The Trigger (5 page)

As I refined my plans, it was a relief not to be confronting the risks associated with earlier trips that I had undertaken through African war zones. At peace for more than a decade, the region I would be travelling through was one no longer framed by war. Ask students today what they know of Serbia and they are more likely to mention its annual music festival, Exit, than the conflict of the 1990s. Launched in 2000 in the Serbian city of Novi Sad, Exit has grown raucously and exponentially each summer into one of Europe’s most popular music festivals – a sort of Glastonbury, but without the mud.

The Internet has always seemed like the world’s greatest library opening up through my laptop and, even though I was such a long way from the Balkans, useful leads soon began to surface. Online search engines made it easy enough to track down old friends whom I had known as translators, from Sarajevo to Belgrade, and without exception they all responded positively to my emails. As the research trail sprouted new branches, I uncovered a few words of Serbo-Croatian lodged unused for years in a remote part of my brain, although the language’s name now had to be handled with care. The nationalistic wars that pulled Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s have made using the old term, ‘Serbo-Croatian’, potentially offensive. The different communities today speak of their own exclusive language, whether it is Serbian, Croatian or Bosnian. It required sensitivity when I introduced myself to local sources and set about explaining my plan.

One of the words that came back to me clearly enough was vukojebina, an earthy term whatever you call the language. It translates as ‘where the wolves fuck’, a synonym for the ‘back of beyond’. During the war of the 1990s it was a term I often heard to describe the more remote areas of Bosnia, many of which were impossible to reach because they lay behind hostile frontlines. I was delighted to see that Princip’s route cut straight across some of these, so I would be covering new territory on this trip – terra that had remained for me infuriatingly incognita when trapped inside besieged Sarajevo.

Among my favourite books had been the memoirs of a British journalist-adventurer, Arthur John Evans, who had walked extensively throughout Bosnia in the 1870s when the Ottomans were on the point of being replaced as occupiers by the Austro-Hungarians. Evans would later become world-famous as the archaeologist who discovered the Minoan civilisation on Crete, but as a young man fresh from Oxford he tramped through Bosnia and would later write on the region for the Manchester Guardian, the precursor of today’s Guardian. His methods were slightly different from those of the modern-day reporter – he often carried a pistol – yet there was still much to admire. Rereading his memoirs, I found that in a letter dated February 1877 Evans described passing within a mile or so of the Princip family home at Obljaj. As I was about to embark on my own long overland journey, his description of the charms and challenges of walking through Bosnia added to my sense of anticipation:

Those who may be inclined to ‘try Bosnia’ will meet with many hardships. They must be prepared to sleep out in the open air, in the forest, or on the mountain-side. They will have now and then to put up with indifferent food, or supply their own commissariat … those who delight in out-of-the-way revelations of antiquity, and who perceive the high historic interest which attaches to the southern Slavs; and lastly, those who take pleasure in picturesque costumes and stupendous forest scenery; will be amply rewarded by a visit to Bosnia.

Sleeping out in the open would not normally concern me, but my research showed that Princip’s route touched on territory that was vukojebina in both the literal and figurative sense. The mountain region I would have to cross supports a significant population of wolves. I checked with local environmental groups and they assured me there had only ever been one confirmed case of a human being attacked by a wolf in Bosnia and that was because the animal was infected with rabies. I could be confident that, if I bumped into a wolf, it would most likely view me as a hunter and run away. Bears, they told me, were another story.

Bears continue to live in the mountains that I was planning to pass through, and the forests surrounding the town of Bugojno, where Princip caught his first train, have long been famous for bear-hunting. The closest I got to a bear in the 1990s was in Bugojno, when I covered fierce fighting for the town between Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim forces. As the Bosnian Croats prepared to pull back they set about torching an old mountain lodge used by Tito, himself a great fan of bear-hunting. Before they left, one of the militiamen ran inside and came back out with the trophy skin of a large bear pegged out on a huge wooden board, signed by the communist dictator himself. The gunman offered it as a gift to bemused British officers attached to the United Nations peacekeeping force, and the skin remains to this day in the proud possession of the officers’ mess of 1st Battalion the Yorkshire Regiment. Not to miss out, the squaddies were presented at the same time with a stuffed bear cub that is still to be found in the sergeants’ mess.

Again I made contact with local environmental specialists and they assured me there had been only a handful of instances in the region when people had been attacked by bears. I was told that all would be fine, as long as I made sure I never found myself between mother bear and cubs.

But there was one other risk that I did not want to underestimate, one that is particularly serious in Bosnia – landmines and unexploded munitions left over from the 1990s. Mines were laid by all sides then, making Bosnia one of the most mine-contaminated countries in the world. Attempts have been made to identify areas of high risk and efforts begun to clear some areas, but in spite of this around a dozen people are killed each year by wartime mines and munitions. I got in touch with the de-mining authorities in Sarajevo, who explained that it was only cost-effective to clear areas likely to be used by people. If mines were found in remoter, wilder spots, they were simply marked with warning signs and recorded on maps.

When I told the de-miners the details of my route, they sent me sheet after sheet from their map database, all as large digital files attached to an email. I clicked on the attachments and watched eagerly as the images slowly opened on the screen of my laptop, looking out for place names and features that I knew to be on Princip’s route. The challenge then became to find a safe passage through the squiggly Richthofen-red loops that the experts used to mark the minefields. On the very first sheet a series of minefields was marked in the valley where Princip was born. The map for Bugojno was the most worrying, with an almost unbroken braid of black and red reaching from top to bottom of the entire page, right across the route I hoped to follow.

I spoke to the experts and to several climbers and hikers from Bosnia. They all had the same advice: away from the old frontlines it would be safe to hike in open country, but when approaching old frontline positions I should be sure to stick to tracks or paths that showed the visible signs of being used by people or animals.

As I became engrossed in my research I realised that under my feet at my desk in Cape Town was a much-loved kilim, one that I had not really thought about in years – a large, hard-wearing piece with the repetitive fractal design common to Anatolia or the Levant. For as long as I can remember it has been on the floor of the various houses I have lived in as a foreign correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, and now as a writer in South Africa. As I went through my wartime diaries from the 1990s I was reminded of where I got it. It did not come from some shop in Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar or a carpet dealer in Yemen, but was sold to me by a farmer’s wife in central Bosnia.

She had spun the wool herself, dyed and woven it, using skills passed on by her mother and grandmother. I had stayed with her family for several months when the war sluiced around her tiny farming community – so close in fact that the farmhouse walls were often thwacked by stray rounds. Without electricity, we would pass winter nights sitting by candlelight around the wood-burning stove, growing strangely blasé about firefights that broke out in the nearby hills. I would read Evans or some other book that I hoped might unlock the complex local history, and she would quietly spin her wool. What was most remarkable was that she was a Bosnian Croat, a Catholic by faith orientated towards Rome and the West, and yet she maintained the proudly Eastern tradition of making Turkish-style kilims, a twist in Bosnia’s rich ethnic weave.

Having worked out the route, my last concern was with the language. Happy though I was at having remembered vukojebina, I would need something more than a few rude words to get by on an overland trip across all of Bosnia and some of Serbia. I approached one of my most trusted Bosnian friends, Arnie Hećimović, a man who came of age during the war of the 1990s. Arnie had been just nineteen when fighting broke out in the small town in central Bosnia where he had been brought up, his family being forced to flee as neighbour turned on neighbour. He became the family’s breadwinner overnight, finessing his grasp of English (largely self-taught from the lyrics of bands like The Clash) into a marketable skill; he became a translator for journalists covering the nearby deployment of British peacekeeping troops. I was one of many foreign reporters who benefited not just from Arnie’s skills as a translator, but also from his role as a gatekeeper, and from his ability to help my understanding of the conflict through his local knowledge and his diplomacy at being able to persuade militiamen of different sides to let us through frontlines at awkward times.

The work allowed his family to survive those dark years, but, with the war robbing him of a university education and rerouting his life, he had joined the many thousands of Bosnians driven out of their homeland. He left in 1995 for Britain, where he has lived ever since. It had been some years since we were last in touch, but we arranged to meet to discuss my plan for working together once again. We agreed on a rendezvous in bustling South Kensington. And so it was that along a pavement crowded with museum-minded tourists I spotted the loping hulk of a man I scarcely recognised. I had known Arnie as a geeky adolescent, his eyes magnified in childlike awe by the thick lenses of the spectacles he used to wear, but here was a teenager no longer. He had filled out to fit in full the muscular Balkan stereotype.

We hugged and gossiped, teasing each other about our thinning hair and stouter frames. Then I got down to business. Would he consider coming back to Bosnia, to walk with me from Princip’s village? When I first posed the question there was a pause. For Arnie, Bosnia was not a writer’s project, a place to be analysed with the dispassion of an outsider. For him, it was a home that had rent itself apart and spat him out. I could tell he was not initially keen, but he was nevertheless curious, wanting to know more about my wider interest in Princip, asking questions and listening closely to the route that my research had already identified. After an hour or so I began to fret about being late to interview a research source, but it was Arnie who told me to relax, as he could get me across London in time. The years had reversed our roles completely. Arnie (the onetime Bosnian yokel) showed me (the onetime London resident) how to do something I had never done before: access a bicycle from London’s rent-a-bike-on-the-street system. And so I found myself being guided deftly once more by Arnie, not along a mountain track in central Bosnia as before, but this time along a rat-run leading smartly to Victoria Station.

We parted with Arnie promising to discuss the plan with his girlfriend and see if he could find a way of taking time off from his job as a picture editor on the Guardian, the same paper that Evans wrote for in the 1870s. It took several weeks for him to mull over my proposal, and it soon became clear from his emails that he was most concerned about the landmine threat. In the past fifteen years Arnie had gone back home to see his family enough times to know full well the risk. Some of the woods where he used to play as a child were strictly out of bounds to modern generations of children because of the mines. It was troubling him so much that he had started dreaming about them.

I did everything I could to reassure him, sharing the maps I had been given by the de-miners and explaining to what lengths I had gone to tap into the best current advice. Eventually, with the encouragement of his girlfriend, he agreed to come at least for the first weeks of my journey, emailing me his decision:

I’m sure it’ll be just fine, but mustn’t convince myself that it’s going to be a walk in the park. The only thing we have to worry about are: landmines, poisonous snakes and quick changing weather but not the rest :-)))

We agreed a start date of mid-June 2012, and all that remained was for me to pack a rucksack, remember the lucky hat that had accompanied me on my previous adventures in Africa and say goodbye to my family. Jane – the same name, my diary informed me, as the girl I fell for all those years ago on that Yugoslavian package holiday – was as supportive as ever, but we never enjoy the impact that long periods of separation can have on our children. At the time Kit was six and Tess a year younger, so I sat them down on the eve of my departure to go through it all, emphasising that Mum alone would be around for the next couple of months. I explained that I was going to a place called Bosnia, which I used to know quite well, but now I was to explore the history of a man long dead – Princip – a man responsible for killing the Archduke of something called the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They both appeared to take it in and, as children do so wonderfully, moved on instantaneously to the next thing to grab their attention: an ice lolly from the fridge, a grubby game in the garden … whatever.

As Tess ran out of the room I heard her shouting to Jane: ‘Dad’s going away to look for a hungry ostrich.’ Baldrick would have been proud.

* Over the centuries the official name of the country has referred to both Bosnia and Herzegovina, the latter being a relatively small segment of territory on the southern and western periphery, famous for its stark, stony relief and its seasonal extremes of temperature. It owes its name to a period in history when it was ruled by a herceg or duke, and the naming tradition continues today with the modern nation officially known as ‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’. For the purposes of this book I will use the accepted abbreviation of ‘Bosnia’ for the whole country, unless explicitly referring to the parcel of land that makes up Herzegovina.