PRISONERS OF AN INVENTED PAST
(A Peruvian's journey through the Southern Balkans)

José Luis Rénique

1

We are in a shabby coffee shop in the left bank of the Drina River by a bridge that leads into the center of the city of Gorasde. After three weeks travelling throughout what once was the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia I thought I had developed certain impermeability to the effects of war. There is something particularly striking in what I have seen this morning however. It is not the amount of destruction -on which Gorasde closely competes with Sarajevo, Mostar or Eastern Slavonia- but something more difficult to grasp. Here, the shock of war is still in the air as in no other city I had visited before. Eight months after the last shot of this fired, Gorasde still seems to be under siege. There are practically no vehicles. People wandered occupying the center of the street or huddled before electoral propaganda as in front of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) before the rosters of the missing and the returnees. It looks like a city occupied by rural dwellers. Rural types packed the coffee shops. There is no urban pulse here. No sign of reconstruction, no development programs. "Those who could rebuild the city have left or were killed. There are no jobs here. This is a city of refugees. The only money people have comes from abroad" is what we heard from a policemen we met hanging around by one of the two bridges over the Drina.

Gorasde's recent history summarizes a great deal of the drama caused by a war where grabbing territory and "ethnic cleansing" were inseparable goals. Driving all the Muslims from the Drina valley -the conduit between Belgrade and the Serb-held territory in southern Bosnia as well as the Adriatic coast- was in that sense a prominent strategic objective of the Serbian forces. In doing so, Gorasde was a major stumbling-rock. In February 1994, after enduring three Serb offensives, Gorasde was declared a "safe heaven" by the United Nations (UN). In July 1995, Zepa and Srebrenica, the two other "safe areas" in Southern Bosnia, were overrun by Serbian forces bringing UN credibility to the lowest point since the war. The fall of Gorazde seemed imminent when North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced that any Serbian assault would trigger heavy air strikes. The threat worked, Gorazde was saved but transformed in a Muslim enclave in the middle of Serbian territory. Without water or electricity, its streets swollen with thousands of families driven from dozens of towns and villages elsewhere along the Drina River valley, Gorasde became a little more than a ghetto whose 60,000 inhabitants survived on the food carried in by daily aid convoys.

"Each morning -according to a report by a journalist who visited the city in late 1995- as the huge white tractor-trailers crawl into the city, a ragged collection of spectators gathers to applaud. In the afternoon, crowds of silent men and women gather to scan the list on Steva Helete square for those who have parcels from the outside brought in by the UNHCR."

If foreign donors do not pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the area Gorazde is destined to remain "an impoverished Muslim outpost ringed by a sea of hostile, bitter Serbs." This is the grim conclusion of this report.

Nothing much has changed eight months later. Although according to the Dayton agreement Bosnia and Herzegovina is all one single entity, Gorasde remains an enclave precariously linked with Sarajevo by a heavily patrolled 60-mile corridor. The remains of a UN vehicle and the abandoned Serbian checkpoints marked the place where the noose asphyxiating Gorasde used to be. Few vehicles dare to travel the route to Sarajevo unless under the protection of NATO's Implementation Force (IFOR). Public transportation is reduced to two daily buses that carry the marks of the still not completely placated belligerent mood.

As we leave Gorasde we are exposed again to the sad display of roofless remains of houses, churches, mosques and shops that we have seen all over the country. As we approach Sarajevo we travel through a heavily peasant area that poses a glaring contrast with the cosmopolitan spirit of the Bosnian capital. We make a stop in Pale -the remote ski resort that became the headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs. It is hard to reconcile its insignificance with the fact that from those scattering of chalets on the nearby hillsides their leaders directed a military campaign that aroused condemnation around the world. Unlike Gorasde, Pale is a lively and active town with an urban pulse incongruent with its simplicity. Shops appeared to be well stocked and there are no signs of destruction at all. Still, Pale is largely cut off from the rest of the world as the symbol of a cause usually depicted as Nazism revisited by the Western press. Although Serb Radovan Karadzic is politically banned and currently wanted on charges of heinous war crimes as ordered by an international tribune in The Hague, his pictures are omnipresent here. Even the universal use of the Cyrillic alphabet as a mark of Serbian identity -as opposed to the prevailing use of the Latin alphabet elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina- seem to reinforce this sense of stubborn isolation. To my foreign and distant eyes there is something archaic in the external forms of this revived Serbian nationalism, like a mix of 19th century romanticism combined with disturbing aspirations to ethnic purity.

Back on the main highway I notice the sense of relief in both Radovan, the driver, and Senad, the translator. For them as for me -although for different reasons- this trip has been a remarkable experience. Both of them spent most of the war in Sarajevo. During the four years of siege Pale was forbidden territory.

"I though I would never be able to visit these places again, they belong to a separate world, the hills surrounding the city were our limit and we knew that behind them others were doing their best to make our lives miserable," says Senad as we move along the highway heading towards Sarajevo. At one side of the road the name TITO is carved in big characters in a wall. Finally, a tunnel takes us through the hills ringing the Bosnian capital into the metropolitan area. All of a sudden, the rural hinterland gives way to the urban center where the separate histories of this land had historically found a seemingly enduring point of convergence. For decades if not centuries, Sarajevo had been for optimistic souls in the region a resounding negation of what Westerners have internalized as the very notion of "balkanization": breaking up a country into smaller and often hostile units. Between 1992 and 1995, however, that spirit would be submitted to the Machiavellian test of Serbian artillery and Western indolence combined. How Sarajevo fared is still to be seen.

A couple of minutes after leaving the tunnel we make a stop near the National Library of Bosnia, destroyed by shelling four years ago. An empty structure surrounded by mostly untouched buildings is what remains. Inside, somewhere under the piles of rubble, lays the rests of the Oriental Institute's collection of ancient manuscripts that the combined effort of a number of European and American universities is trying to reconstruct. The afternoon sunlight filters through the empty windows. A group of Swedish soldiers take pictures of each other having as a backdrop what once was the main reading room of this beautiful of neo-Romanesque structure harmoniously blended with Ottoman decorations.

"As firefighters struggled to contain the blaze -remembers Senad- more shelling came in. It was one of the sorriest moments of this ridiculous war. Imagine how stupid somebody has to be to think that by burning books and manuscripts you can make a whole tradition, a complete culture, disappear."

As I come out of the building I observe the neighboring hills and think about the close proximity between the surrounding peasant world and the cosmopolitan openness and proud ethnic plurality represented by the old Bosnian capital. Once the forces of nationalism were unleashed this gap became a geological fault that swallowed a patiently built appearance of normal coexistence. In those circumstances, the Serbs and Croats of today became the "Chetnik" and the "Ustasha" of the 1940s, while Sarajevo became the symbol of some kind of Turkish revival or the pawn of Muslim fundamentalism in Eastern Europe. Age-old rural mistrust of urban ways turned into hate and, conveniently equipped with modern artillery, a sort of defensive chauvinism became lethal aggression. According to British journalist Misha Glenny, although the battle for Sarajevo was launched by Serb leaders for strategic reasons, a secondary goal was to score a victory that "would also signal a victory for the primitive and irrational over the civilized and the rational."

As Sarajevo slips into the night, hordes of young fellows take over the old Ottoman section. The siege and the shelling seemed to be a memory of a distant century at that time. Over burek and beers Radovan, Senad and I talk about the events of the day. Talking about his impression of Gorasde, Senad says, "it took me by surprise, it was an apocalyptic view." With the last drop of energy and my mind already focused on my trip back home I make a quick comment on the appalling amount of physical destruction we saw there. "That is the least of the problem -Senad responds using a particularly grave tone-, houses could be redone, but how could you reconstruct this? -he says while he points his finger to his temple- how could you persuade the people that we could live together again as normal civilized people?"

Shortly before the curfew begins Radovan and I drop Senad at his apartment in a high-rising building located in the vicinity of what during the days of the siege was known as "sniper alley." As he walks toward the building I notice the nearly complete penumbra that reigns in the area. Few points of light interrupt the prevailing darkness. "Two thirds of Senad's building was destroyed by shelling, life in this area during the war was the closest to hell anybody could be" says Radovan as he heads back toward the city center.