The Wolf of Sarajevo

by Matthew Palmer

  When they were back in the jeep and through the checkpoint, Eric explained to Annika what he had done.

  “There’s a drone following us?” she asked.

  “Of course not. But they don’t know that. All these guys have seen too many movies. It seems to them like just the sort of thing we would be able to do. I used that.”

  “But then why give him the coin at the end? It seems like a mixed signal to me. You risk confusing the dog.”

  “We’ll be back this way. We may need him to want to help us without the constant threat of an invisible drone. What I did helped him save face. It looks like he won because I gave him something even if it’s only a trinket from the embassy gift shop that cost me a couple of bucks.”

  “They teach you to do things like that drone story in your school for diplomats?”

  “Oh god, no,” Eric said laughing. “That’s not a diplomat thing. I learned that kind of bullshit as a journalist.”

  —

  Zoran Dimitrović’s office was on the top floor of an early-twentieth-century Italianate bank building that had been converted into a presidential villa. It was neither vast nor imposing. The scale was appropriate, however, for Banja Luka, a city of some one hundred and fifty thousand on the banks of the Vrbas River. It would never rival Vienna or Budapest, but Eric appreciated the city’s wide-open green spaces and provincial charm. During the war, Republika Srpska’s government had operated out of an old ski center in the mountain town of Pale. Banja Luka was at least a real city.

  In the 1990s, Banja Luka had been a magnet for Serbs displaced from the parts of Bosnia under Muslim or Croat control. Many had stayed on after the war. The fighting had touched the city only indirectly. The notorious Manjača concentration camp built by the army on a mountain just south of town had held thousands of prisoners. The camp leaders, who had presided over a brutal regime of torture and murder, had been convicted of war crimes by the international tribunal in The Hague.

  The president’s chief of staff met them at the villa’s wrought-iron doors and escorted them up the marble stairs to the office. Oil paintings featuring dark colors and somber themes hung heavy on the walls. It had been more than eight months since Eric had been in the building. He and Ambassador Wylie had met frequently with Dimitrović when he had first taken office. Cutting ties with the American embassy had been one of the first signals that something fundamental had changed in Banja Luka. The presidential palace seemed less dynamic than it had on Eric’s last visit. Most of the offices they walked past were empty and looked like they had been for some time.

  The president was waiting for them just inside the door to his office. He was only in his midfifties, but his hair was already turning from gray to white. He kept it cut short. His blue suit looked tailored and his tie looked expensive. Italian, Eric suspected. Dimitrović was tall, even for a Serb, almost six foot four, but he was stoop-shouldered and walked with a slight limp, an old war wound, it was rumored, even though no one seemed to know exactly where he had served in the fighting.

  Dimitrović greeted Annika coolly. There would be nothing friendly about this meeting.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Petrosian,” Dimitrović said, as he shook Eric’s hand. It was clear from his sour expression, however, that this was a lie. It was not the last one that Eric expected to hear over the next hour.

  “Nice to be remembered, Mr. President,” Eric offered in return. This, at least, had the virtue of being true.

  The furniture in Dimitrović’s office was a mishmash of styles. Eric sat in an overstuffed armchair that was too soft and too low to be comfortable. Sondergaard was seated on a love seat directly across from the president.

  Dimitrović’s plus-one was young and fit. He did not offer his name and Dimitrović did not introduce him. He looked more like a bodyguard than an advisor. There was a small pin on the lapel of his jacket that seemed like the kind of thing Diplomatic Security or the Secret Service used to differentiate levels of access. He took a seat along the wall behind Eric and Sondergaard so that he was looking across the room at Dimitrović rather than facing the guests. It was unusual behavior. Eric could not recall ever seeing anything like it.

  “Madam High Representative, welcome to Republika Srpska,” Dimitrović began, as two middle-aged women in matching uniforms distributed coffee and cookies. “I believe this is your first time in my country.”

  Dimitrović understood English well enough, but he spoke it with difficulty. Eric translated his Serbian for Sondergaard.

  “Actually, this is my third visit to Bosnia,” she replied.

  “I don’t include the Federation. I mean the RS.”

  “As your country?”

  “Maybe not yet as a member of the United Nations. But my first loyalty is to Republika Srpska and its people.”

  “Well, the future of your people will be determined by the decisions that you make in the next few weeks. You know why I’m here.” Sondergaard leaned forward on the love seat to underscore the urgency of her message. “Bosnia is at the edge of a precipice. You know what lies at the bottom. We all do. We’ve seen it before, close up. I want to help you step back from the abyss. But I need your help.”

  “I don’t believe we are at the edge of anything,” Dimitrović replied, and then paused to allow Eric to translate. “We are already falling. We have been falling for nearly twenty years now. Bosnia is a trap, pure and simple. It is a pit with smooth sides from which we have not been able to climb out. Look with clear eyes at the real lessons of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing was an ugly reality, but it worked. The places in the former Yugoslav space that are the most stable and successful are those places that were most effective in eliminating their restive and quarrelsome minority populations. Slovenia is the easiest example; it didn’t have many minorities to start with. But look at Croatia. The Croats expelled nearly all of the Serbs and they have little cause to regret it. The same is true for the expulsion of Serbs from their ancestral home in Kosovo. It is those places that cling to the fantasy of multiethnic harmony that are the hardest to govern and the most backward politically. The peoples of the Balkans do not want to live together. They want to live at peace as neighbors with good fences between them. The sooner you in the West understand that basic reality, the easier it will be to talk about real solutions.”

  “Such as?”

  “A new Congress of Berlin. The big powers agreed to a rational redrawing of borders once before. But the last time around, Europe and America insisted that the Tito-era administrative boundaries of Yugoslavia’s republics were sacrosanct and could not be changed. This is ridiculous. If Yugoslavia could be so casually disintegrated, what is so special about Bosnia? Kosovo was not even a republic. It was a Serbian province that you chose to strip away and give to the Albanians. Why should we not have the same rights if we don’t wish to live together with the Croats and the so-called Bosniaks? If we wish to live on our own, who are you to tell us that we cannot?”

  “So yours is the discredited dream of a Greater Serbia?” Sondergaard asked incredulously. “Have we not already seen the terrible consequences of that ambition?”

  “I am no more interested in being ruled from Belgrade than from Sarajevo. We Bosnian Serbs have fought for our freedom and we have won the right to self-determination. And we are determined to chart our own way forward, unburdened by the ineffective Dayton institutions.”

  “You do appreciate that the Congress of Berlin set the stage for World War I. None of these decisions are made in isolation. I offer you an alternative vision. Community. Union. Cooperation. These stand in opposition to the idea of separation and isolation. Yours is a dark view of human nature, Mr. President.”

  “Yes,” Dimitrović agreed readily. “Yes, it is.”

  “There was a time not so long ago when your views were different. When you supported Bosnia’s membership in the European
Union and even NATO. When you worked in favor of a unitary Bosnian state that did not distribute rights and responsibilities to its citizenry on the basis of their ethnicity and family name.”

  “Times change. I assure you that my views are sincere.”

  Dimitrović was looking over Sondergaard’s shoulder, Eric noticed, as though seeking approval from the young “advisor” sitting along the back wall.

  “So you no longer see Bosnia as a future EU member state?” the High Rep asked.

  “I no longer see Bosnia as a state.”

  “Even at the risk of war?”

  “Yes. Even then.”

  “What happened to you, Mr. President? You came to power promising support for a unified Bosnia. You started to make good on that commitment, then you moved away from it without any sort of warning.”

  “Perhaps the scales fell from my eyes,” Dimitrović suggested, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The only past that concerns me is the past injustice that has been done to my people.”

  “There will be a peace conference in Sarajevo in three weeks’ time. Will you participate?”

  “In my capacity as a hypocrite? I don’t see how that would be possible. History is our guide. A history of man’s inhumanity to man. We learned under the Ottoman pashas the importance of solidarity and will not surrender it to your artificial concept of unity.”

  “Will you at least send someone to represent you at the conference?”

  Dimitrović again looked to the back wall before responding.

  “If you force me to be blunt, I will be. Republika Srpska is not interested in the Sondergaard Plan. We have our own plan.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’ll see.”

  On the way out, Eric made certain to walk over to the “advisor” and shake his hand.

  In the car on the way back, Eric asked the visibly dispirited High Representative if she had noticed the man’s pin.

  “No,” she admitted. “But he didn’t really seem the type for jewelry.”

  “It wasn’t jewelry,” Eric agreed. “It was more like a unit badge.”

  “For which unit?”

  “It was a white hand.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Ain’t it. I think we may be looking at this all wrong.”

  “In what way?”

  “We’d been assuming that Dimitrović was using the White Hand as an instrument of his personal power, a way to consolidate influence in his office. What if it’s the other way around?”

  “Meaning?”

  “What if the White Hand is in control of Dimitrović?”

  “Well, that would certainly complicate things, wouldn’t it?”

  —

  On the drive back, Annika looked out the window at the verdant mountains only just beginning to change their summer colors for the muted tones of fall. In a few months, the Bosnian landscape would appear harsh and unforgiving, but for the moment, it was hard to credit that life in a place this beautiful could be anything but peaceful and comfortable. Settlements were spaced out along the road almost at regular intervals like mile markers.

  Half an hour outside Banja Luka, they had to stop as a column of ten tanks crossed the highway, a mix of Yugoslav-era M-84s and Soviet surplus T-55s. In a field to one side, regular army troops were digging in, building firing positions for towed artillery that was pointed south toward Sarajevo. It was just an exercise, Eric knew, but there was a sense of urgency to the scene as though the soldiers involved expected to be doing this again for real at some point soon.

  “Take a look at the flags,” Eric said. The lead tank was flying a tricolor flag with horizontal stripes of red, blue, and white. Similar flags were flying from the antennae of the self-propelled guns digging in for whatever exercise was under way.

  “What is that? Serbian?”

  “That’s the flag of Republika Srpska.”

  “I thought Bosnia had a unified army now. Wasn’t that the one major accomplishment of post-Dayton integration?”

  “It was,” Eric agreed. “But that deal has broken down and the army has splintered. Most of the heavy weapons belong to the RS now.”

  “Is Dimitrović right, Eric?” Annika asked sadly, after they had navigated their way past the army encampment. They were driving through a small town of crumbling timber-and-wattle homes. It had been a mixed village before the war, with most of the villagers identifying themselves as Yugoslavs to the census takers. Now, the village was almost entirely Serb and it had something of the air of a ghost town. The High Representative’s mood seemed to match that of the town, tired and forlorn.

  “Right about what?”

  “This,” she said, gesturing out the window. “That the people here can’t live together, that they won’t live together, that they’re better off apart.”

  “The old ancient hatreds argument?”

  “Yes. What if it’s true? What does that mean for Bosnia’s future and what we’re trying to do?”

  “I don’t think it is true,” Eric said, trying to project conviction, knowing how easy it was for peacemakers in the Balkans to slip into a kind of fatalistic despair about a region that seemed to work so hard at resisting accommodation and compromise. “Or rather, I don’t think it’s necessarily true. The reality is that the ethnic groups in this part of the world have lived together in relative peace for longer than they’ve been killing one another. Mixed marriages were common here before the war.”

  “And what about Srebrenica? Or Jasenovac?” During the Second World War, the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The most notorious death camp, Jasenovac, was a cultural touchstone for the Serb side every bit as powerful as Srebrenica was for the Bosniaks or as Vukovar, the object of a vicious three-month siege at the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, was for the Croats. Bosnia did not have a single history. It had three self-contained narratives.

  “This isn’t Disneyland,” Eric said. “History here offers up plenty of violence, shocking violence. And it’s often organized along ethnic lines. But history is not destiny. When Tito died, the Communist Party held Yugoslavia together with Scotch Tape and glue for ten years. But in the end, it couldn’t survive the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nationalist feelings had been suppressed under the communists, not eliminated. Ethnic nationalism was there right under the surface. It offered people a sense of identity, of belonging. The violence didn’t have to be a part of that picture. A few leaders—Milošević on the Serb side, Tuđman in Zagreb, and even Izetbegović in Sarajevo—used nationalism to promote themselves. To take power. The more they took, the more they wanted, and like Mao said, ‘It’s easy to ride the tiger. What’s hard is getting off.’”

  “But the hatred, the intolerance, it all seemed so real, so visceral. Was it all just made up?”

  “Oh, it’s real enough. The anger is real. The bitterness is real. The sense of historical grievance on the part of all the parties is real. Just about everyone in this part of the world carries around a mental ledger of historical injustices, and the books are never balanced.”

  “But aren’t the Serbs the ones responsible for what happened here?”

  “Depends on where you want to start the narrative. It’s largely true if you want to start the clock in 1991. But the Serbs don’t start it there. They look back to 1941. Some go back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as the starting point. And we in the West don’t always understand it. Did you ever read Rebecca West’s book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon?”

  “Well, I bought it, but I’d be lying if I said I read it.”

  “It is awfully long,” Eric agreed. “Eleven hundred pages to describe a six-week trip through Yugoslavia in the thirties. She’s not a great writer either, but she was a very perceptive observer. She wrote that Westerners w
ho spend time in the Balkans have the unfortunate habit of adopting one of the nationalities as their pet, the one that can do no wrong. As she put it, ‘Eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.’”

  “So Jasenovac explains Srebrenica?”

  “No. Nothing can explain Srebrenica. And nothing can justify it. It was a singular act of evil.”

  “Can we just ignore the history? Tell them it doesn’t matter?”

  “We can’t. It’s a part of what makes this place what it is. It makes the people who they are. I saw something similar up close with my grandparents. They were from a village near Trabzon on the Black Sea where they grew the sweetest grapes on planet Earth, or so my grandfather assured me. His family were farmers. My grandmother’s father was a shopkeeper. They were only teenagers when the Ottoman troops started burning the Armenian villages. The soldiers drowned tens of thousands in the sea and left the bodies floating on the surface like pack ice. My grandparents were the only two people from their village to survive. They eventually drifted to America on a postwar tide of refugees, got married, built a good life. But they never really left the village. Even after almost seven decades in sunny Southern California, they considered themselves villagers from Trabzon. Old Grandpa Petrosian had a photograph of his family’s farm, a sepia-toned picture of grape arbors and haystacks that he kept on his desk. Both the land and the genocide had worked their way deep into his soul, into his blood and bone. It was who he was.”

  “And they never went back to the village? Just to see it again.”

  “Go to Turkey? No way in hell. They wouldn’t even eat turkey.”

  Annika’s smile was tired but genuine.

  “I hope you don’t mean to tell me that it’s all hopeless.”

  “Not at all. We can’t ignore the history, but that doesn’t mean we should let it be the driver of policy, to dismiss them all as prisoners of their own prejudice. We overcome it. And that means we have to understand it. To share in the historical memory.”