Down with Big Brother (72 page)

There is compelling evidence that most of these developments were orchestrated from Belgrade. The SDS leader, Radovan Karadžić, was regarded as Milošević’s loyal ally and client at this point. Two months previously, Milošević had urged the JNA to take up positions along the Neretva River, in support of the Serbian population in Herzegovina. The purpose of this exercise was to provide military security for “all those territories where Serbs lived” until the final breakup of Yugoslavia. In September, army leaders had finally set about implementing his plan.
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T
HE DAY AFTER
the Montenegrin reservists were deployed around Mostar, I took a flight from Belgrade to Sarajevo. I was researching a series of articles about the metamorphosis of communism into nationalism: Yugoslavia seemed like a textbook study of the dangers facing the Soviet Union following the collapse of central authority. Although Western governments were doing their best to ignore the growing tensions in Bosnia, it was
already clear to anyone who followed developments in Yugoslavia that this would be the next great flash point.

The Muslim-led Bosnian government was desperate for international attention. Making as much noise as possible was its only real political weapon, given the fact that Serb nationalists already enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in firepower. Within hours of arriving in Sarajevo, I was invited to observe the work of a government commission investigating the events in Herzegovina. Soon I found myself in the back of a black Mercedes, driving through the gorges of the wild Neretva Valley, in search of the Montenegrin reservists. Sitting next to me was the head of the commission, Rusmir Mahmutcehajić, a deputy prime minister. As we drove past the scene of epic World War II battles between Tito’s Communist partisans and the Germans, he gave me his interpretation of the latest developments in the republic.

“This is the final stage in Milošević’s plan to create a Greater Serbia. It will be very difficult for us to avoid a war. There will be resistance—political, social, and even terrorist—from Bosnia. Milošević is like Hitler. The world must understand what will happen if he is not stopped. There will be genocide. He is a crazy man. How can we believe his assurances to us when the Albanians of Kosovo do not have any rights? He thinks we will be easy prey, but he is wrong.”
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Following behind us was a long line of BMWs, Opels, and Mercedes, the cars of choice for senior government officials. The composition of the commission was a case study in Bosnian coalition politics. Led by Mahmutcehajić, a Muslim, it included a Serb and a Croat. The Serb representative was a deputy police minister, nominated for the post by Karadžić’s SDS Party. Other than keeping an eye on everyone else, he appeared to have little interest in the work of the commission. His face wore a look of supercilious amusement. When I asked him what the commission was likely to achieve, he shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Nothing.” Each member of the commission was accompanied by his own personal bodyguards, who eyed one another suspiciously. The Muslim and Croatian bodyguards were decked out in shiny suits and dark glasses; the Serbs, in Rambo-style combat fatigues. All were heavily armed.

In between listening to news bulletins from the front, Mahmutcehajić speculated on Milošević’s reasons for sending the Montenegrin reservists into Herzegovina. Version one: to carve out a Serb-dominated region on the eastern bank of the Neretva. Version two: to occupy the mountainous hinterland above the medieval Adriatic city of Dubrovnik, cutting it off from
the rest of Croatia. Version three: to destabilize the sociopolitical situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in advance of any move by the Muslim-led government to declare independence. In view of subsequent events, all these explanations appear perfectly plausible.

As we drove on, we saw more armed men, representing a bewildering array of factions and paramilitary forces. Some saluted as we drove past. Others scowled. Finally the government motorcade pulled into a mixed Muslim and Croatian village. A crowd quickly gathered around us. “This is not a Yugoslav army; it is a Serbian army,” shouted one villager. “They are behaving like beasts; they are drunkards,” screamed another. “They were firing at us all night,” yelled a third. “Give us weapons. Nobody is safe any longer,” shouted a fourth.

“Weapons, weapons,” the villagers chanted together, looking as tough and as rugged as the mountains that rose around them.

As we toured more villages on the eastern bank of the Neretva, the cause of the commotion became clearer. A long line of trucks and tourist buses had arrived from Montenegro, disgorging some three thousand disheveled reservists. Part of this ragtag army was billeted at the Mostar military airfield, but others were camped out in the open. When they were not lobbing shells into Croatian and Muslim villages, the reservists spent most of their time scouring local bars for women and shooting their guns into the air. The arrival of the reservists had seriously strained intercommunal relations in the area. Muslims and Croats viewed the newcomers as a direct threat. Serbs saw them as a potential ally in a future battle, even though they were careful not to show their satisfaction in public.

After crisscrossing the Herzegovinian countryside, we eventually came across several dozen Montenegrins lounging outside Slobo’s bar in the tiny village of Potkosa. The tables were littered with empty beer bottles. The government ministers got out of their limousines. There was a clatter of safety catches being released and cartridge clips being jammed into position as the two armed groups faced each other across the remote mountain road.

“Hi, guys. Can I speak to whoever is in charge?” said the deputy prime minister, trying to be friendly.

There was no reply. The Montenegrins played with their automatic rifles. The deputy prime minister retreated.

The sun was dipping behind the starkly beautiful mountains when the motorcade moved off. Suddenly we heard the sound of shouting. Our police escort had practically run into a barricade blocking the road, half a mile up
the hill from Slobo’s bar. Excited-looking soldiers waving M-76 automatic sniper rifles and Kalashnikovs appeared out of the woods on one side of the road. A row of ruined houses on the other side blocked any escape route. Each of the twenty or so cars in the motorcade was covered by an armed soldier.

“Turn your engines off. Don’t move,” shouted the soldiers, aiming their weapons directly at us.

Our driver reached instinctively for his German-made pistol. But he quickly understood that the situation was hopeless. We had driven into an ambush. One shot, and there would have been a bloodbath. During the moments that followed, we were left to ponder the true balance of power in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ministers who were trapped in their Mercedes and BMWs could lay claim to the legitimacy of the ballot box, but it was the other side that possessed the guns. Furthermore, the government was itself bitterly divided over the future of the republic. The Serb members of the government commission shared the views and goals of the people who were threatening us with their guns. There was little doubt which side was better placed to win an eventual confrontation.

After about ten minutes the deputy prime minister was allowed to leave his car and approach the command post on foot. After another ten minutes of tense negotiations a JNA officer appeared and ordered us to return to Sarajevo. The gunmen disappeared back into the woods, as silently as they had emerged.

B
ACK IN
S
ARAJEVO
, the politicians were quarreling over the significance of the Montenegrin incursion and the prospects for avoiding all-out war. The Muslim politicians were desperate for foreign intervention. They were bombarding both the European Community and the United Nations with appeals for peacekeepers to be sent to Bosnia
before
rather than
after
real fighting broke out. Preoccupied with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the war between Croatia and Serbia, no Western capital showed any sign of listening to these appeals.

The clandestine arming of the Serb population had presented the Muslim-led government with a terrible dilemma. Militarily it would have been prudent for it to arm its own supporters, just as the Zagreb government had done prior to the outbreak of war in Croatia. Politically, however, such a step would have provoked a final rupture with the SDS and the collapse of the multiparty coalition. Rightly or wrongly, the Bosnian president, Alija
Izetbegović, believed that the best chance for preserving peace lay in being as conciliatory as possible toward the Serb minority. For this reason, he chose the opposite path to that followed by Franjo Tuđman of Croatia. In Bosnia, unlike in Croatia, Serbs could not legitimately complain of discrimination. Attempts by Belgrade television to portray Izetbegović as a Muslim fundamentalist bent on creating an Islamic state in the heart of Europe would have been laughable had they not been so sinister.

A short man with a sad, rumpled face and a kindly smile, Izetbegović struck a tragic figure in the fall of 1991. In his doubts and well-meaning equivocations, he was more like Hamlet than the ayatollah Khomeini. He still believed that the best chance of preserving Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multiethnic community lay in preserving Yugoslavia as a federal state. As proof of his sincerity, he had gone along with JNA demands for the disbanding of territorial defense units established by Tito, on the ground that they could become the basis of rival ethnic armies. But the army had double-crossed him. Instead of remaining neutral in the conflict, it had distributed arms to Serb rebels. In what was supposed to be a training exercise, the JNA was even preparing for the coming war by digging artillery positions in the mountains above Sarajevo.
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As the leader of an ethnically based party, Izetbegović must bear his share of responsibility for the fratricide that tore Bosnia apart. At the time, however, his main failing appeared to be an excessive optimism and naiveté. After the European Community recognized the breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia in December 1991, he believed he had no choice but to take Bosnia out of a Yugoslavia that would be dominated by Milošević. But he failed to provide his own people with the means of defending themselves against the inevitable Serb onslaught. He deluded himself into thinking that war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was unlikely for the simple reason that it was too ghastly to contemplate.

“The result of a war here would be terrible,” he told me in the presidency building in Sarajevo. “There would be neither victors nor vanquished. It would be a catastrophe. Every second person in the republic has a weapon, either legally or illegally. It would mean a general war in Yugoslavia. Everybody has an interest in Bosnia, and everybody would be drawn into such a war. The war would spread to Serbia, through Sandžak and Kosovo. A war in Bosnia-Herzegovina would lead to war in Europe.”
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The headquarters of Karadžić’s SDS Party was only a few hundred yards away from the president’s office, but it was like entering a different world. Unlike Izetbegović, Karadžić knew exactly what he wanted and had
a clear strategy for achieving it. He made no secret of his belief that Serbs were entitled to two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina—even though they accounted for only one-third of the population—and were prepared to go to war to attain their territorial goals. There could scarcely have been a greater contrast between the soft-spoken Muslim intellectual and the ranting Serb nationalist, who had previously worked as a psychiatrist for the Sarajevo football team.

The day I went to see Karadžić, Sarajevo was buzzing with reports of a fax that he had allegedly sent to SDS offices around Bosnia. A copy of the “instructions” was published by the Sarajevo newspaper
Oslobođenje
, along with an SDS statement that it was a “dirty fabrication.” “In the event of resistance to the legitimate and humane demands of the Serbian people, you must be merciless,” Karadžić had supposedly told his followers. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”
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Although Karadžić denied issuing such instructions, he used similar language in my presence. He interrupted our conversation several times to take telephone calls from regional SDS chiefs and discuss plans for full-scale mobilization. “The destiny of Serbia is at stake,” he screamed down the phone. “This is our historic hour. We must act now.”

Turning his attention to me, he laid out his own idiosyncratic version of Bosnian history. “The Muslims are trying to dominate Bosnia. They want to create an Islamic state here, but we Serbs are not going to let them. You cannot force Christians to live in a Muslim state. Look at what happened in Lebanon. The Bosnian Muslims are really Serbs who were forced to convert to Islam, when the Turks were here. They have a very high birthrate. They are waiting until they make up fifty percent of the population, and then they will proclaim their Islamic state. I don’t understand why America is supporting this anti-Serb coalition.”

I asked him if he would agree to some kind of loose confederation between Bosnia and Serbia, an idea then under discussion. He shook his pompadour of scruffy gray hair in a vigorous no.

“We will never agree to this. A confederation is not a stable type of state. Attempts to create a confederation can only end by war or by disintegration. Probably both. They cannot take our territory.”

The kind of state Karadžić had in mind became clear when he produced a map purporting to show that many Bosnian towns with majority Muslim populations were really “Serb.” This was at the height of the so-called war of the maps, when every ethnic group was making absurd territorial claims. In retrospect, however, Karadžić’s map was a remarkably farsighted document.
This was more or less what Bosnia was to look like in a year’s time, after hundreds of thousands of Muslims had been chased from their homes by “ethnic cleansing.”