The authors of this atrocity were not Serbs. They were Croat militiamen. Muslim troops in the area responded in kind, burning Croat homes and assassinating Croat men. Croat attempts at ethnic cleansing in central Bosnia, and the feeble but vicious reaction of frustrated, outgunned Muslim forces, show how virulent the madness unleashed by the Serb campaign to dismember the republic is. In the mountains and villages, no one rules. The British brought Bosnian Muslim army commander Sefer Halilovic from Sarajevo to Vitez to explain a Croat-Muslim cease-fire to “his” men. But on British TV, amid bearded Muslim villagers who had seized weapons and dug trenches to defend their homes from the Croats next door, he looked vaguely ill at ease, almost like a visitor from another country. If Bill Clinton does intervene militarily to save Bosnia, he will be intervening to save something that, it is increasingly obvious, exists only as a memory. Serb officials already mordantly refer to “the former Bosnia-Herzegovina.”
The West has finally gotten exercised about Bosnia, but long after most of the damage is already irreversible. About 137,000 people are dead or missing; Muslims have had to be buried two or three to a grave in some places. Serb forces control 70 percent of the country but cannot make these newly seized lands, purged of their largely Muslim business and professional classes, function economically. Along the back roads, Muslim children beg for food from passing United Nations convoys. “Please, lunch packet,” they cry. The vehicles send dust flying in their faces. In the red-roofed mountain resort town of Olovo, a place where Serbs, Croats and Muslims once splashed in curative hot-spring water, all but a handful of homes have been shelled to rubble by the Serbs. A population of 5,000 has shrunk to 80 civilians and 800 rifle-armed defenders. Olovo is just one of dozens of towns to which there is no realistic prospect that the 2.3 million displaced people in Bosnia will soon return. Sarajevo alone, once the architectural pearl of the Balkans, will take billions of dollars to rebuild.
Another poignant casualty is not physical but spiritual: the unique interethnic coexistence that, while never as deeply entrenched as Bosnian propaganda would have it, did distinguish the republic from the rest of former Yugoslavia. Bosnia has always been a crossroads of Islamic, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Jewish traditions. The tragic paradox of this history is that ethnic hatred is antithetical to Bosnia’s survival, yet also a temptingly available rallying cry for ambitious nationalist politicians. The moderate Muslim-led government of Alija Izetbegovic could not square this circle, both because of its own miscalculations and because of clumsy Western diplomacy. The West failed to shore up Sarajevo against Serb threats even before the republic was first recognized last April. And then ethnic partition was enshrined by the Vance-Owen peace plan, which gave both Serbs and Croats an incentive to stake out their assigned sections by force and rid them of Muslims. “Everybody says Vance-Owen is to blame,” says British Maj. Brian Watters of the recent Croat push against Muslims in Vitez.
Unlike the Serbs and Croats, each of whom can turn to a nextdoor mother country for help and refuge, Bosnia’s Muslims are alone in the world. At 44 percent of the population, they were the largest group but still a minority; self-interest dictated a policy of communal power-sharing. The city of Tuzla, for example, held by the Bosnian government, is probably the least nationalist town in all of Bosnia. It is ruled by the Reform Forces, the republic’s only multiethnic party. Thousands of ethnic Serbs still live there, securely. One Serb, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Yugoslav People’s Army, proudly displayed the framed photograph of Tito on his apartment wall as we sipped whisky with his Croat wife. National parties will be the death of Tuzla," he told me. Pictures of Tito still adorn many homes and offices in Bosnia, not out of affinity for communism but from nostalgia for a time in which national differences were at least muffled by the government.
Under the pressure of a near-genocidal Serbian assault, however, some of the Muslims are burning for revenge and beginning to adopt the methods of their persecutors. Two Serb Orthodox churches on the roads outside Tuzla have been vandalized. In the city itself, Bosnian troops, having fought for more than a year with only the weapons they can steal from the Serbs or buy from the Croats, paraded five bleeding Serb prisoners, including a woman, through the city’s largest hotel, beating and kicking them as they went. Bosnian Second Corps Cmdr. Hazim Sadic apologized: “Most of these soldiers are from villages in eastern Bosnia where their houses were burned by the Serbs at the beginning of the war,” he said. But the spectacle was sickening just the same.
On the day of my visit, Olovo’s defenders gathered to toast the one-year anniversary of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serbian shells exploded in the distance. Muslim fighters downed glasses of slivovitz, the local plum brandy-in total violation of Koranic prohibition but in tart contrast to Serb propaganda about the Islamic fundamentalist threat to the Serbs. In fact, a local imam (sipping orange drink) was on hand to watch the heresy unfold. Some Croats were there, too; the nearby Serb threat in Olovo had forced them together with the Muslims even though their respective kin were battling only a few dozen miles away in Vitez. In a nearby house, one of the few left standing, a group of fighters propped up their rifles and broke into a chorus of “Emina,” the traditional Bosnian folk song about a young Serb’s love for a Muslim girl. It was a delicious moment, but also one filled with palpable doom. In Bosnia, Europe and the world are watching the destruction of a treasure we hardly even knew we had.
Bosnia Emergency Fund Save the Children Box 925, Westport, Conn. 06881 Emergency Relief Efforts for Bosnia and the Former Yugoslavia U.S. Committee for UNICEF 331 East 38th Street, New York, N.Y. 1001 6 Former Yugoslavia Relief Fund American Red Cross Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013
The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War by Misha Glenny. Penguin Books. 1992. Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History by Robert D. Kaplan. St. Martin’s Press. 1993. The Balkan Express: Fragments From the Other Side of War by Slavenak Drakulic. W.W. Norton. 1993.
