One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  Provisions in the agreement that ended the war and created the two separate states within Bosnia attempted to set up mechanisms that would protect “human rights.” A Human Rights Commission was established, which could make observations and issue reports, but had no power of enforcement. Refugee returns, arguably one of the most important factors in rebuilding society, depended on the ability of the refugees to trust the institutions of the state in their home area, especially the police force. Muslims who had been expelled were reluctant to return to Serb-controlled areas, and Serbs who had fled were reluctant to return to Muslim-controlled areas. Perhaps most troubling for children was the loss of friends from different ethnic groups who had left their homes and would not return.

  The Dayton Accords, which ended the war in December 1995, set up a system that stopped the fighting but left the wounds created by the war largely unaddressed. There was no ecological approach to rebuilding the society—no effort made to address the underlying causes of the war, the interconnected effects of the war on a community level, or the circumstances that could lead to another one. Police forces still harbored former military and paramilitary soldiers; schools still taught their own version of history in which the victimized group was always the group writing the curriculum, in which there was always an enemy “other.” The separate media rules and education systems ensured that the propaganda on each side would continue to flow. Refugees did not return, by and large, to unfriendly areas. The ethnic division of the country had been institutionalized.

  Another war was not out of the question, but war was not, however, the major concern for the children on Mount Igman, neither memories of the war if they were old enough to remember, nor fears of a new war coming. They had more pressing concerns than politics and warfare.

  “There is too much crime in the city,” Elvira said. “There are too many drugs and no jobs. It is very hard in Bosnia, you know?”

  Elvira was a high school student, a plucky girl who spoke English well, fretted about boys, and enjoyed looking after the younger kids on the mountain. More than once, I saw her scold Christof for his attitude toward the weaker or littler children. She was a bright, motivated youth, who, under different circumstances, would have found life brimming with opportunities.

  “The problem is,” she explained, “there are no jobs. I do not know what I’ll do after school. Even with a university degree, there is no work.” Bosnia has a 40 percent unemployment rate and young people are often anxious to leave. Elvira spoke German and hinted at the possibility she might go there, though Sarajevo was her home and she was not eager to leave it. Her family had stayed through the war, hiding in basements with their neighbors, dodging sniper fire to get water from the well or firewood to heat their home. Why would she leave now? She was conflicted and hoped the situation would change.

  After coming down from the mountain and spending some time in the city, I sat on a rooftop with a group of men in their early twenties. We drank beer and looked at the burnt out towers of the twin skyscrapers, nicknamed Momo and Uzeir. Momo, a Serbian name, and Uzier, a Bosnian name, gave the towers significance before the war. They represented Bosnian unity. Because no one knew which building carried which name, both towers were destroyed in the siege. Now the corpses of the twin buildings stand as far more grim reminder of what brother can do to brother.

  Next to us, the old police barracks still stood, though mortars had ripped it open and torn its guts out. The rooftop on which we sat took a hit and bore a huge gash in its side, the metal railing twisted and bent.

  “They used to lob mortars at the station and hit our apartment building,” Omar told me. “I lived on the other side of the building, so it was okay. Though we still went to the basement when the shelling was close. It was an exciting time.”

  Omar laughed and joked about the war. He was a young teenager during the siege and the whole thing had seemed like an adventure. He reminded me of Anna Freud’s conjecture about the children during the bombing of London in World War II; that the young could not only handle but even enjoy the chaos of war, so long as it only threatened their lives and disrupted their routine, so long as the family stayed together. He and his family survived. For him, the war was a distant memory, one that did not trouble him greatly.

  “I’m not traumatized,” he laughed. “No more than anyone else in this crazy city.” He took a drag on a cigarette and ran his hand through his dreadlocks. He wore a T-shirt that read Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic that he got a great kick out of quoting every time we mentioned that I was American.

  “The economy, man, that’s my problem,” he finally said, after giving some thought to the host of problems facing a young Muslim man in the Balkans. “That’s what gives me nightmares. There’s nothing to do in this town and no way to make money.” He made a little, he explained, selling small bits of marijuana to his friends.

  “There are some hardcore dealers in the city too, dangerous guys. They weren’t always that way though. I went to school with these guys. But now there’s no way out and no other way to make money, so they sell drugs.”

  Before the war, the suicide rate in Bosnia was around eleven per 100,000 people. Since the war, the rate has almost doubled, to around twenty suicides per 100,000 people in 2003. Discussing the problems of depression in Bosnia—psychological and economic—a woman who had lost her husband to a mortar told me with a shake of her head, “You know…we’ve survived the war. Now we have to survive the peace.”

  Her youngest son, a fifteen-year-old who had been a baby at home when the mortar came through the wall and killed his father, sat with us a while but felt no desire to talk about the past. He was more concerned with the present—the struggling economy, the war criminals still at large. He did not stay in the room long to talk, and he seethed with a bit of anger toward his mother when she spoke lightly of any times during the siege. He was not entirely comfortable with an American, his mother explained when he left to go out with friends. He suspected America was waging a war against all Muslims and thought I might be judging him, hating him secretly because he was Muslim. He may, however, just have been a shy teenager.

  “After the war,” she told me, “he always tried to protect me, keeping the shades drawn, avoiding windows. He could not understand why people fixed the glass in their windows or greenhouses…he thought they would simply be shattered again by mortars or grenades.”

  The aftermath of the war affected her youngest son deeply, and he remained terribly protective of his mother, even as she and I spoke. Before leaving, he ran me through an intense interrogation about who I was and why I was visiting. Though he spoke decent English and very good German, he refused to speak them in front of me, other than to ask what I was doing in Sarajevo, preferring to talk to his mother privately in Bosnian when I was present, even to have her translate, though he understood everything I was saying. His mother suspects that his anger and his trouble in school, despite his intelligence, go back to the loss of his father.

  “He is very much like his father,” she said. “I loved his father very much, and my son is stubborn just like him. He reminds me more and more of him every day.” Her eyes grew moist, though she did not cry. She entertained countless journalists in her home during the siege, she told me, and had told her story many times. Telling her son’s story, however, was harder for her. He, like teenagers the world over, was struggling to figure out what kind of adult he would be.

  As poverty grows in Bosnia, as the post-war economy stagnates, young people are left with few options. Frustration grows daily and politicians on all sides seem incapable of making things work. The two parliaments constantly block each other’s initiatives. Al Qaeda has begun to get a foothold in the region, forming safe houses in Sarajevo; right-wing clerics are gaining prominence. Several suspects have been arrested in Bosnia under terrorism laws, charged with planning suicide bomb attacks on American and European interests in the Balkans.

  At the same time, the Serbian nationalis
ts continue to honor and protect former war criminals. At the funeral for the mother of the former Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, people carried signs and political banners proclaiming him and General Mladic heroes. This environment of high tension and little opportunity is a hard one in which to grow up, in which to heal. Everyone is tired of fighting, but peace has its own challenges.

  Children manage the minefields of peace and of recovery from the trauma of war in radically different ways. Jaca engaged directly with her memories, telling stories, reading about politics, asking questions. Omar never thought much about it at all. Christof rarely spoke of the war, though the consequences of it loomed large in his interactions with the other children and with our dog.

  I spoke with dozens of children in my time in all of the conflict areas I visited who did not want to talk about their experiences of war. Justin, the tall Rwandan boy who lost his mother and father, felt better because, as he said, “I am learning to forget.”

  I was shocked to hear that sentiment echoed by adults all around him and around many other children in similar situations. The adults were trying to forget as well. They stated proudly how their programs were designed to help the children forget the terrible things that had happened to them, to not think about them at all. Words like repression and avoidance buzzed around in my head. I came from a culture where forgetting was seen as pathological. People in America spend small fortunes trying to remember traumatic events as a way to become healthy again. My gut reaction was that this kind of avoidance would only lead to problems, but I’m not a trained psychiatrist. I said nothing. How else to cure trauma but by talking about it, I wondered. Avoiding the subject, repressing the memories of the terrible events of war, would lead these children to problems, I feared. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Pathological behavior. How could they move past the things they’d experienced unless they talked about them, exorcised the demons of their past, so to speak?

  A thirteen-year-old Albanian boy named Peter had lost his father, who was shot by paramilitaries. He wore soccer shorts and a red tank top that needed washing. His face was downcast, and he did not join in the conversation with the other children on the day we met. He did not want to talk about the past or the future.

  “They took my father and burnt him in a house with some other men, what does it matter?” he said, angry that I would pry, a total stranger. The principal of his school told me he was quite a good student, “well adjusted,” though a bit sullen at times, like any thirteen-year-old boy. His family was poor.

  “It makes sense he would be sad,” the principal said. “If the ocean was a piece of paper and the sky was a pencil, that would not have been enough to write the suffering of the Albanians.” The principal was also a published poet and had spent years in a Serb-run prison for his political verses.

  Despite my fears at Peter’s avoidance of past troubles, he was doing well under the circumstances. For him, avoiding the subject worked. Talking about it distressed him, being forced to remember and being helpless to change the past. He was not in denial, he just didn’t want to talk about it.

  “They took my father and burnt him in a house with some other men, what does it matter?” His words echo in my head, the matter-of-factness, the tight grip on reality.

  “We don’t talk about these things in my family,” eleven-year-old Adem said. “Though I know that three houses in our village were burned down by the paramilitaries.” He looked around the classroom where we sat and stared at Peter a moment. I asked the group of kids how they dealt with memories of the past, memories that were unpleasant. Adem answered for everyone. “We play to get over it.” Peter nodded in agreement.

  The talking cure, as it is sometimes called, is an individualistic concept. It fits well in the West, where the individual reigns supreme. But in other cultures, the individual is of far less importance on his or her own than the group, the community. In a society emerging from war, it is not just the individual who has been traumatized, it is society. Everyone has felt the sting, not just as individuals but as a community. The very institutions that make a community have been traumatized—laws, moral norms, family structure, economic security. Especially in cases of ethnic conflict, it is the group trauma that trumps all others.

  In Bosnia and Kosovo, everyone talked about what they did to us, what happened to the Serbs, what happened to the Muslims, and so forth. Individual suffering was always set in the larger context of the suffering of a people. The children often saw their own suffering not as an individual event but as part of the campaign against everyone they knew or identified with.

  In that light, healing for many of these young people could not happen in a vacuum. Their troubles were tied to the community’s troubles. Their worries were not symptoms of psychological problems, but real reactions to the situations in which they lived. As Sigmund Freud wrote, “In an individual neurosis, we take as our starting point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal.’ For a group all of whose members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background could exist.”

  Safety and security tend to be the main concerns for young people immediately after the end of a war, but as security threats lessened, access to education, better healthcare, and the means to make a living took the forefront. Social justice was also a concern that stayed on their minds. A sense of group victimization kept many of the children trapped in their wartime memories. Perhaps, for the young, it was better not to think about it.

  Looking at the Albanian children of Kosovo, I saw that their sense of well-being depended on independence, the hope that history would not repeat itself. Their greatest fear was being tied to Serbia, once more at the mercy of the Serbs. For the Serb children, much of their anxiety came from their imprisonment in protected enclaves, their feeling that they were surrounded by a hostile nation, cut off from their own people in Serbia, left at the mercy of the Albanians. In Bosnia, crime and economic hardship dominated the worries of young people. They also worried about war criminals who were still at large, who were keeping populations in terror and keeping people from returning to the homes they lost in the war.

  The problems of a post-war society are vast and complex and all of them are connected, especially in a society where ethnic conflict has torn everyone apart. As Kosovo looks toward independence and Serbia looks to block that hope, and as Bosnia tries to enter the European Union and bring its war criminals to justice, the region may once again find itself in turmoil, and many of the children who survived the wars of the 1990s will be the young adults who fight in the new conflicts. Meeting many of these young people, I cannot say if they will choose the path their parents took. I am sure many will. I like to think, however, of Mount Igman and the soccer games I played.

  Every evening before dinner most of the kids would gather on that field littered with spent shell casings buried just beneath the dirt. The dog, Prijatelj, would trot along behind us, ignoring the occasional unkind word or tossed stone, and flop himself down under the shade of a tree to watch and to pant. The children, a jumble of different histories and dreams, would pick teams with the toss of a rock, or a coin if one was handy. They put aside their parents’ violent history, their own troubled past, and they kicked the ball around, laughing and passing and dodging and slipping, the way kids do all over, in peace and war and poverty and riches. They played soccer together. They played every evening for as long as they could, at least until it grew too dark to play.

  SEVEN

  “God Has Something in Store”

  What Becomes of War’s Children

  In the Autumn of 2004, I received an unexpected phone call from a young man named Joseph. He lived in Michigan, he explained, though he was not from Michigan. He came from a small town in southern Sudan near the White Nile. As a young boy, he had fled because of the bombings and attacks by the government army in Khartoum. He was separated from his family and wandered in the desert with thousands of other youths
like himself, the youths who became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. He had survived, he explained, through the grace of God.

  He lived with the other boys, his brothers in suffering, he called them, in Kakuma Refugee camp in Kenya until, thanks to the U.S. State Department and American church groups, he was put on a plane and given a new life in an American city, resettled to a third country of refuge far from his homeland. He received basic training in what life would be like in America. Simple things: This is a flush toilet, this is a gas stove, this is a bread knife, a utility bill, a paycheck. He was loaded onto a plane with hundreds of other boys, one of countless flights that left the refugee camp over the years during which the resettlement program was operational. It was his first time on an airplane. Until then airplanes had only dropped things on him, bombs or pallets of food aid (which could also kill someone crushed underneath). This acceleration away from the earth was something new to him, exciting and terrifying, a microcosm of the emotion he felt about abandoning his homeland and his people to start his new life in the United States. At twenty-three years old, America became the fourth country in which he had lived but the first that he did not arrive in on foot.

  He had, however, left someone behind in Kakuma camp, he told me over the phone: his cousin, a young girl, his only family. He worried for her, all alone. He knew to contact me through his cousin; he had gotten my information from her, the young woman who chose to be called Rebecca.

  “You have met her in Nairobi?” he asked me.

  “Yes,” I told him. “I met her one year ago.” I didn’t want to give him too much information just yet. I didn’t really know who he was, calling me out of the blue. Rebecca had been in hiding, after all. A man was after her, a man who could have friends all over America through the resettlement program. Not all the Lost Boys were little angels, and most were grown men by now.