When I applied last year to be an election observer in Bosnia for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), I fully expected to be rejected-as others had been-on the grounds of political bias. One foreign office underling, with whom I had a chance conversation in 1992, knew that I had done some translation for Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim Bosnian president, in the early months of the war. And then there was my Channel Four film Sarajevo Diary. These people cast their net wide-how could they possibly have overlooked my activities?
Once I realised that this hurdle had been crossed, I thought that I ought to warn someone that I should not be sent to Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb mini-state carved out of Bosnia by ruthless ethnic cleansing). Sarajevo Diary had been shown on Sarajevo television and therefore seen in Pale, the Srpska seat of government. But there was never-in London or Vienna-a convenient opportunity. I was caught up in, and processed by, the huge OSCE machine. And anyway, nisam htio da se pravim vazan, as I have learned to say in the language of my lost country. "I didn't want to pretend to be important." It was not that I feared for my life. Just that, at some point, someone might recognise my face, or my name, and say: "This one is an enemy of Srpstvo (the Serbian nation)." There would be an embarrassment for the OSCE.
Apprehensions before journeys get overtaken by the journeys themselves. By the time I found myself standing on the tarmac of the apology for an airport in Banjaluka, the main town of Srpska, I was more worried about the mines that might lie out there, under the innocent grass, than about my reception in this curiously familiar, but unknown place.
I ask myself now if I behaved unconscionably. While others on the bus to our base at Prijedor were gasping at the devastation-viciously destroyed villages as far as the eye could see over the whole Podkozarije plain-I was taking pleasure in the sight again of the tiny yellowing maize plots and the witch's-hat haystacks, and reflecting that I could be almost anywhere in former Yugoslavia. I understood, but did not react to, the significance of the Serb homesteads here and there-intact as though immune to a pestilence that had swept through. I registered without thought the names "Omarska" and "Keraterm" (two of the most atrocious Serbian concentration camps) on passing signposts. Later others talked with bated breath of what had happened here in summer 1992-of the dead piled in doorways. I did not make this imaginative leap. I told myself it was because I knew it all already, I had lived with the war too long, had had my shock more than three years earlier on the road between Sarajevo and the sea.
Later still, when we socialised in the evenings with our drivers and interpreters (as we had been instructed to do, and to remember their poverty and be generous to them), others brought back stories of their discomfort at supping with murderers or, at the very least, with those who would not acknowledge the murder that had been done in their name. "Very disturbed" one observer found her pair of young men, beneath their "Serbian" certainties. Of course such impressions would vary, but I too was always aware that an ideological gulf separated me from my pair, Bosko and Milovan, from Ljiljana, the policeman's wife, and from the cheerful Serbian peasant whose hill village polling station we visited on pre-election day. He pressed finest sljivovica (plum brandy) on us, filled our hands with walnuts and did not want us to go. In my head, I was always returning to my tired old theme-that in the former Yugoslavia there is no such thing as ethnicity, that these people who called themselves "Serbs" could as well be "Muslims" or "Croats," that the so-called "nations" have no objective existence. At the same time I was revelling in, and lamenting, my lost paradise. The endless beechwoods, their depths of light and shade, stretching away for ever like a deep pelt, like fur, over the body of the country we call Bosnia.
bosko was a lean, dark-skinned, gypsy-looking type, hook-nosed and darting-eyed under a swept back mass of black hair. I mistrusted him immediately. He was my driver. When I saw him I knew I would not be able to exercise over him the authority I had been told I had. In fact I was quite wrong, a more straightforward human being I have not met. Milovan was a stooped bespectacled balding figure, who in voice, mannerisms and lack of vitality reminded me of a former student of mine in Sarajevo. Except in his knowledge of English. The designation "interpreter" was in his case a joke. He hid throughout behind my Serbo-Croatian. I learned what was really wrong with him when almost casually he told me that his mother had died suddenly of a stroke three months before.
Bosko was Prijedor born and bred. Milovan was a double refugee-from his home city Zadar in the Croatian war, and from Maglaj in the Bosnian war. Bosko was a carpenter by trade-he would look critically at restaurant ceilings and say, "I could do a better job." Milovan worked behind the counter in a shop. He was at pains to know whether I could help with his father's difficulty. In order to leave Croatia the old man had had to take out Croatian citizenship, and on the freedom of his passport had recently gone to Zagreb to see if he could acquire his pension. He had been refused on the grounds that his son had fought against Croatia. "Is this not ini-quitous?" Yes, of course it was-but we were close to the discussion I so studiously avoided of "good" Serbs, "fascist" Croats; or, on the other side, "democratic" or "civilised" Croats or Muslims, "Bolshevik" or "Byzantine" or "genocidal" Serbs. "And did you fight in the war?" I asked. "Naturally"-and he told me of some near-fatal episode. He did not seem to be particularly interested-I had to worm it out of him. But his reluctance to talk about it seemed to be more weariness than anything else. I did not bother to ask what Bosko did in the war. I gathered in some late night conversation that he had in his time been a paratrooper in the Federal Yugoslav Army (JNA).
I was surprised to learn that these two had not known each other before their OSCE employment. Both were older than I had supposed. Bosko was 39, not the ten years younger he looked; Milovan 30, not the mild young student manqu? I had taken him for. My knowledge of the language-and of the "body language"-intrigued them immediately. Bosko, Milovan and Ljiljana wanted to know about me, so at first rather guardedly, later more freely, I told them. "You lived in Sarajevo all those years?-pa ti si nas (you are one of us)!" Then inevitably, "And who are you, your children, married to?" Lies never work, I told myself from bitter experience, and rather cautiously mentioned inter alia my Muslim son-in-law. Not even an unspoken Pa sta? ("So what?") hung in the air. I had to explain to them that I could not hear their voices against the electronically enhanced "music" that boomed in the caf?s of the nearby town of Novi Grad because I was deaf from damage done to my ears in the early Sarajevo bombardment. "Oh, that must have been terrible, we have heard about the bombardment of Sarajevo." Yes, but your lot did it-was my unspoken thought. And theirs? What exactly were you doing there, anyway? Or, What do you think of that shit Izetbegovic? I was in dread of this question, which came near to being asked sometimes. I had had to admit that I knew Radovan Karadzic slightly, and Koljevic, Buha, Maksimovic rather well (because we had been colleagues in the same university faculty). But they did not seem particularly enthused by the names of their leaders. "You know, there was never any conflict between us all. It was self-seeking politicians who made us quarrel among ourselves," said Ljiljana. Yes, yes, and again yes. But in nearly the next breath, she was talking about Balije and Turci (pejorative terms for Muslims). "I simply can't stand those Muslims!"
I was struck by the assumption-among the courteous local election committees, the staff in the restaurants, even the kalashnikov hefting young soldiers who guarded our dilapidated Prijedor hotel-that we who had come among them knew the rightness of their cause. I was reminded of the atmosphere of wartime Sarajevo-the solidarity.
One of the few unqualifiable truths we were told in Vienna was that Republika Srpska would vote solidly for autonomy, and eventual secession from Bosnia-Hercegovina and amalgamation with Serbia. Intimidation? Cheating? There was no need for them. Karadzic's illegal smiling face, Arkan in a bright blue suit, looking like a youth who has just won the lottery, had been plastered on every wall, and hung from trees in the villages, but, by OSCE ruling, had disappeared on election day. When late the following night the Displaced Persons' (in other words Muslim) vote was at last counted-a 24 hour delay because the Ifor had delivered the sacks without documentation-I was dismayed by the lack of charitableness towards hounded out neighbours. One indignant man brought to me an unusually spoiled ballot on which all, including the very name "Republika Srpska," had been obliterated, and underneath was written "Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha." I thought, "I understand. Why can't you understand?"
One explanation for this myopia came in an outburst from the young woman who was interpreting for one of the two OSCE supervisors who haunted us in Prijedor and Novi Grad. (The relationship of us observers to them was never quite clear although a young American woman with whom I was partnered for the count insisted that we ought to be observing them too for our final reports.) This supervisor, an elderly Englishman, did not bully the locals. He simply stated to the smoke filled air, over their tired heads, that he did not mind what they did, it was not his place to instruct them, but that if he was not au fait with all that was going on, they would have to take the consequences. He was also less than considerate of his quite good translator, with long urrhing and arrhing disquisitions thought out on his feet-a man in love with the sound of his own voice, my Bosnian-Serb friends and I agreed. I do not know what he said to her but the girl suddenly broke away with, "This is my country, after all-and by the way, in 1992 the Muslims were planning to murder us all in our beds, we had to rise up, to defend ourselves. My father was, I know for a fact, on one of their death lists!" It is just possible that someone who was 14 or 15 at the time might believe this nonsense.
But perhaps it is all too easy to believe it. After all I know an adult, a former colleague, who endured half the Sarajevo siege, yet in his published diary of his "Golgotha" propagates in detail the Karadzic version of what happened there. And in half-ravaged Novi Grad-in that curious economy of half day electricity cuts and pretend-smart bars awash with idlers-when I took the empty shell of a substantial orthodox church at one end of the main street to be a bombed out building, Milovan indignantly remonstrated. "No, it is under construction!" And on my last day Bosko drove the three of us up to Mrakovica to see the monument to the dead of the 1942 Kozara epic (a famous clash between the German army and Tito's partisans). We probed beyond Prijedor through the devastated plain, and zigzagged up into the mountain range on a ribbon of asphalt. At every turn ghostly skeleton houses confronted us with their message of vileness delightedly and thoroughly done to nominal members of another religion. I expected Milovan and Bosko to feel a self-defensive need to explain what we were seeing. Instead Bosko, bored, just chatted about the superstitions attached to Muslim cemeteries.
On the mountain itself, beyond the empty car park, we walked for 20 minutes along the concrete paths of what had once been a national park, then climbed through the pines up an array of steps, already tilted and awry with burgeoning growth, to the admittedly ugly-too grandiose-tower of fluted concrete cylinders. I will not hear of the "tawdriness" of "communist" memorials. The Cenotaph, too, would fall apart from neglect. I wandered among the thousands of names. I picked a flower and thought to keep it-then threw it away as ridiculous. Bosko talked of childhood adventures here "in the old days." Milovan mentioned his lost Dalmatian coast. The restaurant was just about working-sufficiently to serve me the strong drink I needed. I had always wanted to come here, and now it was nothing to me.
i have said that I was in an unknown place. I had actually spent some weekends in Banjaluka in 1959-60 and, apart from countless train journeys through, usually by night, to Zagreb or Zadar or England, I had once, in 1965, stopped off in Prijedor, and spent three days in Novi Grad (then known as Bosanski Novi), for the sake of a sweet extramarital affair. The Podkozarije plain was then hotter (because more humid) than Crete, where I had just been. Novi Grad is marvellously situated-on the confluence of the Una and the Sana. I was asked-as I had been asked 31 years before-if I knew how the Una got its name. The Romans found the river so pure and its colour so deep that they named it "the only one," and the Goths and Celts had passed the corrupt memory on to the Slavs. In the canyon it runs through, where the railway goes over the Dinaric watershed to Knin and the sea, it is in truth no bluer or greener than any other Balkan mountain river; but at Novi Grad it is a brimming wide body of water, it surges with whirlpools, flowing past the little stone-walled walk under chestnut trees beside which I had long ago held hands and kissed. At any rate, somewhere there I had, under her instruction ("I don't want my family to know about you"), found a charming inefficient small hotel. I could not for the life of me recall her name-Selma, Selima, Selina, Sahiba-one of those Muslim S-names that used to give me so much trouble in my classrooms. Now the riverside walk was all 1970s structures-one of which was our headquarters and counting station-and flattened, nettle-grown, Muslim ruins. Beyond the roadblock, the bridge across to Croatia had been destroyed by UN forces during last year's Bosnian army offensive, which was blocked by the Dayton agreement. A cage of Unprofor Bailey metal was now ferried across the gap. At our end, right beside the "Dayton" caf? where we went for relief from ballot counting, argument and boredom, a vandalised mosque.
It seemed my love story was getting about. In one of the Novi Grad polling stations an elderly local observer, wearing the identity badge of one of the nastier minor parties (possibly Seselj's, possibly Arkan's-I lost track of all the acronyms), fixed such a baleful, glowering look on me that I thought, at last, my darker secret was out. "You say she was the stationmaster's daughter?" "Yes." "1965?" "Yes." "She was a trainee nurse, wasn't she?" That I had not forgotten. "I was working at the station then. Was the family name not Boric?" "Yes-Good Lord!-Sorry!-Da, da!" "My old friend," he said, turning comfortably back to his political cronies, "worked with him for 30 years. Good man. Can't remember"-back to me-"that plavusa's (blonde's) name."
I am overwhelmed still when I think of it. That strange split-the co-existence in the same person of racist hate and normal human affection for individual members of the hated "race." This racism is a sort of global football hooliganism. The spectrum stretches from patriotic tub-thumper to Nazi concentration camp commandant. Most Serbs do not realise how close to the latter they have unwittingly been brought. No-I am not ashamed that I supped with them. I am a child of the British empire. Murder has been done in my name, too.
i was not much of an observer. I made a mess of the paperwork-I am a bad form filler-and in the end simply stuffed it in someone's pigeon-hole in the Prijedor hotel. I had only hitched the ride, anyway, hoping for Sarajevo. I am so glad I was sent to Republika Srpska. I broke the bogey. The elections were a nonsense, of course-like bullying Dayton itself, like the Contact Group plan, and the Vance-Owen and Carrington and Cutileiro interventions before it, like all the international community's dealings with a mess they could not really be bothered about. I tried to put this to the American woman on the evening we drove back under a thunderous cumulus-rimmed sky with a cut off rainbow jutting up over the brow of a hill like a biblical pillar of fire. "Your Clinton wanted a quick foreign policy fix. Imagine the second world war stopped in 1942. 'Sit down at the table, you quarrelling factions. Let's leave all military gains in place, let's just stop this dreadful fighting.'" She would not hear of it. Milosevic is no Hitler-although he may be a far more skilled Goebbels-but Tudjman is certainly Mussolini's like with his "thousand year dream." It is no use trying to re-establish a "multi-ethnic" Bosnia if you do not at the same time recreate the indivisible Yugoslavia of which it was an integral part. Whether there was once a medieval Bosnian state is irrelevant. The past is irrelevant. Only the living matter. Bosnia, and other events in the world, make me despair of humankind's ability to manage itself. So far from being a Balkan sideshow, I fear Bosnia shows us the way the world will go, unless we make up our minds to start discarding our anachronistic "identities" and "sovereignties." Fat chance!
