Rock and Hard Places (35 page)

There are forty or fifty vehicles in the convoy: trucks, vans and 4WDS from dozens of different organisations, and one white armoured car full of German journalists (“Silly bastards,” snorts Ted. “If some fuckin’ cabbage-eating dickhead does open up on us, you know which vehicle he’s going to go for.”) Nonetheless, Ted rearranges the luggage in our truck so the helmets and flak jackets are where we can reach them.

When we’re finally given permission to move, a lone Croatian police motorcycle escort leads us on an unnecessarily circuitous route through the northern part of the newly former Krajina. “This isn’t the usual way,” explains Bill. “There must be something on the other road they don’t want anyone to see.” What we do see is unpleasant enough. The towns we pass through were, until seventy-two hours ago, bustling villages. They’re ghost towns now, though it can be imagined that most ghosts would find them too spooky for habitation. In Plaski, the domestic details bear mute testament to the terrified speed of the Serbian exodus: livestock wandering the streets, washing billowing on lines behind deserted houses, a half-full bottle and two full glasses on a table outside an empty cafe.

President Tudjman had been promising to any reporter who would listen that property would not be gratutiously damaged, and the human rights of all Krajina Serbs who stayed put would be respected. It doesn’t look like anyone was too keen on testing his word, and it does look like that might have been a good call. The houses that have got off lightly look like mine did the morning after my twenty-first birthday party. Others tilt at some point between that and smouldering ruin. Outside one two-storey villa, a television set lies smashed on the drive, as if the place has been captured and looted by Led Zeppelin.

On the outskirts of Plitvice National Park, the convoy slows and stops before we head for the border, to make sure we’ve still got as
many vehicles as we started with. Up and down the long line of trucks, people piss against the wheels of their vehicles—they’ve obviously seen the same mine awareness map I have, in which the whole region is shaded yellow (medium risk) or red (high risk).

Along the road from the opposite direction come several commandeered trucks and hijacked tractor trailers carrying Croat soldiers back from the fighting. All adrenalised, mostly drunk, they greet us by waving, singing, and firing burst after burst of automatic fire into the air. It looks like something out of a b-movie matinee, and sounds like it—Kalashnikovs emit a dull, relatively quiet bark. The trouble is that those bullets, having gone up a couple of miles, are going to come down, and at lethal speed. Most of us retreat behind or into our vehicles. A bolder spirit emerges from one of the trucks belonging to the Catholic aid agency, Caritas: a nun gets out of the cab, accosts the shambling, unshaven, sodden Croatian officer ostensibly in charge of these camouflaged clowns, and gives him a bollocking that drowns out the last discharges of gunfire. The embarrassed soldiers apologise, and start trying to shake everyone’s hand. One of them speaks English. I ask him about the burnt houses in Plaski.

“Muslims,” he says, with the straightest face he can manage. “We opened the road into Bihac, and they came out and attacked the Serbs. Or perhaps the Serbs burnt their own houses when the attack started.”

When we reach the border crossing, thick grey smoke is billowing from behind a small wood a few hundred metres away to the right, just inside Krajina.

“It was a village,” shrugs a Bosnian Army soldier at the checkpoint.

 

THE BIHAC POCKET is the modern equivalent of the torturous diplomatic conundrums of bygone eras, the Alsace-Lorraines and Schleswig-Holsteins that still strike terror in the hearts of fifth-form history students.

The Bihac Pocket, the northwestern corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, has a history as impressive and bloody as its impressively bloody present. During World War II, Bihac was the base for the partisans of Josip Broz Tito, the man whose political skill, populist cunning and monstrous violence (in the first year of his reign alone,
250,000 people died in massacres, forced marches and concentration camps) is widely, if dubiously, credited with keeping Yugoslavia intact. In the spring of 1954, the Pocket town of Cazin, where I stay for a few days, was the scene of the only peasant rebellion in the history of Cold War Eastern Europe: Bosnian Muslims, Serbian Orthodox Christians and Croatian Catholics all fought on the same side.

When Yugoslavia was still Yugoslavia, it was the most beautiful country in Europe, and the Bihac Pocket one of its most under-rated treasures. The region could have been created to adorn the lids of chocolate boxes: lush green hills trundle gently to every horizon, horse-drawn carts stacked high with hay and picturesquely ragged farmworkers compete for road space with backfiring cars. The Una River is a rich, sparkling blue that would embarrass sapphires. The place looks an agrarian utopia. The hospital in Bihac has recorded cases of malnutrition. The majority of the cargo of the convoy I come in with is food.

Bihac and Cazin have elegant elderly buildings that wear shell damage with the dignity of parading veterans, and footpaths teeming with people enjoying the sun and idle chatter. Electricity is supplied to every house for one day out of every ten, and the siege that the Croatian army has just lifted has inflated prices to the absurd levels of the Weimar Republic. A 12-kilogram sack of flour doesn’t leave much change from £500. When I go to the market in Cazin with some people from Feed the Children to buy some plastic bags to bundle food supplies in, we’re charged the Deutschmark equivalent of £23 for fifty. And most people in the area haven’t seen a paycheck for the better part of a year.

The Bihac Pocket has spent four years being strangled half to death. Before Croatia’s assault on Krajina had, with the help of the 5th Corps of the Bosnian army, reopened the roads into the Pocket, the region had been besieged by Bosnian Serbs to the south, and by a renegade Bosnian militia to the north. The latter was essentially the private army of a local businessman (Agrokomerc chairman Fikret Abdic) who had a grievance with the Croatian government, and had thrown in his lot with the Serbs after the Bosnian army had tried to bring him into line.

In Cazin, people tell me that things have improved dramatically even in the last few days. The Bosnian army now controls the entire
Pocket—a fact they celebrate all night, every night, periodically interrupting the drone of cicadas with more skyward volleys of automatic fire. Abdic has gone, various rumours placing him in gaol in Zagreb, in exile in Serbia or doubtless, given the Balkan mania for conspiracy theories, running a haberdashery in Toledo with Elvis Presley. Everyone in the pocket is terribly pleased about all this, except those who’d lived in the region Abdic had controlled. In accordance with the Balkan custom of petty retribution, they are now paying for their loyalties—in Pecigrad, north of Cazin, I see groups of people bussed in from Velika Kladusa, the capital of Abdic’s self-proclaimed Republic of West Bosnia, being made to sweep the streets.

The Krajina Serbs have gone, and the retreating Bosnian Serbs are contenting themselves with half-heartedly shelling Bihac, attracting no more attention from the locals than the intermittent summer drizzle. There is a pervading sense of smoke lifting and dust settling. Certainly, it’s all smiles at Cazin’s radio and television station, which operates out of a shrapnel-pocked and sandbagged building that used to be a bank when people around here had money to put in one.

Cazin is a small town, with a news beat that probably once consisted, as it properly should, of school fetes, cats up trees and the fortunes of a useless local football team. In 1991, the staff of the station found themselves training on the job as war correspondents. Indira Topcagic and Nihada Seferagic, two of the station’s seven journalists, have worked eighteen-to twenty-four-hour days since following the local brigade, the 503rd. Their resources total one tape recorder, three typewriters and an assemblage of antique broadcasting equipment that looks like Heath Robinson drew it. In the field, they travel by foot. They’re paid fifty Deutschmarks a month, when they’re paid at all, which isn’t often. “It’s our way of showing that we’re with our army,” they say.

We chat for a bit through an interpreter. They show me the remains of the rocket that came through one of their windows last year. I tell them I think they’re very brave and clever, because they are, and they ask me what everyone in the Pocket asks eventually: what do people out there think about what’s going on in here?

It’s a tough question, doubly so through an interpreter, but I have a go. I tell them that when people I know think of the war in Bosnia,
they think it’s terribly sad, but that’s it. Nobody has really kept track of how it started. There was no moustachioed dictator with a big army whacking a little country with no army but a lot of oil wells, no jackboots goosestepping across Poland, and while there are many dead in the streets of Sarajevo, none of them are Austrian Archdukes. I mean, everyone’s vaguely grasped that Slobodan Milosevic is never going to make a convincing Santa Claus, and nor have the revolting Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his attack dog, General Ratko Mladic, won many fans, but western politicians too cowardly, too stupid, or with too many vested interests to involve themselves in the conflict have done all too effective a job of persuading the media and public that what’s going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina is unfathomably complicated, locally contained and Not Our Problem.

“But we’re dying.”

I know that. But if you believe most of what you read in the papers, tribalism and violence are just what you ex-Yugoslavs do, they’ve become two more of those universally accepted, wacky, inexplicable European character traits. The general feeling, however misinformed, is that the west can no more intervene to enforce peace among the Yugoslavs than it can to make the Italians organised, the English friendly or the Germans funny.

Indira and Nihada have heard all this before, but they listen to it again, and then say what every Bosnian says at this point.

“You could give us guns.”

 

THIS IS GENERALLY the point at which the west stops giving and sharing and starts washing its hands. We’ll give people in trouble food, clothes, medicines and other things that make us feel good about ourselves, and while those people are usually happy enough to have them, the people of Bosnia would, on the whole, prefer the means to defend themselves. As Indira and Nihada, among many others, point out, if they were properly armed, they wouldn’t be besieged, and if they weren’t besieged, they wouldn’t need anyone’s help in the first place. It’s a fair point, but it’s hard to imagine anyone organising a benefit album to raise money to buy artillery.

If there’s one thing that spending time in Bosnia will clarify, it’s the arrant stupidity of the international arms embargo on the former
Yugoslavia, which has only hindered the friendless, landlocked Bosnians. It never troubled the Serbs, who had access to the formidable resources of the Yugoslav Army. As for the Croats, ask a Croat.

Back in Pula, I speak to Major Oriano Bulic, thirty-three, a doctor serving with the Istrian-based 119th brigade of the Croatian army. When he isn’t curing or killing people, he writes poetry, and claims to have successfully treated himself for bone marrow cancer as a young man. He comes to the flat I’m staying in clad in battle fatigues with red and yellow ribbons hanging from the tunic (the Croat and Serb armies use identical ex-Yugoslav kit, so they festoon themselves with these colours so they know who’s who, making the war look like paintball played for keeps).

Major Bulic blinks an awful lot less than the rest of us. He is proud of the fact that his unit were the first into Plitvice—it’s a national park set around sixteen lakes connected by waterfalls, and one of the most gorgeous places on earth. I tell him that I’ve been there, not just last week, but in the middle of the winter of 1990, when the lakes had frozen and the falls turned to stalactities, and it looked like Eden on ice. I remark that he must be terribly pleased to have it back.

“He is,” translates Lara, our endlessly helpful host.

Then I say something about the amount of suspiciously shopfloorshiny military hardware I’d seen driving and flying up and down the coast road between Split and Karlovac.

“It’s German,” he says, without hesitating. “I think they ship it via Ukraine. Or American. Or Israeli.”

Germany and America would certainly deny this, and I can’t prove it either way, though the alleged Israeli connection is one for the true conspiracy connoisseur. Germany has a historic (and, for neighbouring republics, frequently unfortunate) alliance with Croatia. America may have an interest in seeing the Bosnian Serbs shut down. What Israel would be doing, arming a state with a Nazi-blackened past, governed by a belligerent buffoon who has said that the Holocaust was “overstated,” and which is currently fighting alongside a nominally Muslim army, is anyone’s guess. I’ve heard this story elsewhere, though. There again, I’ve also heard, and more than once, the one about how Britain started another of the ex-Yugoslav wars by dressing MI6 agents up as Croatian paramilitaries and shelling Bosnian villages (though
when you ask why Britain would do such a thing, you tend to get fairly imprecise answers).

“Oh, the stuff’s all German,” another Croat soldier tells me. Nenad Vrbanic, twenty-seven, is known to all as Charlie, thanks to a childhood bout of meningitis that left him with one leg shorter than the other and a stilted, Chaplinesque walk. Charlie is also of the Istrian 119th, but a little less ebullient than Major Bulic about their triumphal march into Plitvice. “We got lost,” he says, “and that’s where we ended up.”

I tell Charlie I went through some of the same towns he did, and mention the throngs of wandering livestock. He tells me that these hapless animals came in handy, as Croat soldiers herded them across paddocks to clear mines. Unforgiveably, but unavoidably, this Pythonesque visual image provokes giggles in both of us. Charlie also tells me that one house he “captured” himself had been fled in such a hurry that there was a meal cooking on the stove.