War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (7 page)

Intellectuals and social critics are as susceptible to the plague
of nationalism as the masses. They often find in it an answer to their own feelings of ostracism. In the nationalist cause they are given a chance to be exalted by a nation that has ignored them. They too enjoy intoxication. There are no shortages of intellectuals willing to line up behind leaders they despise in times of national crisis, an act that negates the moral posturing they often make from within the confines of academia during peacetime. These enthusiastic intellectuals can become dangerous in wartime. Many hold messianic and uncompromising beliefs that they have never had to put into practice. All nationalist movements have such pernicious mentors willing to justify the use of force for a utopian and unworkable vision. Among the Serbs Dobrica Ćosić, whose sentimental novels about Serbian heroism during World War I found a wide following, including Milošević, was able to replace real history with Serbian nationalist myth, which was used to fuel the war.

Those who do defy the nationalist agenda in war are usually reviled during the conflict and shunned afterward. They are, at least by the labels placed upon them by the world, often rather humble, sometimes simple, and not always well educated. The acts defy the collective psychosis.

A friend of mine in Serbia, Slavica, had a former Muslim classmate who lived in Mostar, a Bosnian city that was devastated in the war by Serbian and later Croatian troops. She sent her two small children to live with Slavica, her husband, and young daughter in a town in northern Serbia. The arrival of the Muslim children caused a furor. The school did not want them to attend classes. Neighbors spat at Slavica and the children in the street. Her windows were broken. Crude graffiti was spray-painted on the walls of her home. Yet she persisted. She cared for the children as her own. After a year she got them into the school, although they endured taunts and harassment.

After the war the townspeople preferred to forget. No one apologized. Slavica was allowed to be a nominal member of the community. She told me that people were uncomfortable around her. She was a reminder of the collective cowardice and indifference by many in her town now. She, I believe, shamed those around her.

“I will never again feel a part of the country where I was born and raised,” she said.

Yet Slavica also felt guilt and shame for the way her nation had reacted, although she had chosen a different response. She insisted that she and her husband had done too little, that the sheltering of the children was insignificant given the magnitude of the crimes committed in the name of the Serbs. The Muslim children, whom she eventually sent to their mother when the mother managed to get political asylum in Canada, called infrequently. They may not have wanted to remember the pain and powerlessness of such dislocation. Slavica was profoundly alone.

Many of those who defy the collective psychosis of the nation are solitary figures once the wars end. Yet these acts of compassion were usually the best antidotes to the myths peddled by nationalists. Those who reached across lines to assist the “enemy” freed themselves from nationalist abstractions that dehumanized others. They were vaccinated against the cult of death that dominates societies in wartime. They reduced their moral universe to caring for another human being. And in this they were able to reject the messianic pretensions that come with the nationalist agenda. By accepting that they could only affect a few lives they also accepted their small place in the universe. This daily lesson in humility protected them. They were saved not by what they could accomplish but by faith. Such people are, however, very rare.

“The survivors all suffer from the same certainty: they know that if similar acts of persecution were to begin tomorrow, despite all the official demonstrations of sympathy for the victims and condemnation of the oppressors, the rescuers would be as rare as they were before,” wrote Tzvetan Todorov in
Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps
. “Their good neighbors who now greet them every morning would once again turn away.”
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I sat one afternoon with a Bosnian Serb couple, Rosa and Drago Sorak, outside of the Muslim enclave of Goražde where they had once lived. They poured out the usual scorn on the Muslims, but then stopped at the end of the rant and told me that not all Muslims were bad. This, they said, it was their duty to admit.

During the fighting in the bleak, bombed-out shell of a city that was Goražde, where bands of children had become street urchins and hundreds of war-dead lay in hastily dug graves, a glimmer of humanity arrived for the Soraks in the shape of Fadil Fejzić's cow. The cow forged an unusual bond between Fejzić, a Muslim, and his Serbian neighbors, the Soraks.

When the Serbs began the siege of Goražde in 1992, the Soraks lived in the city with their older son, Zoran, and his wife. They were indifferent, although they were Serbs, to the nationalist propaganda of Bosnian Serb leaders like Radovan Karadžić.

After Serbian forces began to shell the city and cut off the electricity, gas, and water, the family refused to move out. They threw their lot in with the Bosnian government and were branded by the Bosnian Serbs, who pounded them each day from the mountains above the town, as traitors.

On the night of June 14, 1992, the Bosnian police came to
the door for Zoran, who until the war was on Yugoslavia's national handball team.

“The Muslim police said they were taking him away for interrogation,” said Drago Sorak, “but he never came back. We went nearly every day to the police station, until we left Goražde, to beg for information. They told us nothing. We assume he is dead.”

Soon afterward, their second son, who fought with the Bosnian Serbs, was struck by a car and killed. The Soraks were childless.

The couple, harassed by some Muslims in the town, began to consider fleeing, although it would be months before they could get out. Drago Sorak was increasingly pressed into digging trenches and chopping firewood for the Bosnian Army. The couple had little to eat.

“As things deteriorated it got worse and worse,” he said. “Some of the Muslims wanted to kill us and others defended us. There were only 200 Serbs left in the city. On some nights, groups of Muslims came to the apartment looking for us. We had to hide until they left. We were frightened.”

The difficulties, the harassment, and the disappearance of Zoran all helped turn the couple against a Muslim-led government that they had been willing to accept at the start of the war.

“I would live in Albania before I would go back to living with the Muslims here,” Rosa Sorak said. “How can you expect us to live with those who murdered my son?”

Five months after Zoran's disappearance, his wife gave birth to a girl. The mother was unable to nurse the child. The city was being shelled continuously. There were severe food shortages. Infants, like the infirm and the elderly, were dying in droves. The family gave the baby tea for five days, but she began to fade.

“She was dying,” Rosa Sorak said. “It was breaking our hearts.”

Fejzić, meanwhile, was keeping his cow in a field on the eastern edge of Goražde, milking it at night to avoid being hit by Serbian snipers.

“On the fifth day, just before dawn, we heard someone at the door,” said Rosa Sorak. “It was Fadil Fejzić in his black rubber boots. He handed up half a liter of milk. He came the next morning, and the morning after that, and after that. Other families on the street began to insult him. They told him to give his milk to Muslims, to let the Chetnik children die. He never said a word. He refused our money. He came for 442 days, until my daughter-in-law and granddaughter left Goražde for Serbia.”

The Soraks eventually left and took over a house that once belonged to a Muslim family in the Serbian-held town of Kopaci, two miles to the east. They could no longer communicate with Fejzić.

The couple said they grieved daily for their sons. They missed their home. They said they could never forgive those who took Zoran from them. But they also said that despite their anger and loss, they could not listen to other Serbs talking about Muslims, or even recite their own sufferings, without telling of Fejzić and his cow. Here was the power of love. What this illiterate farmer did would color the life of another human being, who might never meet him, long after he was gone. In his act lay an ocean of hope.

“It is our duty to always tell this story,” Drago Sorak said. “Salt, in those days, cost $80 a kilo. The milk he had was precious, all the more so because it was hard to keep animals. He gave us 221 liters. And every year at this time, when it is cold and dark, when we close our eyes, we can hear the boom of the
heavy guns and the sound of Fadil Fejzic's footsteps on the stairs.”

Fejzić fell on hard times after the war. I found him selling small piles of worm-eaten apples picked from abandoned orchards outside the shattered remains of an apartment block. His apartment block had been destroyed by artillery shells, leaving him to share the floor of an unheated room with several other men. His great brown-and-white milk cow, the one the Soraks told me about, did not survive the war. It was slaughtered for the meat more than a year before as the Serbian forces tightened the siege. He had only a thin, worn coat to protect him from the winter cold. When we spoke he sat huddled in the corner of a dank, concrete-walled room rubbing his pathetic collection of small apples, many with brown holes in them, against his sleeve.

When I told him I had seen the Soraks, his eyes brightened.

“And the baby?” he asked. “How is she?”

The small acts of decency by people such as Slavica, a Serb, or Fejzić, a Muslim, in wartime ripple outwards like concentric circles. These acts, unrecognized at the time, make it impossible to condemn, legally or morally, an entire people. They serve as reminders that we all have a will of our own, a will that is independent of the state or the nationalist cause. Most important, once the war is over, these people make it hard to brand an entire nation or an entire people as guilty.

“I do not understand,” wrote Primo Levi. “I cannot tolerate the fact that a man should be judged not for what he is but because of the group to which he happens to belong.”
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But these acts also remind us that in wartime most people are unwilling to risk discomfort, censure, or violence to help neighbors. There is a frightening indifference and willful blindness, a
desire to believe the nationalist myth because it brands those outside a nation or ethnic group with traits and vices that cannot be eradicated. Because they are the other, because they are not us, they are guilty. Such indifference, such acceptance of nationalist self-glorification, turns many into silent accomplices.

To those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed. The collective glorification permits people to abandon their usual preoccupation with the petty concerns of daily life. They can abandon even self-preservation in the desire to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama. This vision is accepted even at the expense of self-annihilation. Life in wartime becomes theater. All are actors. Leaders, against the backdrop of war, look heroic, noble. Pilots who bail out of planes shot down by the enemy and who make their way back home play cameo roles. The state, as we saw in the Persian Gulf War or Afghanistan, transforms war into a nightly television show. The generals, who are no more interested in candor than they were in Vietnam, have at least perfected the appearance of candor. And the press has usually been more than willing to play the dupe as long as the ratings are good.

The daily wartime episodes are central to the nationalist vision. The carefully choreographed performances come to define and make up the body politic. The lines between real entertainment and political entertainment blur and finally vanish. The world, as we see it in wartime, becomes high drama. It is romanticized. A moral purpose is infused into the trivial and the commonplace. And we, who yesterday felt maligned, alienated, and ignored, are part of a nation of self-appointed agents of the divine will. We await our chance to walk on stage.

During the first protest movement against Milošević in the winter of 1998, a time when nationalism should have been discredited,
I visited one of the faculties occupied by the students who sought MiloÅ¡ević's removal. I arrived at the front door of the Philosophy Department at Belgrade University to be stopped by several curt young men with tags on their jackets identifying them as “security.”

Students inside who attempted to speak to me were told by the security detail that only “the committee” had the right to make statements. And when Jack Lang, former minister of culture in France, arrived at the building to express his support for the student protesters, he was escorted by young men in green fatigue jackets to a room where he was declared “an enemy of the Serbs” and ordered to leave.

Lang had stumbled unwittingly on the virulent Serbian nationalism that colored the anti-government protests. The incident highlighted the problem that changing Serbian society did not lie in overturning the rule of one man, but in transforming a country that had come to see racist remarks as acceptable and had learned to express itself in the language of hate and nationalist crusades. The opposition to Milošević came from those who felt he had sold out the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. There was no repentance.

“Students, professors, and many Serbs have simply switched their ideological iconography,” Obrad Savic, the head of the Belgrade Circle, a dissident group, told me. “They have shifted from a Marxist paradigm to Serbian nationalism. We have failed to build an intellectual tradition where people think for themselves. We operate only in the collective. We speak in the plural as the Serbian people. It's frightening, especially in the young. It will take years for us to rid ourselves of this virus.”