Revengers tragedy
SARAJEVO Spring, 1999 - As the capital of Bosnia, and a frequent player on the world stage this century, you'd expect nothing less than a certain outward sophistication and cosmopolitanism from Sarajevans even when the country that armed and encouraged those who tried to destroy their country over the last decade is getting its teeth kicked in by NATO planes and missiles. Sarajevans are excellent at telling outsiders exactly what needs to be said to keep the wheels running smoothly. They've got a savoir faire that's elusive here in the Balkans. Just use the strained, clunky and stubborn Serb spokespersons that you've been enjoying since the bombing began as a handy yardstick.
For instance, there hasn't been a lot of public gloating by politicians here over the air strikes. Prominent Bosnian politician and frequent talking head Haris Silajdzic whose title in the odd two-tier, tri-ethnic and internationally micro-managed Tower of Babel that passes for government here works out in translation to something like "Co-Speaker of the Council of Ministers" told Slobodna Bosna magazine this weekend that Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's politics are "suicidal," and that he can't explain them. For the most part, that's their story, they're sticking to it, and now let's have some coffee.
Plunge your spade into the dirt about half an inch, however, and you'll find immense Bosnian pleasure at the NATO bombing of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. I've got the last couple days of Sarajevo's papers in front of me as I write this, and the headlines say it all. The front page of Thursday's Dnevni Avaz (the print mouthpiece of the SDA, the main Bosnian government party ) screeched: "After ten years of Milosevic's genocidal politics: Finally Bombs on the Balkans' Butcher." Friday's Vecernje Novine (an evening tabloid) blew out its front page with "Yugoslavia in Flames!" Even the biweekly Dani, which is the consensus pick here in Sarajevo as the most imaginative and entertaining read in the country, got into the act by placing a Tomahawk missile blasting off on its cover with the cunningly barbed headline: "NATO Over Belgrade: Pretty Village, Pretty Flame." (The headline plays off the controversial Serb film of the same name made during the recent wars here.)
If the Bosnian reaction to the NATO bombings this week really was a simple poker face hiding jubilation, it would hardly be worth writing about akin to burning column inches analyzing banal mantras such as "I support our men and women in uniform." What complicates the Bosnian response to the military offensive is the memories of their own encounter with NATO bombings, and the fragile political structure that I alluded to earlier.
The earlier encounter with NATO bombing -- the attacks on Bosnian Serb positions in 1995 that helped lift the siege of Sarajevo and set the stage for the Dayton Peace Agreement in November, 1995 is the easiest to explain. Not that Bosnians aren't grateful for the NATO help almost four years ago; they just believe it was a good three years too late. Watching television with a Bosnian family on Wednesday night when the bombs started to fly, they took a sort of grim satisfaction in the military operation, and a sort of envy at the rapidity with which NATO took up the case of Kosovo's Albanians. A couple years of siege warfare will do that to you.
"Here in Sarajevo," Dulsa Jusic turned and told me as we watched the first news of the attacks |as it on Bosnian state television, "we waited and waited for these bombings to come." She shook her head, but then turned back to the television to watch the endless reel of cruise missile test footage that television here was running in lieu of actual pictures.
Harder to delineate are the delineating brittle politics of Bosnia. As interested as Bosnians are in what's happening literally next door to them, they've got their own problems. The Serb part of Bosnia (dubbed "Republika Srpska") was already reeling from a double whammy that the High Representative appointed to oversee the country Carlos Westendorp dropped on them two weeks ago. On the same day (March 16), Westendorp fired the Republika Srpska president Nikola Poplasen for refusing to implement the Dayton Peace Accords, and then also announced a decision by international arbitrator Roberts Owen to create a free zone in a crucial bit of Bosnian geography called Brcko that the Serbs have coveted as a bridge between their two zones of control in Bosnia.
It took a day or two to sink in, but after that, the Bosnian Serbs started getting uppity under the watchful eye of NATO peacekeepers stationed here -- holding mostly peacefully rallies with fiery rhetoric aimed at the international presence here. The furor was just starting to calm down in Republika Srpska when the NATO bombings in Yugoslavia that have driven Serbs worldwide batshit began.
The Bosnian Serbs have proved to be no exception. Bosnian Serb Television (which is also regulated by Westendorp's office) has taken the bombings as a new excuse to crank up its propaganda machinery war movies, patriotic music, and news imported straight from Belgrade television. A good portion of Sunday's newscast was devoted to full coverage of Serbian protest rallies all over the world, including the Bosnian Serb capital Banja Luka and Brcko masses of folks waving nasty placards and tossing eggs and stones at the High Representative's offices. An exchange of letters between Westendorp's office complaining about coverage and a testy Bosnian Serb television response was aired on the program but only after a half-hour protest parade.
Organized as a counterweight to the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian and Croatian federation isn't exactly providing a calm or sturdy influence. The Bosnians and Croats have been subtly undermining each other since the agreement was signed a process referred to in this year's U.S. Department of State Human Rights Report on Bosnia as "mutual suspicion" and the "separatist aims of hard-line Croats" and the assassination of a high-ranking Croat police official named Jozo Leutar in the center of Sarajevo two weeks ago created a bureaucratic boycott of joint institutions by the Croats that's completely mucking up the alleged federation. Making matters worse, Leutar lingered in a coma for almost two weeks before finally succumbing on Sunday allowing a fresh round of mutual recrimination between the federation "partners" with the announcement of his death.
With all this bickering and nonsense, Bosnia is already a pressure cooker with only an international lid (NATO troops, to be more precise) keeping things contained. The bombings of Yugoslavia (and the shooting down of two Serbian jets over Bosnia itself on Friday)are raising the temperature dangerously high, even on streets bustling with Sarajevans enjoying the first warm days of spring and celebrating the Muslim feast of Bajram. TV cameras were roaming Sarajevo's spartan bus station on Friday, filming some of the first waves of refugees arriving from places like Novi Pazar in southwest Serbia with a bag or two of belongings sitting with them on the curb. A number of them were Yugoslavs fleeing the bombings in Serbia, rather than the terrified and desperate Kosovo Albanians that have been dominating the TV screens. As I write this on Sunday night, relatives of the family that I'm staying with here in Sarajevo have just arrived from the Serbian town of Nis, and are settling down after a long day on the bus to try and get some sleep on the floor.
When you read books like Tim Judah's incredible retelling of Balkan history, The Serbs, you discover that the history of this region is a seemingly endless tale of violence, displacement and flight. After a brief respite (brought about in part by NATO bombs), the tale is starting again here, and Sarajevo's cosmopolitan air is almost certain to be tested yet again, if not by war itself, than by its shrapnel and its shell shock. Beneath the easy air, and the initial euphoria, Sarajevans aren't smiling because they know the story all too well.
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