The Wolf of Sarajevo (32 page)

Who was Sarah to decide what was right?

Who was Eric?

Who was anyone?

POTOČARI

DECEMBER 22

T
he first snowfall of winter had blanketed the memorial, softening the sharp lines of the steles. Against the stark white snow, the marble grave markers were a dull gray. The bare trees encircling the memorial hung heavy with snow that seemed to absorb and muffle all sound. The memorial was eerily quiet. It was as if the whole world had stopped. A moment of silence in respect for the dead. It was cold enough that their breath condensed into ephemeral clouds that lasted no longer than a heartbeat. They were the only visitors. Even the caretaker had seemingly chosen to stay in bed on such a cold morning. But he was an old man, and Eric did not hold that choice against him.

He bowed his head and blinked back frozen tears. Meho would not have approved of any maudlin display of sentiment. He would have skewered it mercilessly. Meho would have preferred a joke
and a laugh. Had he been there, he would have been more than happy to supply the humor. At the very least, he would have wanted those coming together in his memory to take not just comfort but pleasure from the company of friends.

And Eric was flanked by friends. Amra was on his left and Annika was standing by his right side. They helped to steady him—literally as well as emotionally. The leg that had taken the bullet was still weak. It was growing stronger through intense and painful physical therapy sessions, but it would be some time before it was really healed. And it might never be as strong as it had been.

“Maybe it's an illusion,” Eric said. “Maybe Sarah had it right after all. But coming here makes me feel as though I did the right thing giving the tape to the tribunal. Meho was a part of that decision, I have to be honest. But it's bigger than that. The thousands murdered here deserve justice.”

“You did the right thing, Eric,” Annika said, putting a hand on his upper arm. “Left to its own devices, your government probably would have handed the tape over to the tribunal . . . eventually. But it could have taken weeks, even months, before the Washington machinery reached that conclusion. By forcing their hand, you helped secure the early indictment against Dimitrović that got him out of Banja Luka into a cozy holding cell in The Hague. With your friend Nikola running the show in the RS, at least temporarily, the New Compact for Bosnia has a fighting chance.”

“You mean the Sondergaard Plan?”

“I'm Danish, Eric. Modesty prevents me from calling it that.”

Things can change quickly in politics. The peace plan that had once been a long shot was now established policy, and as was so often the case, it seemed inevitable in hindsight. Eric and Annika
both knew that it had been anything but. The peace conference itself had gone well, but overcoming Dimitrović's opposition in Banja Luka had always been the most uncertain part of the process. With Mali's death and Dimitrović's arrest, the RS political establishment had been turned upside down. Dimitrović's party had fragmented into a dozen squabbling factions. Snap elections had produced a stunning victory for Nikola and the Social Democrats, who were aggressively pursuing a new pro-reconciliation agenda. The checkpoints at the border of the RS had come down and the paramilitaries had slunk back into their holes. The leaders of the three major ethnic groups were building real Bosnian institutions and the economy was at long last starting to grow. The voices of the majority in all three communities, hungry for peace and opportunity and disinterested in the old fights, were being heard. There was still a great deal of work to do, but it was a start.

“It may have been the right decision,” Eric said, “but Washington doesn't like to get sandbagged that way. It will probably cost me my job. Wylie has been blasting me at every opportunity. Do you know anyone who's hiring?”

“Funny you should ask. I had a nice chat with Hank the other day.” Hank was Henry Pembroke, secretary of state of the United States of America. Waspy. Patrician. Aloof. Independently wealthy. His great-great-grandfather had been secretary of state to President James Buchanan. It was hard for Eric to think of him as Hank.

“He mostly wanted to talk Iran, but he knows how much I've invested in shaping a post-Dayton Bosnia, so we talked a little Balkans as well. I told him that U.S.-EU cooperation had been the key to success so far and that we should continue that. The long and short of it is that Hank agreed to second you to my staff for at least
a year. Bosnia can't be my full-time job. The world's too big. But I need a strong representative on the ground here to bang heads together and make sure this thing works. I'd like that to be you, Eric. What do you think?”

“He'll do it,” Amra interjected, as she squeezed his hand.

“I rather thought so,” Annika said, with evident satisfaction.

“Don't I get a vote?” Eric asked.

“If you insist,” the High Rep replied graciously. “Although it is only fair to point out that even if you say no the vote would still be two-to-one against you. Nothing to be done about it. That's democracy.”

“Then I might as well say yes.”

“Good. It's agreed. You should have pretty decent job security. After all, your boss owes you her life.”

“That
will
look pretty good in my evaluation.”

“Yes. Thank you, Eric. I know how much that cost you.”

“She was a stone-cold bitch,” Amra said angrily.

Eric said nothing. He understood Amra's anger, but he could not bring himself to see Sarah that way. She was more complicated than that. Sarah certainly did not belong in the same box as people like Kaspar and Dimitrović. They operated solely on the basis of self-interest. Sarah had a moral compass, her own understanding of right and wrong. But her magnetic north was not the same as Eric's.

“I'm glad that you're going to stay in Sarajevo,” Amra said. “And I am happy about the progress you've made. But I do wonder sometimes . . .” She stopped, seemingly at a loss for words.

“About what?” Eric asked gently.

“About whether any of this will last. Srebrenica was just the latest outrage in a cycle of violence and revenge that stretches back a
thousand years. Look around. Every village, every hill, every fort or monastery or mosque or bridge has a story to tell. And none of the stories are about unicorns or buttercups. The blood has soaked so deeply into the soil that I wonder whether this place can ever recover, whether we can ever really overcome our addiction to the past.”

Eric and Annika were quiet as they considered what she had said.

“There's a risk,” Annika conceded. “But we have to operate as though it isn't so. Eric is the one who persuaded me that history is not destiny. We have to believe that. The alternative is to build a wall around these countries and let the strongest prevail. Twenty-first-century Europe is not willing to accept that outcome. I'm not willing to accept that outcome. Neither are you. We can succeed here. The desire for peace will ultimately outweigh the desire for revenge.”

“I hope you're right,” Amra said. “Men like Mali and Dimitrović see only the worst in us. We can be better than that. We are better than that.”

“You certainly are,” Eric agreed. “Meho was. Nikola is. Even Dragan, in his own way. But there are still so many who are stuck in the past. It isn't going to be easy.”

“Then it's a good thing that you've got the job,” Annika said, with a finality that brooked no further argument.

“I do love a challenge.”

“Well,” Amra said, leaning into Eric and resting her head on his shoulder momentarily. “You've certainly come to the right place.”

We saw it coming. Analysts at the CIA and elsewhere in the U.S. government predicted the breakup of Yugoslavia. Nationalist sentiment, suppressed for more than forty years by Marshal Josip Broz Tito and the communists, was once again bubbling to the surface. Nationalist politicians rose to positions of power and influence, most notably Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Franjo Tuđman in Croatia. The pressures building within Yugoslav society were enormous, the fault lines increasingly visible.

What no one predicted, however, was just how violent the breakup would be. On June 25, 1991, Slovenia and Croatia became the first two Yugoslav republics to declare their independence. Slovenia made a clean break, winning recognition of its independence after a ten-day fight that resulted in fewer than seventy fatalities on all sides. Croatia's road to independence was considerably rockier. The sizeable
Serb minority in Croatia considered the new nationalists in power in Zagreb as a straight-line continuation of the fascist Ustaše, the Nazi puppet regime from World War II. The fighting in Croatia between Croat forces on one side and the Yugoslav National Army and Serbian paramilitaries on the other was vicious and protracted. The siege of Vukovar and the slaughter of several hundred people, mostly patients at a local hospital, presaged the horrors that were to follow in Bosnia.

Bosnia was divided among three major ethnic groups—Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, who would later come to be called Bosniaks. In Yugoslavia, Muslim was considered an ethnicity rather than a religion, and religious practice was officially discouraged by the powerful Communist Party. Bosnia was a classic Balkan powder keg just waiting for a spark. The independence referendum organized in February and March of 1992 was just that spark. The Serbs of Bosnia, who made up about a third of the population, opposed independence and boycotted the referendum. Fighting broke out within days of the declaration of Bosnia's independence, and within a month, the city of Sarajevo was under siege. The siege of Sarajevo would last 1,425 days, three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad.

The war in Bosnia dragged on for years, prolonged by Western dithering and ambivalence. All three groups fought one another until the Washington Agreement of March 1994 forged an alliance between the Bosniaks and Croats against the Serbs.

UN peacekeepers and international aid workers functioned, in effect, as de facto hostages, discouraging military action by NATO countries that might have brought an early end to the fighting. Europe and America hoped that economic sanctions alone would be
enough to force Belgrade to sue for peace. They were not. It was the massacre of some eight thousand Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995 that finally pricked the conscience of the West and set the stage for military intervention. Srebrenica had been designated a UN safe area, although it was protected by only a handful of ill-equipped Dutch peacekeepers who could do nothing to avert the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force a month later, ostensibly in response to an artillery attack on a Sarajevo market that killed some thirty-seven people, but really in response to the evil of Srebrenica. Three weeks of bombing and a series of battlefield reversals forced MiloÅ¡ević and the Serbs to accept an invitation to a peace conference in Dayton, Ohio. Sequestering the presidents of what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), Croatia, and Bosnia at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in dreary Dayton for three weeks proved to be a stroke of genius. The talks, led by the talented American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, produced the Dayton Peace Accords, an awkward power-sharing arrangement that preserved Republika Srpska as one of two “entities” in Bosnia and Herzegovina along with the Federation. The RS controlled 49 percent of Bosnia's territory as compared to the Federation's 51 percent. It was, by any reasonable definition, a very good deal for the Serbs.

The Dayton Peace Accords brought an end to the fighting in Bosnia. In this, they must be considered a success. The political structure it created, however, with decision making divided in the center among the three major ethnic groups and real power vested in the entities, was largely nonfunctional. Bosnia became a ward of the international community, dependent on a European High
Representative to make all of the hard choices. The economy stagnated. Those who could left the country for opportunities in the West. And Belgrade and Zagreb continued to manipulate their fellow ethnics in Bosnia in pursuit of their own ambitions.

To be fair, the negotiators recognized from the outset that Dayton was deeply flawed. The idea was that over time practical realities would force the three parties to the conflict together and that the parallel structures would gradually be integrated. The one big success was an agreement in 2005 to create a unified military. Beyond that, Bosnia remains as deeply divided as it was in 1995.

Predictably, some individuals on all sides have taken advantage of the awkward political arrangements to make themselves phenomenally wealthy, while most people—irrespective of ethnic origin—have struggled to get by. Public frustration with the situation boiled over in 2014 in violent demonstrations across the country. Demonstrators targeted government buildings, protesting unemployment, poverty, corruption, and nepotism.

Within a few weeks, however, the protests had run out of steam. The system remained unchanged. Periodically, political tensions in Bosnia threaten to reignite serious ethnic violence. So far, cooler heads have always prevailed, but the underlying dynamic of dysfunction and rampant corruption has kept Bosnia both poor and unstable.

Although the scars of conflict remain, there is no Captain Zero still at large. Those judged to have held command responsibility for crimes against humanity in Srebrenica have been brought to justice. But there are others. In March 2015, Serbian authorities arrested seven people on war crimes charges, including Nedeljko Milidragović, the commander of a special police brigade of Republika
Srpska's police force, who was known as Nedjo the Butcher. Milidragović had reinvented himself as a successful businessman in Serbia after the war. But there is no statute of limitations for genocide.

At the time of this writing, the U.S. immigration authorities are planning to deport one hundred and fifty Bosnians living in the United States who had concealed their involvement in acts of genocide. Some have been implicated in the Srebrenica massacre, including a soccer coach in Virginia and an Ohio metal worker. Authorities in Washington believe there could be hundreds more still at large.

Back in Bosnia, tens of thousands displaced in the war have been unable or reluctant to return to their homes. Mixed communities have become ethnically homogenous, and Bosnia's once-famous culture of tolerance has been deeply damaged, perhaps beyond repair. Closure remains elusive.

It is possible that Bosnia could once again slide into open conflict, but it is neither certain nor inevitable. The people of Bosnia, on all sides, deserve better. They deserve leaders who will act in the public's interest rather than in their own. They deserve a better future for themselves and their children. The wars in the former Yugoslavia once dominated the headlines as the fighting in Ukraine and Syria does today. It would be a mistake to turn away too quickly from the Balkans. The risk of conflict remains, and Bosnia will need help from the international community to escape the shadows of its recent past and chart a sustainable course forward to a European future. They can do it. But not without our help.

—

As always,
the opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of State.