Throughout 1993 the Bosnian Serbs largely sat back and watched their two once-united opponents rip each other apart. Some of the most hateful atrocities and episodes of ethnic cleansing took place that year between these two former allies – incidents that I covered as a reporter. On one occasion I had to drive away wild dogs from eating a corpse in the village of Stupni Do, where Bosnian Croat extremists had slaughtered Bosnian Muslim farmers on an autumn day. An already complex war had become a lot more complicated, something that made reporting it a challenge. For example, in the central Bosnian town of Vitez a small pocket of Bosnian Muslims in the old town centre found itself surrounded by a hostile enemy made up of Bosnian Croats, who were then themselves surrounded by more Bosnian Muslims, who were in turn confronting a wider Bosnian Serb enemy. Newspaper stories became more and more convoluted and, inevitably, mistakes were made.
In October 1993 I was one of the last foreign correspondents to see up close the famously graceful bridge in Mostar. This southern city was then torn apart by some of the worst fighting between Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. One morning I cowered inside a Spanish armoured personnel carrier from the UN peacekeeping force being driven into the Bosnian Muslim half of town, where I was to spend one of the most terrifying nights of my life. My diary recorded that the city’s airfield was a no-man’s-land separating the two sides, so we roared across the tarmac at high speed from the Bosnian Croat frontline positions to find:
. . . the first Bosnian Muslim trenches, First World War-style with tin helmets bobbing up and down every 15 ft and mounds of earth, barbed wire and timber. One nice touch was several feet of trench that were crowned with grapevines sending their tresses down and round the men.
Mortar shells were raining down so heavily that the personnel carrier did not move for the entire duration of its twenty-four-hour-long deployment, parked for safety under the protection provided by an overhanging building. Pumped with adrenalin, I ventured out on foot to an improvised hospital set up in the basement. An old Mercedes taxi roared to a halt outside just as I arrived, its passenger door already flung open as a Bosnian Muslim civilian desperately dragged out a woman who had been hit by mortar shrapnel. As she was bundled out of the car I can remember my reflex of embarrassment at seeing her left breast exposed in the bloody confusion. She made no move to cover herself. She would not move again.
The beautiful single-span bridge was then barely recognisable, crudely covered with a roped web of old tyres, a forlorn attempt to protect the 400-year-old masonry. To cross it was to risk your life, so you had to sprint, doubled-over, all the time knowing that you might be in the cross-hairs of Bosnian Croat snipers hidden in houses just a few yards away on the west bank.
A few days later the bridge came tumbling down, a catastrophically symbolic moment when a dream died – the dream of all southern Slavs living as one. The tyres could offer no protection against a salvo of shells deliberately aimed by a Bosnian Croat tank. So deep ran the hatred between the two former allies that Bosnian Croat commanders ordered to be destroyed anything that hinted at a Bosnian Muslim cultural connection to this land. The bridge had been built by Ottoman occupiers in the late sixteenth century and, in the poisonous atmosphere of the 1990s, that was enough to condemn it through historical linkage – no matter how disingenuous – to the Bosnian Muslim side. Bosnia’s Muslims are just as much southern Slavs as Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs, the key difference being their faith. They were not foreigners and certainly not descendants of Turkish Ottoman occupiers.
The bridge’s destruction was big news, but Newsweek, the reputable American magazine, would famously blunder in a prominent picture-led account of the incident. The magazine wrongly blamed Serbian forces for shelling the bridge. This muddle seemed to capture, for me, the sense of the war becoming too complex for outsiders to decode. Some Western policymakers at that time gave the impression of giving up on Bosnia, as if the violence were too historically rooted ever to be resolved.
As Zdravko, owner of the guesthouse in Glamoč, told me his own story it became clear that during this period our paths had passed perilously close to each other. His home town, Bugojno, was then being fought over fiercely by his own side, the Bosnian Croats, and that year’s enemy, the Bosnian Muslims. In July of 1993 things were going badly for the Bosnian Croats, with their forces preparing for a retreat. ‘They were coming at us from all sides and I was deployed to man a checkpoint to block the road that leads into Bugojno from the south,’ Zdravko said. ‘It was in a place called the Pajić field.’
‘But I remember your checkpoint on that road well,’ I explained. ‘There was a British UN position nearby, and I joined a column of their Warrior armoured troop carriers heading up to Bugojno from the south during the fighting. The first day we tried, it was too dangerous to pass your checkpoint. There were no people on the road, but it was covered in rubble and blocked with a jackknifed truck loaded with wood. The next day, really early in the morning, I drove my armoured Land Rover straight past you, sandwiched between two Warriors that managed to push past the lorry and the rubble.’
With the faintest of smiles Zdravko then said: ‘Well, if I had seen you that day I would have shot you.’ I am still not sure if he was joking. ‘Those UN bastards,’ he continued, his voice sharpening with anger. ‘All they did was help our bloody enemies. They did not give a damn about us Croats.’ His rage against the foreign forces from Britain, France, Canada, Holland, Spain and elsewhere – peacekeepers who found themselves in Bosnia without any peace to keep – was replicated across all combatants in the war. If there was one common feature between the otherwise bitterly divided forces with whom I had contact, it was their hostility towards the outsider, the phenomenon that Ivo Andrić, writing in the 1940s, observed so acutely in his historical novels. In the 1990s the different communities each blamed the UN for working against them: helping their enemies unfairly. I had seen how untrue this was, but self-pity is a powerful force, blinding in its reinforcement of victimhood.
I was intrigued that Zdravko and I could remember the same situation so differently. He was convinced the UN forces had given up on the Bosnian Croat civilians forced out of Bugojno by the fighting. But I remember clearly the risks taken by these foreigners as they did whatever they could to help those same civilians. A British officer would be killed patrolling nearby when his vehicle hit a mine. At the height of the fighting for Bugojno, I watched the local British commander negotiating at length with Bosnian Muslim forces so that he could provide whatever help he could to civilian Bosnian Croats huddling for safety in a small village just outside the town.
Fighting between Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats lasted for more than a year before the leaders of the two groups, under diplomatic pressure from the international community, agreed a peace deal. So from spring 1994 the two sides reunited once more in a common front against the Bosnian Serbs, one that would culminate in joint operations during Operation Storm, which was so decisive the following summer. The Croat–Muslim fighting had achieved nothing except claiming thousands of lives and picking scabs off old rivalries. For Zdravko, it meant that he no longer felt at home in his birthplace, preferring to live in Glamoč, a town set firmly under the control of the Bosnian Croats following the Dayton peace deal that ended the war.
After hearing the Bosnian Serb perspective from Mile’s family back in Obljaj, and that of the Bosnian Croats from Zdravko, our first major encounter with Bosnian Muslims came unexpectedly on the third day of walking from Glamoč. We had just climbed the mountain pass known locally as the Gates of Kupres, which takes its name from a nearby highland town, famous for its ski resort. The pass is well-known for marking the frontier between the rocky open wastes of Herzegovina and the tighter, greener valleys of central Bosnia, and no sooner had we crested the rise than we heard something we had not encountered so far on the journey: running water. Herzegovina is famously dry in the summer months but having crossed through the Gates of Kupres we already had proof o
f change – a perennial mountain stream within the watershed of the Vrbas River. An hour or so later we came across an old climbers’ refuge deep in the forest where we met two Bosnian Muslim imams dressed in clothing I do not normally associate with mullahs: rubber waders, battered green hats and waistcoats covered in small pockets from which bundles of fishing line nosed. They were mad-keen fishermen about to go trout-fishing.
In 1957 Lawrence Durrell published a thriller about the Balkans, White Eagles Over Serbia, following his service as a diplomat in post-Second World War Belgrade. The book’s swashbuckling hero, Methuen, manages to outwit the state security services hunting him by surviving on trout caught in mountain streams. I love fly-fishing, but when I read this book twenty years ago the idea of going fishing up a Bosnian mountain stream was simply unfeasible. Today it was a different story.
‘Can I join you?’ I asked, after introducing myself to Kemal Tokmić and Muzafer Latić. Of course, they said; and so, leaving Arnie to rest outside the climbers’ hut, I then embarked on an extraordinary fishing safari. Clambering down the bank, we came to a stream no wider than a table-tennis table, a chain of tiny pools, cascades and eddies that gurgled down through a muddle of forest obstacles: fallen tree trunks, overhanging ferns, exposed roots and patches of boggy silt. Right there, next to where the mullahs planned to set up, was a red mine-warning sign nailed to a tree. Now I am no expert, but twenty or so years after mines were planted in this area, gravity, rain, landslides and the attention of passing wild animals could only have had one effect, if those devices were dislodged: they would surely have worked their way down the gully towards the stream where we were now standing. I pointed at the mine sign and asked Kemal if he thought it was safe to fish.
With a shrug of his shoulders that marked him out as a truly committed fisherman, he turned away from me and began to concentrate on the next little pool, reading the current for where a fish might lie. ‘God will provide,’ he whispered.
We spent a few hours stalking mountain trout. They were tiny little things, no longer than the span of your hand, spectral-white on the underside and camouflaged dark-brown on top, the boundary between the two colour schemes marked by a plimsoll line of bright-red polka dots. These were not stocked fish bred in tanks, but wild, canny little blighters that it took skill to land. I have fished lakes in New Zealand and rivers in the Falkland Islands, but this piscatorial mission was as challenging as any: approaching each tiny pool in silent stealth, threading the rod through an overhead web of leafy branches, keeping one’s footing on the uneven river bank and trying to land the bait where the water was moving just enough for its touchdown plop to be hidden, but not so much for the line to be swamped.
Kemal was the first to have a strike, but as he jerked the line upwards his weight shifted and the old log on which he was balancing collapsed. The fish escaped in a tangle of leafy, gritty cursing that would have brought blushes to his congregation.
My own attempts were even clumsier, so I was mostly happy to watch and learn from the local experts. Their concentration was intense, their skill level high, their passion tangible. As we crept up the stream bed I thought about the fishermen I had seen on the first evening we arrived in Princip’s village – Bosnian Serb teenagers. I thought of Bosnian Croat boys I had seen fishing near Glamoč. In Bosnia the love of fishing knows no boundaries.
When we got back to the hut I found that Arnie had made a plan. ‘It’s another four hours’ walk from here to Bugojno and, as it is already late, I have arranged for us to sleep here,’ he said. The refuge had been built in the early 1960s when Yugoslavia was ruled by the communist dictator, Tito. Inside was a large common room with a horseshoe of benches constructed around a wood-burning stove, the walls decorated mostly with maps showing local trails. Among the maps were a few photographs of the lodge’s construction team from 1962, lean, bare-chested men, and women in flowery dresses, proudly sharing in the communal project.
I invited my two new angling friends to join us for a meal and we spent the evening chatting around the barbecue built out the front near where the mountain stream tumbles down a waterfall. The woodsmoke blended with the smell of spicy mince nuggets, ćevapčići, hissing fat onto the coals. As a final flourish, flat bread rolls known as lepinja were placed on the grill to toast. Leathery to the touch and dusty with flour, they soaked up the fragrant oil when stuffed with the meatballs and dressed with freshly chopped onion.
The two mullahs showed great interest in my project to follow Princip and were intrigued by the Bugojno connection. They both came from the area. Kemal’s mother had been killed by Bosnian Croat shelling during the fighting of July 1993, but they had no idea that Princip had taken the train from here as a youngster to begin his schooling in Sarajevo. As with others on this trip, the mention of Princip could unlock people’s views about not only the 1914 assassination, but much that had followed in this country.
‘We live in an age where in the rest of the world Muslims are regarded as terrorists,’ Kemal said, after gnawing his way through one of the rolls. ‘But look at the assassination of 1914 in Sarajevo – there were no Muslims involved. The assassin was this young man Princip and he was a Bosnian Serb. He shot dead the Archduke and he shot dead his wife. That makes him a terrorist. But the world does not say all Bosnian Serbs are terrorists, does it? Of course not. It is just the Muslims that all become terrorists when one Muslim does something stupid.’
While I could agree that the Western world can today be clumsy in its portrayal of Islam, I had to point out that one of Princip’s fellow conspirators in Sarajevo on the day of the assassination was a Bosnian Muslim, a man called Mehmed Mehmedbašić. He was armed and committed to the same goal as Princip: to kill the Archduke as he passed through the streets of the city on his official visit. Kemal and Muzafer both said they had never heard of Mehmed Mehmedbašić or his role in the assassination. They were both highly educated men, but on this basic historical point they were ignorant, believing instead a narrative that suggested the assassination was exclusively a Bosnian Serb exercise designed only to serve the interests of that one ethnic group.
Our conversation brought home the polarising effect of Bosnia’s ethnic rivalries, a phenomenon re-energised so corrosively by the events of the 1990s. Kemal had lived through that conflict, and indeed had buried his own mother under cover of darkness in Bugojno because the intensity of the shelling had made it too dangerous to hold a funeral in daylight. If you have endured such an experience perhaps it is understandable that you might blindly emphasise the differences, and not the similarities, with rival ethnic groups within your community. As we sat drinking coffee, our discussion moved on to the period of Tito, the age when community projects such as the mountain lodge outside which we were sitting were built. Again, the sense of victimhood felt by Muzafer and Kemal outshone everything else.
‘Tito was not interested in the Bosnian Muslim population,’ Kemal said. ‘He kept power to himself at the centre and did not care at all about our people here in Bosnia.’
Arnie could not let this pass. ‘Come on,’ he said politely. ‘What about the constitution of 1974, which guaranteed full republic status to Bosnia for the first time within Yugoslavia? The country had always been the poor cousin inside Yugoslavia, next to the federal republics of Serbia and Croatia, but in 1974 Tito went a long way to putting that right, to giving us greater status for ourselves.’
Kemal shook his head. ‘That was nothing. The Tito era was a bad time, and that is what you must remember. His regime was a dictatorship, a dictatorship that was brutal and undemocratic. I read on the Internet that Tito’s regime here in Yugoslavia was the eleventh worst in world history.’
I pressed him to explain. Was it eleventh in a league table of political assassinations or economic mismanagement or corrupt asset-stripping? All he kept repeating was that he ‘read it on the Internet’. Muzafer mentioned that his brother had been jailed under Tito for political reasons, but again he could not remember
exactly what those reasons were. By now Arnie was fuming, but he managed to control his anger to say this: ‘Look at what we have seen since 1990 and the collapse of Yugoslavia. Surely that tells us Tito was special, by keeping the country together for forty years. Only now can we see what a miracle that was.’
The edginess of the exchange made it feel that it was time to say goodbye to our guests. Arnie was clearly cross at the way fellow Bosnian Muslims like Kemal and Muzafer could frame everything in terms of victimhood. I stood up and walked with our two guests to their car, Kemal’s mobile phone pinging to announce the arrival of a message with a photograph attached. It was from a fishing buddy who had spent the day a few miles downstream from us and had sent a cheerful bragging photo of a large rainbow trout landed on a particularly tricky part of the river. The sparkle came back to Kemal’s eyes. As any angler will tell you: better stick to fishing than politics.
Talk about the communist era brought to mind how the same land we were walking through had been the setting for Tito’s rise to power through the Second World War. Indeed, for a brief period at the end of 1943, the potato-rich plain of Glamoč had been where an important series of events took place that was connected to the Allied decision to back the communist partisans led by Tito, a man at that time unknown beyond his inner circle. It was a strategic move that helped push Yugoslavia into the communist orbit once the war ended in 1945.
Yugoslavia, the country created in the Western Balkans after the First World War, had fallen to the advancing Nazis in 1941. The Germans were quick to deploy a ‘divide and rule’ strategy, chopping the territory into parcels that were run by Nazi-sympathising proxies. Hitler’s occupation of the Western Balkans was as brutal as anywhere, with resistance sympathisers shot, Jewish communities destroyed and indigenous fascists given free rein. In one section of occupied Yugoslavia ultra-nationalist Croats were handed power, running a death-camp at a town called Jasenovac, where not only Jews and Gypsies, but rivals from within the local community, mostly Serbs, were put to death in huge numbers.