Forgotten Wars: A Journey Through the Remains of Yugoslavia
The plaque reads: From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian thrown Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.
When I first told people that I was going to Belgrade, I expected the most common response to be, “Why?”
Why are you going to a country we fought a war with less than five years ago? Why do you want to see a city your country’s Air Force bombed while you were in high school? Why do you so desperately want to see hollowed-out buildings and the ruins of a Chinese embassy that was “accidentally” destroyed? Why on earth are you going to Belgrade?
I was over-generous in my expectations.
The most common question was, “Belgrade. Where is that again?”
We have forgotten another war. A decade of genocidal conflict has disappeared from American memory. While all eyes are focused on Iraq, we have forgotten another war from just five years ago. We have forgotten Yugoslavia.
Throughout the 1990s, war raged between the ethnic groups of the Balkans, drawing the United Nations, NATO, and eventually the United States and post-Soviet Russia, into peacekeeping operations.
As communism crumbled across Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia began to splinter. Croatia and Slovenia were first to break away, followed by Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia. The Federal Yugoslav government, led by Slobodan Milosevic, resisted each declaration of independence, and soldiers clashed with paramilitary groups and guerrillas for years until the international community stepped in to stop the bloodshed.
In 1995, the warring factions signed the Dayton Accords, which ended fighting in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina and established a post-conflict plan for peace.
This is a place that should never have left the American consciousness. There is too much that is still in flux, and much that could be learned here that is applicable to other conflicts, especially Iraq and Afghanistan.
After more than ten years of international involvement, the region is just beginning to rejoin the world community.
Much of the responsibility for overseeing the rebuilding in the Balkans has fallen to international diplomats like Paddy Ashdown, the UN High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Ashdown has been at this post since 2000. His job is to ensure the implementation of the Dayton Accords and maintain peace between Croats, Serbs, and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks).
Despite good intentions, Ashdown looks to some like just another British colonial, running somebody else’s country to his own liking. The High Representative himself might not disagree, although he asserts the necessity of his role.
He once said there is such a thing as too much democracy. “When wars end, the West believes that what these countries need first and foremost is immediate and abundant elections: just wave the magic wand of democracy and set the people free to elect their own, and all will be well,” he said. “What we should have done was put law and order first. Once that is in place you have the foundations for real democracy.”
The latest elections on Dec. 28 show cause for renewed concern. Serbia’s Radical Party placed first with 27.7 percent of the vote, taking 82 of 250 parliament seats. War crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj heads the Party from his cell in The Hague. Milosevic’s Socialist Party will take 22 seats, but cannot assign one to the former Yugoslav leader while he is in jail.
Both the Radical and Socialist parties are hard-line nationalists, advocating a “Greater Serbia” that would encompass land held by Serbs in neighboring republics. This ideology is blamed for inciting the wars that tore the region apart in the 1990s.
Arriving in Sarajevo, I could see why Ashdown might fear relinquishing authority to locals. This city was a major battleground. Now, a UN building stands ominously at its center.
The scars of war are still easily visible throughout the city. There were so many spent shell casings lying around that locals have turned them into souvenirs. Small AK-47 sized rounds make pens and desk ornaments. Larger artillery shell casings are sold as vases and flowerpots.
Sarajevo sits in a cup of low, green mountains with houses running up the slopes. Between each clump of dwellings lies a yard of polished white gravestones.
This is the city where the First World War started. A plaque marks the spot where Gavrilo Princip assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand, and sent Europe tumbling into the most destructive conflict it had yet known.
There used to be footprints engraved in the sidewalk, but they were torn out during the 1995 war because Princip was a Bosnian Serb.
Looking down the main street along the brown river in the Turkish quarter, I could almost see the horse and carriage, bearing the archduke like it was June 1914. It took little imagination to see Princip crouching on that street corner, waiting. There is a haunting feeling in that spot, like the ghosts of old nationalists are chained there for eternity.
The United States and NATO are currently looking to pare down their involvement in the region.
In a December 2002 news release from the Council on Foreign Relations, the think tank warned that without a continued commitment to peace in the region, the Balkans could become a breeding ground for terrorism, organized crime, and instability for all of Southeastern Europe.
In October, with American and European attention largely focused on the Middle East, two diplomats rushed to former Yugoslavia to plead to the world powers not to abandon the Balkans.
Former American Ambassador to the UN Richard C. Holbrooke and French Statesman Bernard Kouchner worked for peace in this area for more than a decade. Kouchner was the UN’s administrator for Kosovo, the disputed Serbian province populated mostly by Albanians.
In Kosovo, NATO forces directly confronted Yugoslavia and Milosevic. For three months in 1999, Allied forces waged a brutal air war to drive Serbian troops from the province and stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovar Albanians.
Holbrooke told the Kosovo legislative assembly, “Our troop numbers in Bosnia and Kosovo are relatively small, but their symbolic importance is great.”
He added, “Withdrawal would put the policies we embarked on four years ago at risk and send the wrong message to Afghanistan and Iraq: that Americans, impatient as always, do not finish the job.”
Tamara Milosavljevió, a Sarajevo-born nurse from Belgrade, shares the diplomats’ concerns. “Now people realize what happened here after the passions have fallen, but everyone worries about what happens when the UN leaves,” she said.
Things remain unsettled, and progress is offset by ongoing tragedies. On March 12, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was assassinated. Milosavljevió, sitting next to me in the cramped seats of an overnight bus between Belgrade and Sarajevo, recounted the mood in the country after the murder.
“Djindjic was influenced more by the Germans than the U.S., but he was the best solution. Half the people liked him; half were skeptical,” she said. “He was something special.”
Leaving Sarajevo for Dubrovnik, on the southern tip of Croatia, the bus ride goes through some of the most breath-taking and pristine areas in the region, traveling along the Neretva River and through canyons and mountain passes.
Then we came to Mostar. The city is a testament to what happens in war. Startled birds flew from their new nests in hollowed buildings as we passed. New graves lined the road on either side.
It is a side of war that few Americans ever see. It is never shown on CNN. To witness the after-effects of war, seeing the ruined cities and bullet-riddled sign from the 1984 Winter Olympics stirs something in the soul, crying out against every false promise of justifiable violence.
Europe is a continent full of gravestones and cemeteries. Most are crumbling, centuries-old relics of generations stretching back into time immemorial. The fresh-cut marble and granite monuments lining the roads and dotting the hills of Bosnia-Herzegovina are a reminder that war is not relegated to history, but the choice of every generation.
It is something we should never forget.
Tags: the balkans, travel