what they said? “Well, you’re not a fat Paki any more but you are still a Paki.”’

In the early 1990s he started to attend mosques where some of the first radical clerics were beginning to preach. It was around this time that the war in Bosnia began and he watched video cassettes showing Bosnian Muslim victims of the war. ‘It was very confusing to begin with, to see these Muslims with blue eyes and blond hair. It was not like anything I had seen before. But it was very traumatic – overwhelming, you know – to learn that people were suffering like this just because they were Muslims.’

He joined an aid convoy arranged through his local mosque that sent out two coaches from Britain full of supplies intended for Bosnia, with the plan of bringing back refugees. It ended in chaos as the vehicle got no further than Zagreb in Croatia and was unable to cross the border into the war zone. ‘There were all these guys who were meant to have organised this. I said to them, “You said you are going to do one thing but you end up doing another.” We fell out. It was useless, so after some prayer I joined up with a guy from London who had a van full of supplies and we managed to drive into Bosnia. I had never been out of Birmingham, and there I was, all of a sudden in a war zone.