August 12, 1996

Ruins of Sarajevo Library Is Symbol of a Shattered Culture

By JANE PERLEZ

ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Eerie with shattered beauty, the burned ruins of Bosnia’s national library have stood for the last four years as a wrenching symbol of an attempt to destroy a city and its culture.

Now the gouged granite columns, the crumbling crenelated trim and the once resplendent copper cupola, shredded like lacework, stand for something else: the sluggishness of the restoration and reconstruction of Sarajevo.

“What is missing is money — there are lots of ideas but no money,” said Enes Kujundzic, the energetic library director, who has shown scores of international dignitaries, experts and financiers through the ghostly interior, where more than a million books and priceless manuscripts were reduced to ashes by Serb shells. “I say this is top priority for a country coming out of war. They say with this money we could rebuild several factories, and then rebuild the library.”

Lofty promises of international financing to rebuild Sarajevo’s library, along with its roads, airport and factories, have failed to materialize in the amounts envisioned after the signing of the Dayton peace agreement last December. Much of the reluctance is caused by uncertainty over how Bosnia will fare after next month’s national elections and by unease over whether the Bosnian government could manage the funds.

But unlike many of the reconstruction projects being bandied about, Kujundzic says that his plan is simple and practical.

He wants to start giving basic library services to the people of Sarajevo, who were starved intellectually and deprived professionally during the fighting. The city lent him an unused army barracks in which to get a temporary, but functional, library going again. So Kujundzic’s first need, he said, is financing to create on-line services, open research facilities and create a new book, periodical and archival collection.

The more romantic idea of restoring the fabulous century-old structure that fuses Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian architectural styles — where Archduke Ferdinand of Austria had just attended a reception when he was shot in 1914 — should be deferred until later, he said. Hasty patching to insure that the ruins do not crumble completely from exposure to snow, wind and sun will be finished before the winter.

“Obviously the building attracts much more attention,” Kujundzic said, looking out windows that are patched together with plastic in his temporary office a few blocks from the ruins. “But everyone forgets the people who are alive and willing to do research. And people forget that this country can’t be rebuilt without resources of science and technology. People say you are a cultural institution. I say we’re also an educational and scientific institution that has to help this country compete.”

The library in Sarajevo served the University of Sarajevo, and was a national repository of Bosniaca — with works devoted to subjects about Bosnia or published in Bosnia, many of them centuries old. Some of these were irreplaceable handwritten manuscripts, though many of the books can be found elsewhere.

When Serb artillery bombarded the library in August 1992, flames engulfed almost 50,000 feet of wooden bookshelves and burned a central atrium, richly carved staircases and the ceremonial auditoriums of the structure, built in 1896 as the town hall. The auditoriums had become reading rooms in 1951, when the building was converted to the national library for the republic within the Yugoslav federation. Books, original manuscripts, the archives of Serb, Croat, Bosnian and Jewish writers, the entire catalogue system, microfilm, computers and photo labs were all destroyed.

Three months earlier, the Serbs shelled the Sarajevo Oriental Institute, devastating a collection of medieval literature in Arabic, Persian and Turkish and priceless works in four alphabets — Latin Arabic, Cyrillic and an alphabet that predated Cyrillic, known as Old Bosnian.

Immediately, librarians in the United States and elsewhere tried to come to the rescue.

To recapture as much of the collection as possible, Tatjana Lorkovic, the curator of Slavic and East European collections at Yale University Library, started playing detective. With funds from the Yale library as well as the library at Harvard, the Library of Congress and other national data bases, Ms. Lorkovic is organizing a bibliographic record of Bosniaca.

“Those Stone Age people who destroyed the library destroyed their heritage too,” said Ms. Lorkovic in a telephone interview. “Represented in the library were the personal archives of the very important Serb poet, Aleksa Santic, who lived from 1868 to 1924. When the Bosnians started to go to Turkey after Yugoslavia was formed in 1918, he wrote a poem, ‘Ostajte Ovdje,’ ‘Stay Here,’ to tell his Muslim brothers not to leave.”

Once a bibliography is in hand, Sarajevo could end up with one of the world’s most modern library services. The trend in libraries is away from being depositories of books and toward providing on-line services. The bibliography from Ms. Lorkovic’s project would enable the Sarajevo library to offer many of the available Bosnian works as full-text electronic archives. Ancient manuscripts of Bosnian literature owned by libraries elsewhere could be digitalized using the latest technology, Kujundzic said.

The 108-member staff of the library in 1992 has dwindled to 60. Some were killed, others went into the army, and others fled as refugees. With skimpy appropriations from the Bosnian government, Kujundzic struggles to meet monthly salaries and, so far, has not been able to provide training in new technologies.

There has been no money for supplies since March, he said. Some computers and some books have been sent from Unesco, which has also been working on long-term plans for reviving the library’s collections, he said. But over all, the donations have been meager.

To illustrate his dire need for funds, Kujundzic said his staff had just completed a list of 450 journals and magazines to which the library would like to subscribe, at an annual cost of about $300,000. The subjects, he said, were selected according to Bosnia’s post-war requirements: in medicine, journals about trauma; in international relations, material about the United Nations; in architecture, periodicals about reconstruction. Widely read journals such as Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine and The Economist were also on the list.

To show that they are not waiting around for a grandiose rebuilding project, Kujundzic and his staff have produced the first issue of a new library journal called Bosniaca. It is devoted to articles about Bosnian literature and is intended as an inspiration for those wanting to return the library to its former intellectual achievements.

While the librarians toil to meet the basic needs of a people emerging from the cocoon of war, the debate will persist about what to do with the library ruins, now largely frequented by gawking tourists.

Ms. Lorkovic, who emigrated to the United States from Belgrade in the 1960s, is on the side of both memory and modernity.

“I think the old building should be preserved the way it is — like Coventry Cathedral — as a remembrance,” she said. “A new Sarajevo library should be bright, the biggest and the best and the whole world should help.”

"High Fidelity" and "Love Thy Neighbor"

“High Fidelity” and “Love Thy Neighbor”

August 13, 2002

Peter Maass
My book may not have been turned into a movie, but it had a cameo role in one, about which there has been some mystery, until now.

The backstory: there’s a scene in “High Fidelity” in which the character played by John Cusack is lying in bed with his girfriend, who will leave him for the guy who lives upstairs. The camera pans to the girlfriend, who is reading my book; you cannot miss the title because you are intended to see it. She will sleep with her neighbor and is reading a book entitled “Love Thy Neighbor”—get it?

“High Fidelity” is a smart movie (based on a great novel by Nick Hornby) that appeals, apparently, to readers of my book, because I received a lot of emails about its cameo. How had I arranged such fantastic product placement? I was as surprised as everyone else, and I’ve always wondered how LTN earned its moment of celluloid fame. Did the makers of the movie search Amazon to find a book with a useful title for the scene? Did a lowly production assistant suggest it at the last minute, as in, “Hey, this might be a good prop”? Unlikely as it might be, was LTN’s appearance related in any way to its (award-winning) content?

A good friend who was in L.A. last week happened to share a meal with one of the screenwriters of “High Fidelity.” My friend, may he be blessed for eternity, popped the question: How did LTN get into the movie? The screenwriter said he was familiar with LTN and thought the title would make for a cute joke about the girlfriend’s fling. He also thought that for the very modest portion of the audience who might be familiar with my book, it would convey another message he wanted to put out—that the girlfriend was intelligent and thoughtful, because she was reading a book that is not unchallenging to its readers.

Mystery solved, happily.

Bosnia’s Cantons ‘Must be Scrapped’

balkaninsight.com

07 July 2008 Sarajevo - Bosnia’s internal setup is ‘dysfunctional’ and the cantons system in the larger Federation entity should be scrapped, a member of the European Parliament argues.

The statement from Doris Pack, chairwoman of the European Parliament Committee for South-East Europe triggered differing reactions from Bosnian Serb, Croat and Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) leaders, local media reported on Monday.

These reactions reflect all the difficulties and complexities which constitutional changes – required as a part of country’s European Union accession – face in Bosnia. Any new constitutional negotiations are highly unlikely until after the October local elections.

“If your country wants to enter into the European Union then its institutions have to be efficient,” Doris Pack said in an interview published by Sarajevo daily Dnevni Avaz on Sunday.

Bosnia’s constitution – adopted as a part of the Dayton peace accord which ended the 1992-1995 war – has created a complex internal setup. The country is weak at state level and has two highly decentralised entities – the Federation and Republika Srpska. – and the separate Brcko district. The Federation is further divided into ten cantons.

Pack said that both Bosnian entities should be reformed but especially stressed that the Federation should be “simplified.”

“Maybe the number of cantons should be reduced. Or maybe they should be abolished! Why do they have to exist?” she said, elaborating that cantonal responsibilities could be divided between entity and municipal levels.

Pack also added that establishment of a third, Bosnian Croat entity – for which Croat politicians lobbied during and after the war – is “not necessary” and “would only complicate the situation even further.”

Bosnian Serb leaders welcomed Pack’s statement as proof that the Federation, not Republika Srpska, is the biggest problem in the country. Rajko Vasic, the executive secretary of the ruling Bosnian Serb Union of Independent Social Democrats, said they would accept any changes to the Federation as long as Republika Srpska is preserved in its current form.

On the other side, Bosnian Croat and Bosniak politicians rejected Pack’s suggestion. Most of them support a thorough constitutional overhaul which would abolish both entities and establish a new regional division of the country along non-ethnic lines. This option is strongly rejected by Bosnian Serb leaders.

“This is an unacceptable solution, which would only cement the two-entity division of the country,” said Miso Relota, spokesman for Bosnia’s Croat Democratic Union, HDZ BiH.

The Vice President of the ruling Bosnian Party of Democratic Action, Sefik Dzaferovic, said the setup should be changed not only in one but in both entities.

A soldier's story: Fred Doucette's Bosnian war experience helped him to help others

The Hill Times, July 7th, 2008

By Kate Malloy

When Canadian soldier Fred Doucette returned from Bosnia where he had served as a UN peacekeeper in 1995, he was so full of rage that when he finally tried to get some psychiatric help, he felt like ripping out the heart of a military social worker and “shitting in the hole.”

A seasoned soldier, Mr. Doucette had been with the UN peacekeeping forces in Cyprus in the 1970s and 1980s. But as a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia he was on a “transition mission” and one he says was so horrible he could never have imagined it. As a member of the UN Protection Force, he was under narrow UN orders to help maintain a peace between the warring Bosnian Serb forces from the army of the former Yugoslavia and Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats.

But mostly, he says members of the force felt helpless or like “eunuchs in a whorehouse.”

“There were things going on there that hadn’t been seen since the Second World War, the ethnic cleansing, the atrocities, the rape camps, the concentration camps, it looked like Auschwitz. There were things that were going on and it was just overwhelming to see how they were treating each other,” says Mr. Doucette in a recent interview with The Hill Times.

In 2001, Mr. Doucette was diagnosed with severe, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, and told he could be treated with medical help and psychotherapy after his years of buried rage, nightmares, flashbacks of violence and trauma. He was medically released from the military in 2002.

Today, he works with the Department of National Defence and Veterans Affairs Operational Stress Injury Social Support program. He runs peer support groups in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and helps members of the Canadian Forces who have operational stress injuries, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

According to Veterans Affairs Canada’s numbers, reported by The Canadian Press, the number of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress has more than tripled since Canada first deployed troops to Afghanistan, and of the 10,252 relatively young male and female veterans with a psychiatric condition, 63 per cent have a post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Operational Stress Injury Social Support group indicates 80 per cent of the operational stress injury casualties are in the Army and 80 per cent of those are from the war in Bosnia. It’s estimated 20 per cent of the Canadian Forces have post-traumatic stress disorder today, but the Department of National Defence has not officially released its numbers.

Mr. Doucette recently wrote about his Bosnian experience in his gritty and searing book Empty Casing: A Soldier’s Memoir of Sarajevo Under Siege, published by Douglas & McIntyre.

In an interview with The Hill Times, Mr. Doucette, who lives with his wife Janice Wiper of 35 years in Lincoln, N.B., talks about his tour of duty in Bosnia, his survivor guilt, and his singular message of hope for soldiers who feel lonely, helpless and suicidal. The interview was edited for length.



Do more soldiers out there have PTSD and aren’t saying?

“I think so and I think we’re scratching maybe at the tip of the iceberg and there’s no real comparison, but it’s like the figures on rape and sexual assault: for every one reported rape, they figure that there’s 10 unreported. Now not that these people won’t get the help, but they may be delaying it while they’re in the military.”


You were trained to kill as a soldier and yet when you were in Sarajevo as a UN peacekeeper you couldn’t use force. Did that make your trauma worse and if you were allowed to use force, would that have made it any better?

“It’s odd, but when I look back at that anger that I had, it was more of an eventual thing, and we could still defend ourselves. In Bosnia, if someone shot at us, we could shoot back. However, as a soldier, it’s almost as if when you’re shooting back you think, ‘Okay was it warranted? Well Bob got hit and I shot back. Or maybe I should have shot back before Bob got hit.’ But it’s that judgment call.

“But it wasn’t so much had we been able to just shoot back, but had the mandate and our orders been robust enough, then directed us enough, and said, ‘You can intervene, if you see these things.’ … When we went to NATO, we had that robust mandate that if we saw looting, burning, anything like that, [the orders were to] ‘Stop, get out, sort it out. It may not require shooting, but if somebody shot at us, let’s clear this place up.’ So it’s all about how robust the mandate is because the difference between murdering and killing with a soldier is that we kill under orders that are specific and detailed.”


You talk about feeling terror when you first got to Sarajevo. But did nothing prepare you for Sarajevo?

“No. We train right to the limit, but during the training and deep in your mind you’re thinking, ‘They’re not going to kill me. It’ll be scary, but they’re not going to kill me.’ You know when you’re in training, you may feel, ‘We’ve run for 10 miles, and I’m hungry and I’m tired,’ but you know, that it’s going to end and they’re not going to run you until you die.”


But don’t you get the soldiers together in advance and tell them, ‘You could die.’ Do you not do anything like that?

“Probably very little because you’re trying to focus them on the mission, the leader especially. There are subtle ways when you’re doing the first-aid, you really make sure they know what they’re doing and it’s stressing the point, ‘This could be you, this could be your mate.’ But it’s a fine line because you don’t want to put the fear of God in them about all these things because you can traumatize them before they go. The fear of the unknown is a horrible thing, so you keep that fair balance. The thing that I think they could be doing is teaching them that when they get back to that safe area, they should breathe, think, ground yourself, talk to a mate. I think we could be doing more of that because when I went through the therapy I thought of some of the things they taught me and I thought, ‘Holy geez, I wish I would have known this before I went.’ It wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t demeaning.”


Do you have an example?

“Just breathing. I found out, and a therapist told me, that my breathing was very shallow. She told me I had to learn to breathe and it’s amazing how it works. In Bosnia, when I was in Sarajevo, I’d sit on my little cot and I had a 40-ouncer of Drambuie and I’d bring it out and I’d breathe a couple of glugs of that and then, clomp, I’d be out. But there are subtle things you can do. There’s a program where they send soldiers, Homewood and Bellwood are two organizations in Ontario, where they send soldiers and veterans who have PTSD and addictions because you’ve got to treat both of them at the same time, they’re connected.”


What are the addictions to, usually?

“Alcohol, they could be drugs, it could be gambling, but it’s an addiction of some type where you’ve got to treat the PTSD and the addiction together. So they have a two-month program, in-house. It’s very well-run, there’s a success rate in the sense that 70 per cent of the people don’t come back, or they don’t reoffend, or they don’t get into the thing. But I went there when they first started the program to visit and to be with the first group as peer support and one of the first lectures was how to deal with boredom and loneliness, and I was thinking, I wish somebody had taught me how to do that because in a theatre of operation you’re bored and lonely 90 per cent of the time, but 10 per cent of the time it’s sheer terror.”


Do PTSD and the drug addiction go hand in hand?

“Not fully. It’s self-medication, it’s like I can’t sleep, I’ll drink 12 beers, I pass out, I get some form of sleep, I’m angry all the time, maybe I’ll do marijuana, cocaine, I don’t know; whatever takes the edge off and mellows me out. But the stats we have are in males, it’s alcohol and there’s probably about 50 per cent and females there’s probably about 35 per cent who use that as a self-medication. These are the people who have PTSD.”

Is the PTSD just among the infantrymen?

“No. There’s no rank, no trade, no gender. It’ll hit everybody. This is where the fear of the unknown comes in.”


And it’s 10 per cent of the Canadian Forces have PTSD, period?

“That’s the figures they come up with, however, and I don’t have any new figures but ones we were using for a while, and if you had the pie chart, 80 per cent of the OSI casualties are in the Army, the other 20 per cent is mixed between the Navy and the Air Force. … But the 80 per cent of the casualties are in the Army and, oddly enough, some of the figures we had a few years ago, about 80 per cent of that 80 per cent were in Bosnia.”


Why was that?

“Because that was, I’d say, the transition mission from what we considered traditional peacekeeping where we went in after and somebody said, ‘Okay, there’s the line, the war’s over, they’ve gone through a peace agreement, and now we’re going to stand here to make sure you guys don’t go back at it.’ In Bosnia, the war raged, there was no peace agreement, the mandate we spoke about was fairly narrow and there were things going on there that hadn’t been seen since the Second World War; the ethnic cleansing, the atrocities, the rape camps, the concentration camps, it looked like Auschwitz. There were things that were going on and it was just overwhelming to see how they were treating each other.

“And I say Canada is an intelligent, caring country, and soldiers who come from Canada are intelligent, caring people, and even though we’re trained soldiers, when you put them into a situation like that, their intelligence says that’s wrong and they’re caring enough to get out of that vehicle, and go over and say, ‘Stop, get out of here.’

“But the mandate says, ‘No that convoy is going from here to here and you’re to protect it, stay mounted.’ And you drive by and you do that enough to a soldier, it’s like sending a fireman to the fire and saying, ‘No, stay in the truck, put the hose down and watch it burn, but you can help unload the wood that’s going to rebuild the house. And you’re going to crack.’ You come back from a tour, it doesn’t matter where, with a little bit of guilt or a fairly profound amount. You always doubt, ‘Did I do my job well? Or I wonder how that family’s doing or I wonder how that little kid’s doing, the one who lives down around the corner I used to throw some candy to every day.’

“I came back with the guilt of not having enough dressings to help people; you’re standing there and thinking I’ve got none left. It’s bizarre but that was a little thing that nipped away at me and the guilt of knowing that I’m leaving, that I’m not here forever, because you know when the shit hits the fan, they’re going to get me out of here and even if it’s in six months, eight months, 12 months, I’m going home and you’re looking at these people and say, ‘Hopefully, I did my bit.’ Now there’s a portion that’ll come back and say, ‘I don’t give a shit what happens to them,’ but that’s that mix of people and, on average, you’d be hard-pressed to find a soldier who didn’t have some type of guilt or some type of, ‘I wish I could have done more,’ now with the operations going on and guys are coming back with the guilt of, ‘I survived and Bob didn’t or Ted didn’t,’ or ‘Six were killed in that vehicle, and I lived,’ so there’s survivor guilt.”


You run the peer support group now?

“Our organization is set up across the country, we’re at all the major bases, there’s about 22 peer support coordinators which I work directly with the veteran or the soldier and we have a dozen women who have experienced a husband, a loved one with an OSI, and they work with the families and part of our thing is to run support groups. We do one on one. It’s most of what we do.

“I meet with the soldier who’s sniffing out and said, ‘Fred, things aren’t going good, I’m not sleeping,’ and I just listen and say, ‘Well, here’s the path, you’ve got to go and see a doctor, go and go in and spill your guts to the doctor and here’s what will happen after.’ But the family component [of the peer support] does the same thing because I know this guy has a wife and kids and I say, ‘Give this card to your wife and call Jennifer who works there in Gagetown with me,’ so we cover New Brunswick and P.E.I., and there’s people in Petawawa, there’s people in Ottawa and our program is co-sponsored. I’m a government employee with DND. We’re managed by DND and Veterans Affairs because we don’t care if you’re serving or out. I’ve got an Australian guy, I’ve got an RCMP guy, I’ve got a few Americans. We don’t care, it’s not a big deal because it’s just somebody to reach out to.”


What are the Canadian soldiers saying today from Afghanistan? What are their complaints?

“Oddly enough, a lot of the guys I talk to, Afghanistan is not their first mission, it’s just the one that overloaded the system because they’ve been to Bosnia, Haiti, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia. Some of the guys have had two or three trips to Bosnia and they’ve been to Afghanistan and the old rucksack is finally full and they say, ‘I’ve given everything I’ve got Fred and this one finally broke the back.’ I’ve only spoken to a handful who come and say this is their first mission and usually they were involved in a roadside bomb and they lost friends. I’d say a fair amount of the guys I get are just burnt out and need help and can’t do it anymore, so you get the gamut of ranks too, from corporals to sergeant-majors, saying ‘It’s over.’ They’re overloaded with grief, trauma, and the stress, and holding it together and packing it away, it’s like trying to hold water in a fishing net, it doesn’t work and very rarely will the guys sit and talk and talk about the details.”


What’s the suicide rate in the Armed Forces?

“I have no idea, honestly. All I know is I got a call the other day about a fella [who committed suicide] in the Maritimes and they asked me, ‘Fred, was he on your list?’ I said no and he said, ‘Well he committed suicide and we’ve been talking to his wife and I don’t know why he hit the wall to the point where he killed himself.’ …Even if he served here, here, and here, unless he left a note saying he was in therapy and diagnosed and then committed suicide, you can say he was headed down that road. Unless they leave a note saying, ‘I offed myself because I couldn’t live with the trauma I seen in here.’ But I’ve lost several friends over the years who know what drove them there, but when I think about [how many] and sometimes you paint yourself into a corner and when you’re taking counsel only from yourself.

“I used to compare it to running. I used to run by myself and I could convince myself to quit within two kilometers, but when you run in a group, you gab a bit with each other, working a bit with each other and the next thing you know you’ve done 10 kilometres and you’re back. Well when you’re doing the same thing with trauma, you can convince yourself to do anything and when you’re taking counsel from yourself and saying, ‘You weak bastard. What are going to do now? There’s no options here. There’s no options there’ and the next you know you convince yourself to kill yourself. I know I was at a point where I didn’t say I was going to kill myself but I do remember thinking, ‘End it now. Somebody just end this world now.’ I probably didn’t have the wherewithal to want to do it myself, but if somebody were to drop a big brick on my head that would have been fine.

“But the guys I talked to were straightforward and we all have suicide intervention training, but probably within the first five minutes I’ll ask the guy if he ever wanted to kill himself. Some guys say no and some say, ‘Yeah I’ve sat down in the basement looking at the shotgun.’ I’ve had guys who have given me their weapons and have said ‘Fred, can you take this out of here because I don’t trust myself in the house,’ and … I’ve visited about 10 fellas who are in the ward in the Chalmers Hospital in Fredericton and in Charlottetown who were there either because of suicide attempts or vocalizing that they wanted to kill themselves.”


In your book, you write about the frustration of trying to get help from the Department of National Defence. Has the process of soldiers wanting to get help improved?

“Yep. I’ve got to admit, that was frustrating probably because of the person I saw. The second person I saw, I didn’t do the full disclosure thing, and I just minimized my problems and I could have gotten help then if I’d been honest, but when I did step forward in 2001 and finally spilled my guts to the doc and got referred for assessment. It’s even better today because they’re doing a lot more detection. There’s a third location for decompression now. Troops don’t go right home from theatre. They go to a third location. They’ve got no army gear, they’re in shorts and T-shirts and in a resort sort of atmosphere with water and facilities. You can go sea-dooing, you can go on a wine tour, you can eat in a pub, you can get fall-down drunk if you want, which a lot of them don’t because they just want to rest.”

Empty Casing: A Soldier’s Memoir of Sarajevo Under Siege, by Fred Doucette, Foreword by Roméo Dallaire, Douglas & McIntrye, 228 pages, $34.95.

kmalloy@hilltimes.com

The Hill Times

Robbers hit Sarajevo post office while guards watch Euro 2008 final, steal €700,000

July 1, 2008

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Robbers wearing police uniforms and armed with automatic weapons stormed a post office in central Sarajevo and stole hundreds of thousands of euros as security guards watched the Euro 2008 soccer final, media reported Tuesday.

Sarajevo police confirmed that an undetermined number of armed men robbed the post office at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, injuring three guards, one of them seriously. The getaway van was later found burned in a Sarajevo suburb. Police would not disclose further details.

Local media reported that guards were beaten up by ten men wearing police uniforms. Post office security guards were watching the Spain-Germany final on television when the well-organized group surprised them and stole €700,000 ($1.1 million), the Sarajevo daily newspaper Dnevni Avaz reported Tuesday.

Back to Bosnia: A war correspondent returns.

Peter Maass
A flashback: I heard the sniper’s shot before I saw Haris Bahtanovic fall to the ground. He was walking through a park-turned-shooting-gallery behind Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn. A few men rushed into the open and dragged Bahtanovic into a car that tore away. I wrote a story about this, about the odd way you can cover a war by sitting in your hotel room, out of the line of fire, and watch someone get shot. The next day, I found Bahtanovic in a hospital. The bullet had smashed through his left arm and grazed his ribs. I wrote another story and described the hospital’s recovery ward: “It’s an ugly place. One man lost both legs, another lost his foot, another has metal rods holding together what remains of his lower leg….”

With that, the parallel tracks that my life and Bahtanovic’s ran along for 24 hours forked into different directions. This is what happens in a war: You are thrown from one place to another, from one state of mind to another, as though a tornado has lifted you off the ground and carried you away. The distance need not be great; from one town to another, one house to another, one room to another, one hospital bed to another, and in each there is a different world of agony or loss or hatred, a different story. You move in this way until you become sick of it and leave or become addicted to it and cannot leave or until the war breathes its last. Years go by, and you may wonder what happened to the people whose lives you dropped into, but you hesitate to make inquiries. It is like entering a deserted house; you waver because you might find unpleasant things inside.

My last trip to Bosnia had occurred in the middle of 1993, and by then I had seen enough slaughter. Over the next five years, I never returned, never tracked down the people I had written about—the Serb teacher running an ethnic-cleansing office, the warlord swearing that Muslims were not forced to leave his fiefdom, the Muslim doctor who had no anesthesia to soothe the pain of his scalpel as he operated in Srebrenica. I didn’t lose interest in these people, or the many others I came to know and write about, but the moment had passed when our lives ran parallel; I thought there was little more to say about them that anyone wanted to hear, little more to be learned from them.

Then, last July, I found myself somewhat obliged to visit Bosnia, so I tracked down these ghosts. As always, Bosnia had an ace up her sleeve. I became attuned to the notion, hard to grasp back when the bombs were still falling and men were being shot under my window, that, while people can be murdered rather easily and towns can be flattened with the right artillery pieces and cities can be conquered in due course, countries are rather hard to kill. The apparent victory in elections this month of hard-line nationalist Nikola Poplasen, who defeated President Biljana Plavsic, a moderate by the unique standards of politics in Republika Srpska, is a major setback for the U.S.-backed process of reconciliation, but it need not be a death knell. The task of bringing Bosnia back to life will now be longer and harder, but the forces that wish to destroy Bosnia are not as omnipotent as they would like us to believe (this was also the case during the war); and it is useful to keep in mind that there is a historical pattern, in the Balkans as elsewhere, of war-torn nations collapsing, dead or nearly dead, and rising again, perhaps weaker than before, but resurrected nonetheless.

There should be no misunderstanding: Bosnia’s troubles are as striking as the mortar imprints on Marshall Tito Street in Sarajevo. With few exceptions, refugees who want to return to territory controlled by a different group—Muslims wishing to return to Banja Luka or west Mostar, Serbs wishing to return to Sarajevo, or Croats wishing to return to Brcko—are unable to do so despite pledges all sides made in the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord. Just a few war criminals have been arrested by SFOR, the U.S.-led international peacekeeping force. Bosnia’s economy, such as it is, depends on foreign aid. Government corruption is endemic. Mistrust prevails.

But the news could be worse. The news could be that nobody wants to reknit ties severed during the war, that armed checkpoints remain in place, that you cannot drive or make a phone call from Sarajevo to Banja Luka, that the international community is going to leave any day now, that the people of Bosnia are aching to fight another war, that the politicians who led them into battle are immortal and will remain in power forever. These are the disaster scenarios, and they are not unfolding.

Take a look, for example, at Visegrad. Throughout the ages, this town has been a nerve center of conflict because it is near the border with Serbia and the majority of its inhabitants were Muslim. As soon as war broke out in 1992, the Muslims were “cleansed” from Visegrad, some of them taken to a lovely sixteenth-century bridge over the Drina River, where their throats were cut and their bodies thrown into the cold, green water. I visited Visegrad in the summer of 1992 and walked through its deserted streets and its looted homes. I met Momcilo Mirkovic, who called himself “executive mayor” and wore a pistol at his waist. There had been no cleansing, he insisted, no killings; the Muslims left voluntarily.

—

I returned to Visegrad in July. Mirkovic was easy to locate; an operator provided his home number. He reluctantly agreed to meet at a cafe patronized by beefy men with flashy rings, expensive watches, and sauntering demeanors that indicated it had been some time since they were engaged in honest work. I tried to act like an old friend, but Mirkovic was jittery, on guard. He is no longer executive mayor; now he is a businessman, though he didn’t want to say what line of business. His eyes shifted from one place to another, like those of a fugitive. His hair had gone gray since I saw him five years before, and he was thinner. He put a pack of Marlboros on the table and smoked one, then another and another, and, when he raised his lighter to his cigarette, his hand shook. He asked how my drive from Belgrade had been, and, when I answered that I had come from Sarajevo, unfriendly territory, his comfort level nosedived.

“I don’t want to talk about politics,” he said. “Only refugees.” I asked a few softball questions about refugees and returned to politics. “I don’t like politics,” he stammered. “I left politics two years ago, after Dayton.” He cited “health reasons,” refusing to elaborate further. I asked how he became “executive mayor”—I assume he was installed after the town’s Muslim leadership had been killed or driven out—but once more he refused to talk about that era. “I don’t like to speak about politics…. I’m tired now. Perhaps our talk can continue tomorrow.” He looked at his watch and said he had a meeting in a few minutes. I mentioned that SFOR had arrested a handful of men accused of doing “bad things” in the war, and I asked whether people were upset about this. I didn’t use the touchy words “war criminals” or “war crimes,” but he knew I was asking whether he was afraid of being arrested and sent to The Hague for trial. He began to rise from his chair. “I am sorry,” he said. “I have a meeting at four. I must go. I must go.”

Mirkovic was frightened, not defiant, and this was encouraging. His role in Visegrad’s cleansing was, most likely, only on a political level, letting the death squads do the dirty work. But, if his behavior is any guide, brand-name warlords like Radovan Karadzic are not the only ones running scared in Republika Srpska; even the small fry hear a clock ticking when they go to sleep at night. It would be wrong, in the wake of Poplasen’s apparent victory, to refrain from trying to arrest more alleged war criminals. More than ever, purveyors of hatred who have committed war crimes must be brought to justice, though the risk of doing so, in SFOR casualties, may now be greater than before. This is the price of our dithering.

—

Hoping to take the pulse of more ordinary Bosnian Serbs, I arranged for a reunion with another figure from the past, Vladimir Radjen. When our paths first crossed in 1992, Radjen was cleaning up his street, which had been ransacked during the cleansing of Visegrad. Windows were broken, doors were ajar, even floorboards were ripped up. “We all lived in Visegrad like a big family, the Muslims and Serbs,” he said at the time. Five years later, he does not doubt that he and his fellow Serbs have been led down a dead end. Radjen, 42, now works in a grocery store that is so run-down it not only has no name, there is not even a sign in front indicating it is a grocery store. Across the street is a reminder of what had been and what happened during the war—a patch of ground, covered with weeds, where the town’s mosque was located before it was dynamited into rubble.

We walked to a restaurant alongside the river and the bridge; a more historic and charming spot would be hard to imagine, though there was a surreal twist because the restaurant’s stereo was tuned to the SFOR station. A deejay with a British accent played songs designed to appeal to the musical common denominator of fighting men and women from around the world—so Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the Spice Girls alternately sang in the background as Radjen unfurled his woes. We sat 50 yards from a statue of Ivo Andric, the Yugoslav writer whose majestic novel about Visegrad, “The Bridge Over the Drina,” earned him the Nobel Prize for literature.

“Andric … said there are times when clever men are silent and stupid men talk and robbers become rich,” Radjen began. “Everything he wrote has happened in this war.” Who was Radjen mad at? The nationalists, he said, citing, first of all, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, and Alija Izetbegovic, leader of Bosnia’s Muslims. Then Radjen said he was mad at himself, too. I asked why. “Because I was born and must live now,” he explained. “I wish I had been born later. I don’t know what to do. But I have to be with my people.” He pointed to a row of stores across the street. Before the war, most storekeepers were Muslim. “Now,” he said, “everyone is a Serb, but I don’t know who they are.”

There were only two months left before the September national elections, but Radjen’s apathy was so great he not only had no idea for whom he would vote, he didn’t even know elections were to be held—expressing surprise when I told him about it. Radjen said he would back whoever offered the hope of prosperity to his down-and-out corner of Republika Srpska. He probably ended up voting, as many Bosnian Serbs did, for the hard-line nationalists who conned or frightened people into supporting them. This is sad, but policymakers who may now wish to reconsider our engagement in Bosnia should remember that, just as America played a major role in deciding the course of the war, which was ended after President Clinton belatedly agreed to bomb the Serbs, America can play a major role in deciding the course of the peace. We are not at history’s mercy; we can be the shapers of it.

It was in Banja Luka that I found an oddly hopeful sign about the direction of things. I was looking for a teacher, Milos Bojinovic, who headed the city’s wartime Bureau for the Removal of Populations and Exchange of Material Goods, which was in charge of the administrative side of ethnic cleansing. I found him at home at two-thirty on a weekday afternoon, drunk. For two hours, he spoke in slurred words about how he had been a humanitarian helping Muslims and Croats get out of town. It was alcoholic rubbish. I learned much more when I visited his school. A bulletin board at the entrance listed after-hours activities, like the photo club, acting club, and so forth. Someone had improvised a few new offerings. One was titled “Chetnikism,” a euphemism for Serbian nationalism. The instructor was listed as “Dr. Seselj,” the most notorious warlord. The time, “Nonstop.” The place, “Greater Serbia.” Another improvised activity, “Butchery.”

These jottings had been on the board for some time; nobody cared enough to erase them. I mentioned this to a friend in Sarajevo, Igor Baros, and he responded as though I had announced that Karadzic had been captured by SFOR. “That’s a great sign,” he said. “It’s better than anything the politicians agree on. It shows they think these things are jokes. Their people died for nothing.” True enough, but, as Baros knows, the Serbs remain a long distance from accepting the full truth. They still view themselves as victims and don’t want their old neighbors to return. It would be hopelessly naive to suggest that their view will change in a few years, but it would be needlessly pessimistic to suggest that refugees will never be able to return to their homes. It is between those poles—a few years and never—that changes will occur.

—

Nedret Mujkanovic is a human metaphor for healing the wounds of war. When the conflict began, Mujkanovic was finishing his work as a surgical intern in Tuzla, and the Bosnian army decided to send him, through Serb lines, into the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, which had just a few doctors, and none with surgery experience. In Srebrenica, Mujkanovic often operated by candlelight, under fire, with no anesthesia. He lost precise count but thinks he performed 1,400 operations in nine months. He amputated legs and arms, pulled shrapnel out of stomachs and heads, and so on. I first ran into him at the Tuzla airport in 1993, when he was evacuated from Srebrenica by U.N. peacekeepers. A day later, I spent three hours listening to his horrifying tales of battlefield surgery in a medieval operating theater. He embodied much of what I admired about Bosnia: in addition to Muslims, he operated on captured Serb soldiers and protected them from the retribution that many people in Srebrenica desired.

Five years later, I walked into Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn, which has been restored and now looks just as ugly as it did before the war, and met Mujkanovic in the lobby. I had remembered it as a cold and grubby place filled with weary journalists. But now the guests are aid officials, businessmen, politicians, and—amazingly—some tourists. Mujkanovic looked ten years younger than the last time we had met, and once more he had a surprising tale to tell.

As the war wound down, he decided to become a plastic surgeon, but plastic surgeons in Bosnia were unfamiliar with state-of-the-art practices or anything close to them. So Mujkanovic got in his car and drove the tortuous route to Zagreb, where, without the benefit of any introduction, he presented himself to a plastic surgeon in the Croatian capital and asked to be trained. The surgeon agreed. After a few months, Mujkanovic went to Slovenia, where, once again, he presented himself to a renowned specialist in the field and, once more, asked to be trained. Over the next two years he visited Austria, Italy, and Britain to further his expertise before finally returning to Tuzla

“I knew the war would finish sometime but that medical problems would continue,” Mujkanovic told me, speaking the good English he had learned in the last five years. “For the young population, during the war a scar on the face … made them feel more important, but now it’s a problem. They are coming everyday into my department, and they want to have corrections. During the war, they were very proud to have the scars, but now they want to remove them.”

For the past two years, he also has been a member of the parliament—this is why we met in Sarajevo, where the parliament was in session—but he does not plan to serve another term. “I don’t want to be in politics,” he said. “I have my job, and my job is beautiful.” Mujkanovic is thoughtful, knows his country well, and knows what will be needed for recovery. I asked whether Bosnia will survive. He was silent far longer than I expected. “I think it will be okay because America wants it to be okay,” he said slowly. “It’s very important that America is here. I believe in America. I don’t believe in the English or French.”

Of course, not even America’s best efforts can enable Bosnia to return to life as it was before or even come close to it. Too many historic buildings have been destroyed, too much of the country’s multi-religious fabric has been torn beyond repair. And there are too many roads in Bosnia like the narrow lane I followed one morning. The road, heading out of town, tracked alongside a lovely creek that nourished an oasis of trees and grass and birds. It led to a building Sarajevans know by the name of Jagomir. Inside the renovated building, behind a locked door, under the watch of a white-cloaked orderly, I found the young man who had been shot under my window at the Holiday Inn. Haris Bahtanovic, whose trembling hands are as soft as an infant’s, thinks aliens have implanted a device in his head, and he thinks Sylvester Stallone is his father. He has been institutionalized since he was felled by that sniper. A doctor who cares for him at Jagomir Psychiatric Hospital shook her head from side to side when I asked for a prognosis. Bosnia may recover in some way, but Haris, it seems, shall not.

The New Republic October 12,1998