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

José Luis Rénique

5

"European Muslims...we are Muslims from Europe, and that makes a great difference" is what Nedim likes to say in explaining his identification with a cause and a culture. He does not remember when it was the last time he walked into a mosque, so it is not about religion or a particular set of beliefs. Neither it is about race or language of course as testified by Nedim's physical appearance, similar to any Italian or French youngster. To be a Muslim in Nedim's appraisal is ultimately connected to food and friends; to subtle traditions that have never been an obstacle to his interaction with others. Listening and observing him as we tour Muslim neighborhoods in the slopes of the mountains encircling Sarajevo, I wonder to what extent the experience of war is the galvanizing factor of this otherwise elusive identity. As we move along narrow and curving streets Nedim meets numerous friends or stops briefly to salute groups sitting at low tables outdoors, their residences' walls pocked by Serb gunfire and the impressive view of the Bosnian capital as a backdrop. Old neighbors who became comrades of arms, Nedim explains. He does not go too far in talking about his military days. "We did what we had to do. We accomplished our mission, but if this starts again I will not be here, I will be far away, maybe in Canada."

A year after leaving the army, Nedim is engaged in a different struggle. The one for survival, the one to carve out a future in a torn and ravaged country. Before the war he owned a kiosk where he sold beverages and sandwiches in an tree-line area by the Miljacka river that became the stage of some of the harshest confrontations. "By the early days of war my kiosk was gone" Nedim recounts. Recently he was trying to reactivate his license but his application was put on hold. "Yours is down in the list," he was told by a municipal officer, "because we have to take care of those from the handicapped first, and then those of widows and orphans and veterans with families." Being single and healthy, Nedim has no option but waiting. He is lucky though. His skills as a driver and his fair command of English have been his salvation. Through a network of friends and acquaintances he landed a job as a driver for the local office of UNOPS. A monthly salary of 700 Deutsche marks places him among the better paid Sarajevans. As there is a shortage of vehicles in the office where he works, he used to rent his car to his employer, something that means a significant increment to his salary as a driver.

As we approach Karlovac -the historic military center of the Krajina region- Nedim shares with me his concerns about the future. He is planning to get married in the coming months. If the license for his kiosk comes up he plan to invest his savings in constructing one bigger than the previous one. "It will be open 24 hours, my sister and my fiancée will help" Nedim says. Meanwhile, however, his UN salary is his only alternative. That is why he is so eager to figure out how long is going to last. I explained him with no success that I know almost nothing about the internal workings of the UN system. "What I can tell you is that all this is temporary," I reply under pressure. "And what about becoming a staff member of the UN, is that one a realistic possibility?" insists Nedim. "I simply don't know" I say as my memory goes back to a time in Lima when being a jobless graduate student the idea of becoming a UN employee appeared as the perfect combination for obtaining prestige, a dose of adventure, and an outlet for my utopian views....plus a good salary.

Travelling along the Zagreb-Belgrade highway near the Croatian capital gives me a comfortable feeling of returning to the West. It is a cause of uneasiness for Nedim though. This is his first trip out of Bosnia driving his own car. Since the moment we cross the Croatian border he speculates about possible incidents because of his car plates from Sarajevo. Closer to Zagreb he confesses his lack of familiarity with the city and wonders if he will be able to find the way to our destination. And then, as coming from a remote but certain place in his mind, Nedim begins a nervous monologue that I listen to without intruding

"I definitly feel more comfortable in Zagreb than in Belgrade. Croatians have always been more opened to Muslims than Serbs. There is at least one mosque in Zagreb, you know. There is none in Belgrade, of course. But you could not be totally sure with Croats either. I have an uncle who has lived in Copenhagen for up to twenty years. He has told me about Croatian clubs there filled with pictures of Ante Pavelic and Ustasha emblems. Fascism is alive here!"

And unexpectedly, in a discursive blending of past and present not uncommon in these lands, Nedim turns to talk about his fiancée‚ a native from Western Mostar who is about to have a trying encounter with her recent history on Saturday,

"She is going back to West Mostar for the first time since April 1993 when she was kicked out from her apartment that is held now by a Croat soldier. She wants to find out if at least she can get her stuff back. Electric appliances, clothes, furniture, she had everything and she could not take anything with her. And now she is going to confront the usurper. And I had explained to her very clearly that she shouldn't beg, that she is going there to claim her right, that she got to be strong. You get nothing if you negotiate from a weak position. You have to show that you are strong and that you are not afraid to go even to confrontation..." concludes Nedim clenching his fist against his left hand. We are already in Zagreb and, fulfilling Nedim's prophecy, we get lost. For more than an hour I witness his nervous confusion as we try to find our way to the Central Hotel where we have to meet Daniel, a UN expert with whom Nedim will do the trip back to Bihac.

Before leaving, the three of us sit at an outdoor cafe in the Tgr Jelacica, the vibrant center of this quiet and beautiful city. Daniel is a young man recently graduated from an Ivy League university with an impressive vitae. He started working in relief operations around the world in his early twenties. He was in Sarajevo during the days of the siege and then in Somalia and Rwanda and back in Sarajevo. He talks with a sense of mission that brings me memories of the 1970s, of my years as a student in Lima, Peru. Because of his singular exposure to human tragedy and institutional limitations he talks with a sense of disillusion a bit uncommon for his age. A sense of disillusion that, unsupported by the doses of cynicism of most of the former radicals of my age, rapidly became an intensely emotional appraisal of his recent labor experience.

"When I arrived in Sarajevo for first time the city was under siege. You got out of the plain and physically speaking you entered into a corridor. You entered the airport building moving fast between two lines of blue helmets. Then, you crossed the city in armored cars, following designated routes and as a part of a military convoy. And finally, every night you landed in the Holiday Inn that was like a watchtower from which a handful of nut Westerners followed the development of the war. Now the siege has been lifted, but the corridors are still there -foreign officers perform their duties without really touching society but ephemerally through people like you Nedim, and thanks God that people like you exist. And then, their work is over and they moved elsewhere without really grasping what is going on here to start the whole cycle all over again. And it is so hard to change this system. The other day while I saw this movie Independence Day, that scene in particular when that huge extraterrestrial flying object descends over Washington D.C. It is like that with the UN. A huge object landing into these devastated countries with its crew of experts, social engineers, faxes and computers. And I wonder if what we left behind is worthy, if it makes all these salaries and machines justifiable."

A detonation that makes us all jump out of our seats marks the end of Daniel's story. We immediately see that we are the only ones taken by surprise. It means that it is already noon, says the waiter when he sees how startled we are. "It was noon many times during the day in Sarajevo a while ago" says Nedim pretending to be funny. We laugh at ourselves. Arching over the plaza profusely decorated with Croatian flags, a flock of pigeons returns to their places in the cornices of the buildings. A large banner hanging from a yellow building announces the presentation of opera singer José Carreras in the National Theater. The panpipes music of the Bolivian group "Surazo," starting their show a few meters from us, brings my heart closer to home. It is time to say goodbye. I saw Nedim and Daniel crossing the plaza towards the parking lot. My trip to Bosnia is over. I am on my own.

I spent the rest of that day and the next morning touring the city. In the tourist center at Tgr Jelacica I find out that most of the museums dedicated to Croatia's contemporary history are closed. References to Croatian nationhood and its links with Western Europe dominate Zagreb's historical center. Prominently, the statues of Josip Jelacic, the Ban of Croatia -who in mid-eighteenth century argued for the creation of an Illyrian state within the Habsburg Empire that would include inner Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia and the Serb districts of south Hungary- and King Tomislav -the head of the first Croatian kingdom after gaining freedom from Byzantine rule by the beginning of the tenth century. In the Museum Miamara I see an exhibition aimed at proving that Marco Polo was not Venetian but Croatian. Certainly, as Tina Rosenberg has written, "the struggle to define the past is one of the most important ways Eastern Europeans compete for control of the present." The very distant past in this case.

The cathedral of Zagreb -the largest Roman Catholic edifice in the Balkans- is the indisputable emblem of the Croat identity. "Since Croats are ethnically indistinguishable from Serbs -writes Robert Kaplan- their identity rests on their Roman Catholicism." Theirs is an embattled legacy, as evidenced by the contrasting figures of Bishop Strossmayer and Bishop Stepinac, a legacy seen with suspicion and fear by others in the Southern Balkans. A South Slav nationalist, Strossmayer believed in uniting Catholics and Orthodoxs against the Austrians and the Vatican. A Croat nationalist, Stepinac embraced the Vatican and the Austrians against his fellow South Slavs. A hero of Croatian Catholics, Bishop Stepinac was tried and sentenced in the 1950s because of his support to the genocidal policies of the pro-fascist Independent State of Croatia during 1941-45. Half a century later, the rise of a new independent Croatia would be seen by many -the Serb especially- as a frightening revival of the infamous Ustasha regime of Ante Pavelic.

Another episode of what Eric Hobsbawn has called the "age of catastrophe." An age whose stamp is still visible in people like Gianni, a sweet man in his mid-eighties that I meet in the airport of Zagreb as I queue before the desk of Austrian Airlines to check in for my connecting flight to Vienna. Making efforts to hold back his anguish he approaches to me asking if I speak English. He appears relieved to learn that I am flying to New York too and that I am willing to help him with his paper work. Only in Vienna, after boarding our trans-Atlantic flight does he manage to relax and tell me his story.

"I was born in a small island near Trieste -he says- I spoke Italian and I always felt Italian. After the war, however, my town was occupied by Tito. We fought and we lost. I fled to America and I never returned. I did not want to see my island transformed into a foreign land. For several years, my children tried to convince me to come. I finally accepted. I was supposed to fly to Switzerland and then to New York but they changed my connections and I ended up in Zagreb. It makes me very nervous to be in Yugoslavia, I was very confused when I met you."

"It is okay. I understand your feelings" I said, trying to make him to feel more comfortable. "No you don't," replies Gianni gently tapping my arm, "I have seen these people doing terrible things. Things that I will never forget. You are too young, you are not from here, you would never understand." As we leave Europe behind I tried to capture the last meaning of this journey -this final opportunity to see the world from this particular angle, to grasp why for Gianni as for so many others, for so many years, this one has been the most secure route to that something that many call freedom.