War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (14 page)

In town after town in Bosnia and Kosovo, warlords turned universes upside down. They preyed on the weak to fulfill their own carnal lusts and desires. They stole and raped, murdered and abused, and their immoral universe proved ascendant. In village after village in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or the Congo, the killers and their militias ruled. They were once embraced as saviors, shielded by the myth of war, but they had become parasites.

These militias, without the discipline or military code of the professional soldier, were frightening. They were populated with criminals, misfits, and children who drive around with car trunks full of weapons they did not know how to use. They killed and tortured according to whims and moods. They enjoyed turning us into pawns, playing with our fear, holding us as “guests” while they unleashed a lifetime of bitterness upon those around them. Once in a village in Kosovo I found a local warlord from the Kosovo Liberation Army with enough weapons dangling off him to outfit three or four fighters. He began barking orders to
his hapless followers and when they did not heed his demands started firing into the dirt. Blood began oozing out of one of his combat boots. Determined not to let his visitors see his self-inflicted wounds he clenched his teeth and limped away. It was among the rabble, the barbarians, that I longed for the Roman cohort, the drilled and organized mass that makes up professional armies.

In wartime nearly everyone becomes an accomplice. The huge dislocations, the millions who lose homes and property, are often compensated with the property of those that were forced out. Those who had their homes taken away from them in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs were later given the homes of Serbs who fled the suburbs of Sarajevo. The moral destructiveness of ethnic cleansing, like the psychic wounds of war, thus reverberates throughout a society. Families who are stripped of all they own and then handed by the state apartments that were seized from others are complicitous, whether they like it or not, in the crimes of war.

These dislocations, a large and usually deliberate part of modern warfare, destroy communal structures and weaken ties to those beyond the immediate ethnic group. They create, as Hannah Arendt pointed out, a population of stateless individuals, refugees within their own countries, who to survive must share in the loot of war.
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The policies of communist Russia revolved around such internal displacement. Political or moral dissent is silenced, since nearly all are forced to become accomplices. It is hard to condemn ethnic cleansing when you live in someone else's home.

Following the NATO bombing of the Bosnian Serb army in the fall of 1995, I accompanied several thousand Bosnian Muslim soldiers, backed by Croatian artillery, as they drove retreating
Serbs across central Bosnia. We pushed into town after town that had been abandoned often only hours before. The front lines became mixed up and confused, with soldiers from the two armies colliding into each other in messy little gun battles. In those few weeks, an estimated 100,000 Serbs were made homeless. In one village a desperate group of Serbs gunned down a family in a car, stole the vehicle, and fled.

The village of Kljuć was a depressing collection of dirty stucco dwellings surrounding a muddy central square. I was there on a rainy September afternoon when five packed buses stopped along the road. Clutching his mother's hand, five-year-old Mirnes Mujaković descended from one of the buses. The boy searched for a place to sit on the sacks of clothing piled up along the street as the cargo was unloaded.

The boy's home, friends, toys, and neighborhood had all vanished eight days earlier in a confusing blur of loud threats, pushing, beatings, tears, and a bewildering night under the trees waiting for a boat to cross the Sava River into the Croatian town of Davor. For a week he and his Muslim neighbors had lived on the bus, shuttled from Croatia to Slovenia and now to Bosnia.

Two elderly people in his group had died. He saw their bodies. And strange, gruff men had handed out brown boxes with tins of food so everyone could eat. Now, a man with a clipboard was sending families off to empty houses, many with furniture, clothes, and the bloated bodies of farm animals lying haphazardly in the yards. The houses had been hastily marked with white numbers on the doors.

“Are you OK?” asked his mother, Rasema, as she pulled a sweatshirt from a bag and slipped it over her son's head. “What do you think?”

The boy did not answer. His mother looked up and offered an explanation.

“You see,” she said, her hand shaking as she dabbed a piece of pink cloth below her eyes. “You see, his father went away.”

Fathers often went away in this war. And fathers often did not come back. This was not the first Balkan war fought by men with memories like those being forged in Mirnes's mind. But for now, the boy sought only the solace of his mother's arms.

Soon the man with the clipboard came to the mother and son and took them down a dirt track to a small house that had been abandoned a week earlier by a Serb family. I walked with them. The house still had dishes with scraps of food on them, and clothes were strewn on the floor. A Serbian Orthodox icon hung on a wall. And a black and white wedding picture, apparently decades old, was tacked up over the bed.

“We are going to be getting a lot of these families,” said Mehmet Makić, the head of the local displaced persons office, as he and I stood in the muddy yard. “The Serbs are pushing all the remaining Muslims around Banja Luka out. They are turning the houses of the Muslims over to the new Serb refugees. We expect to get about 11,000 people soon. The Serbs are taking the Muslim homes. We are putting the Muslims in the Serb homes.”

The 300 people who arrived in Kljuć on the buses were from the town of Prnjavor. Most had survived more than three years without work since the Serbs took control of their part of Bosnia. Most of them also had endured harassment and beatings and had seen their young men disappear. But in the last week, in the wake of the sweeping advance of the Bosnian Army, the mood got even uglier.

“We paid for this in advance,” said thirty-nine-year-old Rifet
Ramović. “The Serb soldiers stood by the buses when we left and demanded that each of us pay them 150 to 300 deutsche marks. People had to beg their neighbors for help so they could afford to get out. By the time we left, most of us had nothing.”

In the small living room of her new house, not far from where I had left Mirnes and his mother, Fatima Cura looked around. She and her husband started cleaning up the unfamiliar possessions scattered on the floor.

“I feel guilty,” she said. “This is someone else's home. Is this right?”

Her husband did not answer as he knelt to pick up pieces of stale bread from the floor.

“We lived twenty-seven years together in our house,” she said. “We expected something like this, so we sent our children out.”

Their son was in Sweden and their daughter was in a refugee camp in Germany.

“Then one night last week the Serbs came and put a paper on our door saying we no longer owned the house,” she said. “The police took our keys.”

Eight days later they were driven out of Prnjavor. “We were beaten and pushed by the Serbs on the way to the buses,” she said. “We wondered if we would make it over the river alive into Croatia.”

Mirnes and his mother, like the others on the buses, prepared that night to sleep in a new, unfamiliar bed, still made up with the bedding used by the old owner and his wife. “All we have left from our old life together is each other, a few clothes, and Mirnes' stuffed bear,” she said. “That bear has become the most precious thing we own.”

Later that day, I wandered the streets of the town. The collective
lective occupation of the houses was unsettling. On Ibre Hodzic Street one light shone from the rows of windows. I knocked on the door of the apartment and found three elderly women, two Serbs and a Muslim, intently listening to the news on a radio. The three friends were struggling, as they had for more than three years, to make sense of the latest diatribes unleashed by the Serbs or the Bosnian government, the political agreements that might augur peace, and the advances and defeats that marked the ebb and flow of war.

But in the end it had come down to this: The Bosnian government had just reclaimed this town from the Serbs, and nothing had changed except the victims. As a result of this reversal of fortune, Dursuma Medić, a Muslim, would now have to watch over her two Serbian friends—who for the last three and a half years had taken care of her.

“We are three old women trying to survive a war,” said Burka Bakovik, fifty-two, a Bosnian Serb. “We have been friends since childhood. None of this hatred ever touched us. We all protected Dursuma when the Serbs ruled. Now she protects us. The only news we wait for is peace, and that hasn't come yet.”

As we spoke I could see Muslim soldiers busy painting over the slogans left by the Serbs on the walls outside. “Only one Bosnia, all the way to the Drina” and “Victory is our destiny,” they wrote.

“The war began with words,” said Seka Milanovik, sixty-eight, the other Bosnian Serb woman, “but none of us paid any attention. The extremist Serbs and Muslims were misfits, criminals and failures. But soon they held rallies and talked of racial purity, things like that. We dismissed them—until the violence began.”

The women said the extremist groups soon partitioned the
city and surrounding villages into Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim areas. And each religious group turned to thugs for protection.

“I live in this apartment for two reasons,” said Medić. “One is to protect my Serb friends. The other is because the Serbs burned my house down. I know what can happen when desperate people seek revenge. This is why I have to always be here.”

“My daughter and two grandchildren fled with the crowds,” said Bakovik. “I did not even have time to say goodbye. In a moment they were gone. Now I am alone and afraid. I do not want to be by myself in my apartment, so I stay here. We are all women; we all felt the same pangs in childbirth. We do not believe in war.”

The loss of such social ties, the dependence on the state to dole out homes or property that was stolen, has an insidious effect on even the good and the just. Many must live with guilt and shame. They feel powerless. And those who have been abused and humiliated often search for those even weaker than they to vilify and blame for their predicament. In ethnic warfare this response feeds the racist cant of nationalist warlords who are with one hand thieving on unprecedented scales and with the other blaming the hapless minorities they are persecuting for the economic collapse and misery.

Displacement is one of the fundamental tools warlords and states use to prosecute a conflict. This is why ethnic leaders are so displeased when members of their minority group remain behind. The Croat and Serb and Muslim leaders in Bosnia often made secret deals to “trade” minorities, whether these families wanted to leave their homes or not. Such disruption helped fuel the conflict and sever communal ties with other groups.

“No one ever forgets a sudden depreciation of himself, for it is too painful,” wrote the Bulgarian essayist Elias Canetti. “And the crowd as such never forgets its depreciation. The natural tendency afterwards is to find something which is worth even less than oneself, which one can despise as one was despised oneself. It is not enough to take over an old contempt and to maintain it at the same level. What is wanted is a dynamic process of humiliation. Something must be treated in such a way that it becomes worth less and less, as the unit of money did during the inflation. And this process must be continued until its object is reduced to a state of utter worthlessness. Then one can throw it away like paper, or repulp it.”
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In the Bosnian town of Višegrad there is a graceful 400-year-old bridge, hewn of large off-white stones, that spans the emerald-green waters of the Drina River. The Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić centered his novel,
The Bridge on the Drina
, around the pumice structure, which he could see from his window as a boy. The book chronicles, over 350 years, the turbulent and often violent history of ViÅ¡egrad and Bosnia. And as Andrić pointed out, the bridge has served as a kind of public theater in times of war and upheaval. Brigands and criminals were once impaled and executed on its stone flanks. “In all tales about personal, family or public events,” Andrić wrote, “The words ‘on the bridge' could always be heard.”
¹⁹

The steep wooded hillsides that plunge to the river have for centuries produced killers of appalling magnitude. During the Bosnian war the latest arose from Višegrad, Milan Lukić, along with his group of some fifteen well-armed companions. They too used the bridge as a prop to exterminate a Muslim community that had been there for centuries. Of the 14,500 Muslims who lived in Višegrad before the war, 3,000 are missing or dead.
The others are scattered around Bosnia, many living in poverty in overcrowded rooms and refugee centers.

In April 1992, when the conflict between the Bosnian Serbs and Muslims began, Milan Lukić returned from Serbia to his hometown. He gathered together a group of men, including his brother Miloš, his cousin Sredoje, and a waiter, Mitar Vasiljević. Lukić, who often went barefoot, called the group the Wolves. He set about robbing Muslim homes. The plunder quickly turned to killing. On May 18, Lukić burst into Dzemo Zukić's home and shot his wife, Bakha, in the back, according to neighbors who saw the shooting. He drove the terrified husband away in the family car, a red Volkswagen Passat. Zukić was never seen again. But the car became a harbinger of death.