A Fortunate Life (59 page)

Bosnia, with a population of some 3.5 million, is also divided into three ethnically. The largest group (about 45%) are the Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks as they are called today. Then come the Bosnian Serbs (about 35%) and finally, the Bosnian Croats (about 17% and dropping). There are also a wide range of smaller groups, such as the
Jews
*
and the Roma people (gypsies). Almost every community in Bosnia is multi-ethnic to a greater or lesser extent, with minorities living in almost every town. Generally speaking, though, the Serbs are a majority in the north, the Bosniaks are a majority in the middle, and the Croats are a majority in the south.

I have often been struck by the similarities between those countries whose fortune (or misfortune) it is to find themselves at the junction of the tectonic plates of race, culture and religion. Countries like Switzerland, Afghanistan and Bosnia are all of them mountainous regions, incredibly beautiful, the battlegrounds of conquerors and the cockpits in which, from time to time, terrible inter-ethnic conflicts break out (before the Treaty of Ticino in 1516 the famously peaceful Switzerland of today was the Bosnia of the middle ages when it came to internal war and ethnic conflict).

Bosnia sits four-square on just such a fault line. It was no accident that the Roman Emperor Diocletian divided the Eastern from the Western Roman Empires along the line of the Drina River, which now marks Bosnia’s eastern border with Serbia. Two thousand years later history has made this region an even more complex meeting point of cultural, religious and ethnic differences. Today Bosnia marks the south-western frontier of the Slav people (Yugoslavia literally meant ‘the country of the South Slavs’), the easternmost outpost of Orthodox Christianity (most Serbs are Orthodox), the furthest north-western foothold of the Turkish empire and the religion of Islam (the religion of most Bosniaks), and the eastern boundary of the rule of Roman Catholicism (most Croats are Catholic). In Bosnia, east meets west, face to face and over the garden fence.

Nowhere is this better seen than in Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, sometimes referred to as the westernmost city of the East and the easternmost city of the West. Lying in a great bowl dominated by the snow-capped peaks that surround it, Sarajevo has a setting which, along with those of Hong Kong and San Francisco, is one of the most spectacular and beautiful in the world. It is, essentially, a garden city, with each house in the old
mahalas
(neighbourhoods) sitting in its own garden or courtyard. It used to be called ‘the Geneva of the East’ for its famous spirit of tolerance, which, along with its buildings was damaged but not obliterated by the siege. It was here that the adherents of the Albigensian heresy came,
fleeing the Inquisition in the thirteenth century.
*
They are believed by some to have been the carvers of the strange and beautiful ‘bogomil’ tombstones that can still be found even in the remotest places and on the highest of Bosnia’s mountains. And after them, came the Jews, driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella
†
in 1492. They finally found refuge here, after being persecuted all across Europe, and their ancient language, Ladino, is still spoken by the older members of Sarajevo’s now fast-diminishing Jewish population. When the Jews came to Sarajevo, they brought with them their most precious sacred text, known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, now the city’s most prized possession, carefully hidden from the Germans during the Second World War and securely protected from Serb bombardment during the 1990s siege.

Sarajevo was famous the world over for its jumble of religions and cultures. From our house I could count the minarets of seventy-three mosques. Sarajevo mosques are, in the main, not great, ostentatious affairs but little and ancient and beautiful, each fitting into its community as comfortably as an English church sits in the heart of its parish. Below our house, a stone’s throw from the great Bey’s mosque built in the 1530s, stands the Catholic cathedral, its straight, strong bell-tower pointing with confident affirmation towards its God. And a hundred metres away the Serbian Orthodox cathedral stands, distinguished by its onion domes and characteristic architecture. Here is how Bosnia’s greatest writer, Ivo Andrić, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize for literature, captured the sounds of Sarajevo which I could hear lying in my bed every night:

George Bernard Shaw, writing with terrible accuracy about his people (and mine) once said, ‘If you put two Irishmen in a room, you will always be able to persuade one to roast the other on a spit.’ There is much of this quality about the people of the Balkans, too. This is the dark undercurrent that lies unseen, but deeply sensed, beneath the seemingly placid surface of life. And it is capable of re-emerging in evil times with terrifying rapidity. This darkness of spirit may be unspoken in ordinary conversation, but it is there, clear enough, in the black humour and the everyday aphorisms which are common across all the ethnic communities of the Balkans. The most famous of these is, ‘
Da
Komšija crkne krava
’ – ‘May my neighbour’s cow die.’ Another illustrates something of the same sentiment with a little more humour and a lot more vulgarity; ‘
Lako je tudjim kurcem gloginje mlatiti
’ – ‘It’s easy to beat thorn bushes with other people’s pricks.’

The problem, I think, lies in the question of identity, which is all the more important because all three peoples come from the same root, speak the same language and look identical. The Croats can’t really decide whether they are part of the Germanic races to the north, as they would like, or of the brotherhood of Slavs to the east, as they fear. The Serbs know who they are so well that they are prepared to do terrible things to those who aren’t them, and terribly brave things against the whole of the rest of the world, when someone convinces them that is necessary for national preservation. The Bosniak Muslims, meanwhile, have yet to find their true identity. They did not exist as a recognised group during most of the Tito years. Their identity was forged in the crucible of the recent 1992–5 war, whose aim was their extinction and during which they were abandoned by the rest of the world. They are gifted, artistic and hospitable to a fault. But their most powerful identity remains that of
victims. Constantly alert and often suspicious, they are fearful of the future, always worrying that it will repeat the past again, especially since 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and the ‘war on Islamic terror’.

Actually, it is this very fact which ought to lead Europe and the West to value Bosnia’s Muslims as a powerful bridge in the dialogue of the deaf currently under way between ancient Christendom and newly militant Islam. For Bosniak Muslims are not the new Islam in Europe, which we have suddenly and frighteningly found planted in our inner cities. They are ancient European Islam, which is four hundred years old. Alija Izetbegović used to say that he was a Muslim and a European and could see no contradiction between the two. Walk down Sarajevo’s main street, the Ferhadija, during the
corso
*
and you will see the same for yourself. For Muslim though most will be, there is here as much fashionable finery, as much exposed flesh and as many short skirts as can be observed in any self-respecting European capital of a fine summer’s evening.

Or drive up a Bosniak valley on a still day in late October and note the thin columns of smoke rising through the clear blue air to a God who frowns on alcohol. At the foot of each you will invariably find one of the communal village stills which provides each Muslim family with the ten litres or so of fierce plum brandy (
š
livović
) without which none of them would dream of entering the long nights and deep snows of the winter months.

Bosniak Muslims wear their religion very lightly. Which is lucky for Europe, for, even though we abandoned them in the recent war of extermination, they remained resolutely unradicalised. And they resolutely remain so still, despite continued, determined and expensive attempts by Wahabi extremists to make them into militant Islam’s European fifth column.

Bosnia’s history, just like everything else, has been sharply and often bloodily divided, too. It is an old country, which sent knights to the crusades and until the thirteenth century had its own kings, who despatched embassies to most of the courts of Europe. Then in 1463 came the Turks. They ruled for four hundred years. Contrary to popular perception, though, Muslims had special privileges under the Turks, there were very few pogroms against other religions, which were, in the main, tolerated. As the Turkish empire sickened and then died in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, the Austrians moved in and brought good government, splendid railways, impressive new state institutions and buildings to match. I remember an old man, curious about what being a member of the European Community would bring, once asking me, ‘My grandfather used to tell me that when the Austrians ruled us, if you paid too much tax, they actually gave you some back! Will joining Europe be like that? If it is, then the sooner we get there the better!’

But Austrian rule had only been in place some forty years when a young Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated their Archduke, on a street corner in Sarajevo (a plaque still marks the spot where the fatal shot was fired and set the world alight). After the First World War the ‘wise men’ who divided up the world could not work out what to do with three untidy spaces left over when the bartering was finally complete. So they drew lines round them and called them countries: Czechoslovakia, Iraq and Yugoslavia. After that it was just a question of bundling Bosnia and Herzegovina into the last of these, along with its inconvenient neighbours who didn’t have a king powerful enough, or major state interested enough, to stand up for them. In World War Two, Tito used the mountains of Bosnia as the centre of his great guerrilla campaign against the Germans, aided by the British SOE, afterwards reuniting Yugoslavia under his special form of communism. Only his
cvrsta ruka
(strong fist) could hold the country together, however, and in the aftermath of his death came the terrible years of Milošević and Tudjman. After them came the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, the engagement of the international community, and the time of the High Representatives, of which I was the fourth.

So what exactly was this job – with its title out of Gilbert and Sullivan and powers that ought to have made a Liberal blush – which I suddenly found myself doing in this deeply complex country about which I knew so frighteningly little?

The task of the international High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina is to look after the implementation of the civilian aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreement – in other words to build on the peace that Dayton created. In effect, this meant that my job could be as broad as I wished to make it, ranging from education, to human rights, to the conduct of government, to the operation of the economy, to the restructuring of the transport system, to the reconstruction of houses,
to the reform of the media, etc., etc. In this job, I could interfere in anything and get swallowed up in everything if I wanted to.

And to help me interfere in everything if I wanted to, I had a staff in the Office of the High Representative (OHR) of approximately 800 and a budget of some €36 million. And to make interfering in other people’s business even more fun, I had an array of formidable powers called ‘the Bonn Powers’, under which I could impose laws, subject only to their eventual endorsement by the domestic parliaments, and remove officials and politicians who were blocking or undermining the implementation of the Dayton agreement.

At first sight, this sounds altogether too tempting, especially for someone who would really like to have been Prime Minister. But I soon discovered that it was, on the contrary, extremely frightening to have so much power in a country about which I knew so little. I soon realised, too, that any law I passed, or any decision I took to remove an official rested, as the law in any ordinary country does, on public consent. My first conclusion, therefore, was that I could only do this job successfully if I saw myself as the servant of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and that, if I ever lost their support for what I did, then my job would be finished overnight – and me with it.