18
Defensive Responses to Inhumanity in Bosnia-Hercegovina
Robert E Kibler
In “The Tenth Circle of Hell, Rezak Hukanovic’s novel based on his experience in the death camps of Bosnia, his protagonist Djemo narrates a scene wherein he and other Croats and Muslims captured by Bosnian Serb paramilitary troops were being conveyed by trucks to a concentration camp. For no good reason, the soldiers stopped the truck somewhere in the countryside and summarily beat and executed some of the captured. The soldiers made them strip naked first, and the one old bearded man who had refused to do so was assaulted, and in the process of stripping him of his clothing, soldiers cut off the man’s sexual organs and part of his buttocks, and then still made him stand. Later, the man was doused with gasoline, burned, then dumped in a garbage container.
Such crimes were to become common in the Balkan wars, and have been chronicled by national and international observers to a great degree--but when Djemo sees what happens to this man and the others for the first time, he, like all of the captured, was stunned. As Hukanovic writes through the consciousness of Djemo:
One of the soldiers mumbled something and ordered the driver to shut the door and drive on. Through the window Djemo could see the wide expanse of the plain at the foot of the Kozara Mountains, just where the turf of tilled soil reached its highest elevation. Fertile, ploughed land, sown with wheat, extending as far as the eye could see. “Who will harvest it”? wondered Djemo. Abandoned cattle, cows, horses, sheep, and newborn lambs grazed in the fields. They wandered around scorched houses as long spits of flame and pillars of smoke soared high above them. In front of the [burning] houses, fresh linen still hung on the lines stretched across the courtyards. No one had expected such evil [he thought].[i]
Perhaps no one ever does, and yet the world has experienced it time and again. How do we stand it? Why does it continue to happen? Big questions.
In Hukanovic’s narrative, Djemo illustrates one type of defensive response to what playwright Tennessee Williams calls “man’s inhumanity to man.”[ii] He cognitively or emotionally shifts away from the horrific experience he witnesses to a more remote and presumably less frightening vantage point. That is to say, he sees the fields, the houses, the linen, and wonders objectively about what will become of the larger world rather than about what is happening to an old man right in front of him, or for that matter, about what is happening to him.
I think the character of Djemo illustrates a particularly important response to inhumanity because it tells us something concerning our core being, about our way of dealing with the human drama experienced in extremis. Last summer I traveled to the war zones of the former Yugoslavia on a research grant, and the part of my study that I will share with you tonight concerns two defensive responses to inhumanity involving humor and what may be termed mutedness, or silence. Both are related, I think, to the response evoked by Hukanovic’s character Djemo. But first we should perhaps know a little about the history of the Balkans, Yugoslavia, and more particularly, a little something about the history of Bosnia-Hercegovina, where I spent much of my time.
The region known today as the Balkans roughly stretches from the southern reaches of Austria and Hungary in Central and Eastern Europe down to Greece on the Meditteranean, and constitutes what are now the regions or republics of Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Bosnia-Hercegovina. To its east, beyond Romania and Bulgaria, are the steppes of the Russian Ukraine. To its West, the Adriatic Sea, at the far side of which lies the great city of Venice and the shores of Italy. To the south are Albania and Greece and more importantly, Turkey and its capital city, Istanbul—seat for centuries of the great Ottoman Empire.
At one time or another, virtually all of its greater neighbors have run slipshod over the Balkan region, wrecking havoc on a land rich in variety and resources, while leaving a cultural imprint on the fiercely independent people living there. The Romans came and conquered early on, and the largest complete arena built for gladiatorial combat still stands in the city of Pula, Istria. Beginning in roughly the 9th century, European missionaries from the north brought Catholicism, and at the same time, traders from Istanbul in the south brought Islam. On June 28, 1414, the Islamic Turks, operating under orders from Istanbul, invaded the Balkans and claimed it as part of the Ottoman empire.[iii] Yet just a little over a century later, after the merger of Austria, Hungary, and Croatia in defense against the Ottomans, the newly formed and very Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire began to put political and military pressure on the region from the north.[iv]
By the 16th century, an official from the Viennese court traveling in the Balkans reported that there were three distinct peoples living in the region: The Turks, who ruled the land with great tyranny; the Christians of the Catholic faith, who looked to Europe and the Austro-Hungarian Empire for protection, and the Serbs—sheperd-folk living around Belgrade, who had formed an alliance with the Eastern Orthodox church, and so saw the Christian patriarch of Istanbul (then Constantinople) as their spiritual leader, rather than the pope in Rome.[v] For centuries the Ottoman Turks kept a heavy and violent hand on the region, and while rarely persecuting the Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, gave preference in all ways to Muslims.[vi] This created both massive conversions of Christians to Islam,[vii] on the one hand, and on the other, a fiercely antagonistic and resentful population of ardent Catholics and Orthodox Christians who refused to abandon their faith.
But the Ottoman Empire lost strength in the 19th century, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire gained it, finally annexing the territory of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1908[viii] and thus adding many individuals of the Islamic faith to the list of resentful ones living in the region. So the Balkans has for centuries been a land of conflict, and unto this day, those living in the region have come to expect that violence and warfare will visit every 50 years, thus affecting each generation in some fashion.[ix] Their history has lived up to their expectations, especially in areas such as Bosnia-Hercegovina, with its mixed multi-cultural (Catholic, Serb, Turk) cities such as Mostar and the capital city, Sarajevo.[x]
Bosnia-Hercegovina has always existed as an autonomous region, and never as a sovereign state. For centuries, it served as part of the buffer zone separating the rising Austro-Hungarian Empire and the collapsing Ottomans. For those loyal to the Austro-Hungarians, service on the military frontier of Bosnia-Hercegovina[xi] constituted hard duty, and was rewarded with fast-track promotions. As the centuries passed, most people in the military frontier region of Bosnia and Hercegovina went about the business of living quietly with their neighbors of differing faith, but every so often, something happened that made one or more groups seek dominance—even in little ways. These unexpected and sometimes tumultuous events illustrate the fragility of whatever peace comes to the region, and in ways great and small, continue unto this day. For example, competition between the cultural groups and their corresponding faiths is evident in their distinct calls to worship. Muslims, for example, are called to prayer five times a day by a muezzin, who typically climbs a tower (minaret) and calls the faithful to prayer. The Catholic and Orthodox Christian bells ring to do the same thing. Yet since all religious groups call their faithful on the hour, to get the edge, in several towns and cities in Bosnia-Hercegovina, each group tries to start its call earlier than the rest, so eventually the muezzin and the Christian bells are calling out to the faithful as early as 4:30 for 5:00 prayer. This kind of competition seems funny enough from a distance, but recent events have shown it to be otherwise.[xii]
In June of 1991, the former Yugoslavia, held together by the communist strongman Tito until his death in 1980, disintegrated.[xiii] For a variety of reasons, Serbians controlled much of the Federal Yugoslav army,[xiv] and they used that army against Slovenia and Croatia as soon as those two regions announced their independence in June of 1991. Slovenia defended itself well, so the Serbian-run Yugoslav army abandoned military operations after ten days, and turned towards Croatia. In December 1991, the small Serbian population living in the Krajina region of Croatia rebelled, and Serbia sent both paramilitary units and Federal troops into Croatia to protect the interests of the rebelling Croatian Serbs.[xv] Likewise, Serbs living in Bosnia-Hercegovina declared that they wanted a new Serbian republic, separate from the rest of Bosnia-Hercegovina,[xvi] while at the same time, the government of Bosnia-Hercegovina held a referendum to decide whether it too, like Slovenia and Croatia, should declare independence from a Yugoslavia that only the Serbs and their Federal army were trying to keep unified.[xvii]
When the Bosnian referendum was put to a vote on March 3 of 1992 in Sarajevo, the Croat and Muslim citizenry chose independence from a Serbian-controlled former Yugoslavia, and as a result, Bosnian Serbs immediately set up blockades in the streets in order to separate their part of the city from that generally controlled by the others.[xviii] Again, Serbian paramilitary units, supported by the Federal Yugoslav Army under Serbian control, invaded Bosnia-Hercegovina to both protect the Bosnian-Serbs and to continue the long-term nationalist goal of creating a “Greater Serbia.”[xix] War broke out in Sarajevo on April 6, 1992, and the city—which is enclosed in hills where predominately Bosnian-Serbs lived,[xx] was surrounded by Serbian paramilitary and Federal Yugoslav troops who took all of the high ground and started shelling the Croat and Muslim sections of the city below.[xxi]
Between 1992 and 1995, paramilitary and Federal Yugoslav troops sent millions of artillery and mortar shells into Sarajevo, and let snipers perched in the windows of suburban homes set on the hillsides fire at will upon the trapped population. For better than four years, Sarajevo was blockaded, and the city population was forced to live as rats in a cage, without transportation, electricity, or running water. Of necessity, they had risk going into open areas where snipers had clear shots at them, jumping into little holes for cover as they made their way to markets, where food sporadically appeared, and to open wells, where they had to wait in lines for water. Thousands died trapped in the city. Tens of thousands were wounded, leaving the entire much of the city population deeply traumatized.
Even seven years after the formal end of hostilities, suicide rates have kept climbing in Sarajevo. As Dr. Ceric, a psychologist at Sarajevo Hospital noted, “it is hard to explain what happened to the people’s minds during this trauma when there was no real or emotional protection for an exceptionally long period of time.”[xxii] So they sit and smoke and drink, unable to do much more. Even the next generation will be affected, because the children of Sarajevo grew up in dark basements during the war, and emerged not knowing the difference between bananas and apples—neither of which they had ever seen.[xxiii]
Around the rest of Bosnia-Hercegovina the Serbs engaged in the most appalling of practices—mass deportations of Muslims and Croats, round-ups and imprisonments, torture, massacre, rape, and vast destruction.[xxiv] For efficiency, they used psychological warfare—what the head of the Serbian army, General Ratko Mladix referred to as “mind bending.”[xxv] This involved spectacularly torturing and killing a few people in this or that village in order to create a climate of fear that would make the others depart. Then the ethnically “cleansed” areas could be plundered and repopulated with Serbs.
Many villages were completely destroyed, or effectively pummeled back into the middle ages. In cities such as Mostar, however, the Muslims and Croats banded together to fight the Serbs, and did indeed force the heavily armed Serb paramilitary units and Federal troops to retreat. But then in 1993, the Serbs temporarily defeated, the Muslims and Croats turned on each other in a bid for more territory within their own city. Fighting took place block-by block, house-to-house, killing and maiming thousands,[xxvi] [xxvii] and leaving blood on nearly everyone’s hands, and interminable sorrow in nearly everyone’s hearts.[xxviii] The civil wars in the region formally came to an end in 1994, and Serb paramilitary units and Federal Army troops would fight on for another year, until 60,000 United Nations Protection Forces and NATO Peacekeeping Forces were deployed to the region to keep the extremely uneasy peace.[xxix] Historically, this is how the Balkan world stands today—psychologically damaged, pathologically armed, obsessively guarded, and as some say, silently waiting for the peacekeepers to leave. Such is the world of outrage from which human beings such as Hukanovic’s Djemo sought escape. Djemo sought philosophical abstraction. Others used humor.
While in Sarajevo, I met with Ivanovic Zeljko, poet, novelist, and member of the shadow government in Sarajevo during the siege. We had breakfast together early in the morning. I ordered coffee and croissants, and he ordered whiskey—a common breakfast in Sarajevo.[xxx] “It is a dark humor we developed during the siege,” he said, “but it somehow helped keep us alive. He recalled an entire series of jokes involving two men—regular joke characters. Let’s call them Oskar and Felix. Anyway, there was always a 10 pm curfew in Sarajevo during the siege years, and in one joke, Oskar and Felix are guards on the street. It is 9:45 pm. A man walks by the guards and raises his hand to say hello to Oskar. Oskar raises his weapon and shoots the man dead. Felix, puzzled, asks Oskar, “why did you shoot that man. It is only 9:45?” Oskar noted that the man was his neighbor, so he knew where the man lived. “There was no way he could get home in 15 minutes,” Zeljko said, laughing perversely. And as the poet Izet Sarajilic noted, with the same perversity of spirit: