I left Gracanica Monastary feeling more despondent than ever. Children observe, they take in the adult world moving around above them. From Southeast Asia through Africa and into this broken corner of Europe, I marveled at the way the children watched everything and learned to navigate their war zones with deftness and, often, grace. Those who survive were usually those who were most observant, most engaged. When the adult world lumbers above like blind elephants, the children, the little mice, learn to scurry from underfoot, learn to march behind the elephants, following in their footsteps. It is a matter of survival.
In Kosovo, where I expected to find youth in the process of reconciliation, the adults were modeling the most dangerous behavior for their children, the behavior that led only to war. The children observed the hatred around them, observed the divided society, and adapted to its norms. I had seen children in other war zones choose forgiveness and peace, and knew that the Serb and Albanian children I met were capable of choosing it too, even if no adults around them modeled it. How else to explain child soldiers like Musa, Xavier, and Paul in the eastern Congo? They were not blessed with positive role models either.
Why then had I yet to find one child in Kosovo who did not, in some way, demonstrate that the ethnic war was not still raging in their hearts? Why did they all hold onto these ethnic hatreds that had caused them and their families nothing but pain and loss?
“You must understand the history,” my friend Alex told me.
He was a medical student in Pristina and had been a refugee in Germany during the worst of the war and the aftermath. He was Albanian, but by no means a fanatic nationalist, though he had some involvement in the independence movement as a teenager in the Milošević days. He was more concerned with his American girlfriend, passing his first year medical exams, and finding a rare Slipknot album than with ethnic conflict and politics.
His Serb neighbor had been a paramilitary. His own apartment had been turned into a clubhouse for Serb death squads after his family fled. A bit more cosmopolitan than the youths I was meeting in the village, Alex had no special resentment for Serbs as a group, though he did not really believe coexistence was possible without independence. Many of his friends were involved in multiethnic peace organizations (such as my translator in Babin Most). I feared that even he was about to bring up the Battle of Kosovo.
“I know, I know, I know…the history,” I groaned, contemplating throwing myself out the window rather than hear the story one more time. “1389. Kosovo Polje.” I took a long swig of my beer.
“Sort of,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“There is never peace in the Balkans,” he said, laughing. “We just can’t help killing each other.”
“Come on,” I said.
“No, really. There was the Ottoman takeover. And the Austro-Hungarian war, uprisings right and left. World War I started here. And then World War II was fought here. Under communism, there wasn’t so much violence. But in the eighties there were marches and riots in Pristina. Then Bosnia, then the war here. There is never peace for long. Some people say, ‘It’s been five years, we’re due.’ No one really thinks there will be peace.”
At talks in the summer of 2006 about the future status of Kosovo—whether it would remain a part of Serbia, though granted greater autonomy, or whether it would gain independence—as 90 percent of its inhabitants desire—no hope of a peaceful settlement was in sight.
“Belgrade was willing to give everything but independence and Pristina wanted nothing but independence,” the UN special envoy at the talks said. As a BBC article reported, the Serbian prime minister refused to go to a joint lunch with the Kosovo delegation, and neither side offered a handshake when the talks began.
The adults, the ones in power, the ones who made the speeches, the ones that made the wars that rocked the children’s lives, modeled no behavior that could suggest an alternate view of the situation: the Albanians and the Serbs would not, could not get along.
The children have television, access to magazines and newspapers, or, if not, they have the rumor mill or the conversations going on among their parents and the other grown-ups around them. They learn about these events; they watch and listen and learn, and in Kosovo all they see is the madness of ethnic hatred and failed diplomacy. They do not live in a world where talking things out leads anywhere. They live in a world where the other wants to control them, to get rid of them, to exterminate them. The more engaged the child, the more aware they would be of the problem and the more helpless they would feel to prevent it, to change it. If the leaders couldn’t even sit down with each other….
Could that explain it? The children held onto these opinions because they were girding themselves for another war, another war that seems more and more likely? They acted like the grown-ups around them not because they inherited bigotry passively, the mindless recipients of their parents’ worldview, but because bigotry was more practical.
They chose bigotry.
After all, who would want to reach out to the other side if that would label you a collaborator when the violence erupted again? Staying in a mental state of war with the other side prepared these children for the inevitable war. The thought did not sit easily with me: bigotry as a survival strategy, each child’s internal, quite personal war without end.
Christof jogged over from the soccer field where the others were playing. I sat in the shade of a newly built pavilion petting the stray dog that had found its way to us on the slopes of Mount Igman, an hour outside of Sarajevo, Bosnia. Christof tried to practice his schoolroom English with me, the look of concentration, the search for those vocabulary words the teacher always blathered on about.
“Here, for you,” he said and stuck out his arm, dropping a rusty shell casing into the palm of my hand. He’d found it in the dirt on the soccer field. It was the third one he’d found that day, and it had become something of a project for him, picking up rusty shell casings, grim reminders that the place this youth group had chosen for its weeklong summer excursion had once been the site of bloody fighting between Muslim and Serb forces. The casing was as long as my index finger.
No one was allowed to wander off into the woods. Ten years after the war in Bosnia ended, land mines still hid in the forests, regularly exploding unsuspecting deer. The dog at my feet looked up at Christof with a panting smile. It was hot as hell on that mountain and the dog, a stray who had wandered around the mountain and had become a somewhat unwelcome fixture around the guest house, rested happily in the shade of the pavilion. Despite his size and rather tough look—he was a Rottweiler-German shepherd mix—he had a deep love of people and warmed up to the children immediately, following us around from activity to activity. I marveled at his survival, wandering as a stray through these deadly woods on this deadly mountain. That he had not set off a land mine was a miracle. He had a wound on his mouth that made him look ferocious—he was at least fifty pounds—but he clearly loved people and loved getting scratched behind the ears and on his amazingly soft belly, which I gladly invested a good deal of time doing. Christof did not join me in petting the dog, but he looked at me puzzled as I did. He watched me looking at the shell casing he had given me, scratching the mutt, and generally pondering the sordid history of this mountain.
“Ugly dog,” he shouted suddenly and mimed kicking the mutt in the stomach.
It was my turn to look puzzled now. Christof bolted off again to play soccer without giving any explanation for his outburst. I would join him soon, but I needed another moment alone with the dog that we had named Prijatelj, which means “friend” in Bosnian. He was a mixed breed dog, which made him unpopular in a country where the term “ethnic cleansing” had been coined less than a decade earlier.
I watched Christof hit his stride—he was a graceful thirteen-year-old who took great pleasure in a well-placed slide-tackle or an elegant header. It was hard to believe, watching him leap off another boy’s shoulders to head the ball toward the goal (he m
issed and laughed about it to convulsions) that he could be filled with so much hate toward this beat-up dog. I had come from Kosovo a few days earlier and had grown used to bigotry among people, expected it even. But hatred toward this one dog? I couldn’t understand it.
I had stopped him and his brother more than once from throwing rocks at Prijatelj. Christof was blond with piercing blue eyes, just becoming aware that girls liked how he looked though he was still uncomfortable with himself. He picked on other kids, the smaller ones, the weaker ones, or the ugly ones. But when the adults around scolded him, he was not only quick to apologize to the other kids, he showed them real kindness. He included them in his games or even, in the case of a tiny Jewish girl named Sofya whom he had been mercilessly picking on for days, carried her on his back during a hike when she grew tired. He struggled to figure out his place, the kind of young man he wanted to be. In that struggle, though, he had decided where this mutt stood. He hated the dog with unapologetic venom. Even in the presence of the adults (there were three Americans, including myself, and two older women from Sarajevo who worked with the youth group year round), Christof’s hostility toward the dog did not abate.
Christof, I learned, was a mixed breed too—half Serb and half Croat—and during the siege of Sarajevo, no one trusted his family, though they suffered the deprivations and shelling like everyone else. They lived in Grbavica, the one neighborhood in the city controlled by the Serbs. The neighborhood was on the front lines and was as dangerous a place as any. Bosnian and Serb snipers faced off and fired mortars at each other, killing anyone unfortunate enough to be inside the targets or in the range of the shrapnel. A fragment the size of a roll of lifesavers could take off your head. Death came easily in Grbavica, just as it did in the rest of the city. When the siege ended, however, and the Serb lines moved back and the city became one again, Christof’s family ran into other problems.
Neighbors scrawled offensive and threatening graffiti on their door; the kids were picked on in school, bullied. They were half Serb; they’d lived in the Serb-controlled area. They were the enemy. SFOR—the NATO peacekeeping force in Bosnia—had to intervene to protect the family from harassment and threats of violence. The two boys, Christof and his little brother Peter, who was just a baby at the time, found it very difficult to have foreign soldiers protecting their family. It somehow seemed to amplify their guilt and send a message, in that nasty schoolyard way, that they couldn’t take care of themselves. Something along the lines of crying to the teacher because of a bully, though in this case the bullies were myriad and the “teacher” carried M16s.
The mockery in school did not stop. NATO doesn’t concern itself with child’s play. Christof learned to bully from the bullies, learned to shoot an insult like a sniper’s bullet because the insults were shot at him like mortars. No one trusted them; no one wanted them in their neighborhood. He and his family belonged to some other group, the enemy.
This was Christof’s first and only summer in the multiethnic youth group on Mount Igman. All five of us adults were determined to help him see things another way, to help him feel like part of the group, and I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this big good-hearted mutt could help if Christof would just stop throwing stones at it.
The multiethnic youth group with whom I was visiting on Mount Igman, run by the Jewish community in Sarajevo, began informally during the siege. As the former communist nation of Yugoslavia began to break apart in 1991, the Jewish community saw unsettling signs of rising nationalism—new flags and slogans, angry rhetoric, guns everywhere—signs that brought back painful memories of the Holocaust.
Before World War II, Jews made up 13 percent of Sarajevo’s population. By the time the war was over, they made up less than 4 percent Their numbers dwindled, as they did for all of Europe’s Jews at the hands of Nazi death squads or in concentration camps. Still others escaped to join the partisans and fight the German occupation, dying in combat to liberate their homeland from foreign invaders. Just down the hill from the soccer field stood a monument to the fallen partisans who liberated Yugoslavia from the fascist regime. Many Muslims and Christians in Bosnia hid their Jewish neighbors from the SS or the Ustashe (the Croatian branch of the Nazi party, essentially) at great peril to themselves. The war ended, and Marshal Tito took control of Yugoslavia, forging arguably one the most successful communist states in the post-war era.
Under Tito’s rule, ethnic tensions were suppressed and Jews were treated like any other member of the state. Yugoslavia tried to stand as an example of cosmopolitanism among the communist nations, and Sarajevo was the prime example. They touted their ethnic and economic harmony, wore it like a badge. They were the intersection of East and West, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Jew. The architecture in the city was a rich assortment of styles and eras. Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympic games, building a lovely Olympic Village, a new stadium and hotels, and a mammoth Alpine Jump on Mount Igman. Muslim, Jews, Catholics, Serbian Orthodox—all called themselves Yugoslavian.
This picture of harmony masked the nationalism brewing underneath the surface. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Serbian nationalism began to grow. The Serbian Orthodox Church aligned itself with Serbian nationalist politicians, largely due to the crisis in Kosovo. Serbs held a majority of government posts. At the same time, the Islamic revolutions around the globe—most notably in Iran—began to inspire Muslims to claim their own identity as a national group rather than a private religion as they had been defined. The Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs all claimed nationality, and the Muslims wanted the same. Agitation to that end met with hostility from the Serb majority in the Communist Party and the argument that would eventually lead to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the start of the Bosnian war began to roil with accusations of repression and religious fanaticism.
But the Jewish community who remained in Bosnia—some two thousand of them—never forgot who they were, though they generally tried to stay below the radar of nationalist debates. They tended the old cemetery in the hills, where the graves dated back to the sixteenth century. They maintained the old Sephardic synagogue in the Turkish quarter; they understood how easily a people could be lost, despite the illusion of harmony and prosperity, and how dangerous the revival of ethnic nationalism could be. They also remembered the great kindness many of their neighbors had shown them during the Nazi time. Perhaps more than any group in Yugoslavia, they remembered the sting of war, which put them in an historically unique position in the early nineties: the ethnic conflict that erupted was not about the Jews.
At their annual meeting in Belgrade in June 1991, arguments between the Jews of Serbia and Croatia broke out over the question of independence. That month, Slovenia and Croatia had declared their independence from Yugoslavia—something Belgrade opposed because 12 percent of Croatia’s population was Serbian. The arguments between the Jews living in Serbia and the Jews from Croatia were fierce. There were loyalties among the Jews, of course, but these Jews were also members of nations and not completely immune to the patriotic fervor of the time. The Croatian Jews argued for the necessity of an independent Croatia, while the Serbian Jews argued with equal vigor for the maintenance of a state led by Belgrade.
The Bosnian Jews found themselves isolated from the other Jewish communities, who spent much of the meeting arguing with each other. Loyalties divided between the family of Yugoslavian Jewry (who had met together every year since the end of World War II) and the national identity of the Jewish members. The tensions at the meeting made it clear that greater violence was coming. If the Jewish communities fell to bickering among themselves, what would happen between the other ethnic groups?
Jacob Finci, the head of La Benevolencija, the humanitarian arm of the Bosnian Jewish community at the time, recalls a visit to the beach in Croatia that summer when, in the parking lot, he experienced of shudder of terror. A group of men draped a Croatian flag over their car and stood around it drinking and singing patriotic songs.
What struck Jacob was how much the nationalist flag of Croatia resembled the flag he had seen as young boy, fifty years earlier: the flag of the Ustashe, the Croatian Fascists. It was then that he was certain there would be no more peace in the Yugoslavia.
As independence movements stirred throughout the Balkans, tensions were highest in his home country of Bosnia, the most ethnically mixed of the former republics of Yugoslavia. Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and a trained psychiatrist (and, oddly, an amateur poet of mediocre ability), stated that if Bosnia tried to declare its independence, they would be on a “highway of hell.”
When the Bosnian parliament overwhelmingly passed a referendum on independence in April 1992, the Serb MPs boycotted the vote. Soon afterwards, both sides erected barricades around the city.
On April 6, 1992, during an independence rally, Serb forces and Bosnian police clashed, starting the civil war. True to his threat, Radovan Karadzic and the head of the Bosnian army, Ratko Mladic (both currently under indictment for crimes against humanity), did indeed turn much of Bosnia into a hell for the Muslims: mass rapes and massacres spread throughout the country. Under the banner of Orthodox Christian zeal and patriotism, Serbian nationalists aimed to “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim population. They forced Muslims from their homes, stole their identity papers, and destroyed their mosques and cultural sites. While Muslim forces were also guilty of human rights abuses, little evidence suggests that targeting civilians was a matter of policy as it was for the Serb army. The Serbs hoped to hold Bosnia as a part of Slobodan Milošević’s aspirations toward a “Greater Serbia.”
One Day the Soldiers Came Page 21
