Jan/Feb. 1997
Vol. 53, No. 1

A fictional state

of being

By Colin Woodard

My friend Jasenka says being Sarajevan nowadays is like being an animal in a zoo.

Foreigners come and go-soldiers, journalists, aid workers, bureaucrats, and politicians-popping in and out of Bosnia on military aircraft on their respective missions to protect, question, relieve, administrate, or govern Bosnia-Herzegovina. They stay a few days, weeks, or months to do their business, take a few pictures of the devastation, and then return-exhausted and heroic-to peaceful homes far away. "But we must stay here," she says, "begging from these tourists like helpless, bitter exhibits in a zoo."

"It's not your fault," Jasenka adds. "Many of you have come to help, but you can't imagine how this feels after four years of war." She lights another cigarette, staring with blank intensity at the plastic-covered window frame. Jasenka, 39 and divorced, raised two small boys during Sarajevo's terrible siege. They moved 12 times, losing their apartment and their car. For two years they stayed indoors without heat, electricity, or running water, venturing into sniper and mortar range outside their door only when supplies had to be replenished. "People say I'm a hero for staying, but now I just feel stupid. I loved this place and I wanted to stay. But I look around and ask myself: What future is there for my children?"

Bosnia-Herzegovina is a country that exists on paper, but not in practice. It continues to occupy its place on the map-a heart-shaped nut squeezed between Croatia and Serbia-only because a vast army of soldiers and diplomats have been sent by foreign governments to prevent it from breaking into pieces.

But Bosnia is already divided into three hostile statelets, and the real task of the international authorities is to put the pieces back together.

As a child I doubted that the project to restore Humpty Dumpty was going to be successful, even if all the king's horses and all the king's men could manage to overcome their divergent interests and obvious obstacles to communication to see the project through.

My childhood skepticism has been borne out in Bosnia. In recent months, more than 100,000 civilian and military personnel from dozens of agencies, organizations, and national armies and governments were simultaneously maintaining peace, administering an international protectorate, and rebuilding the physical and political infrastructure of a devastated and divided country.

These countries ranged from the United States and France to Saudi Arabia and Russia, and their interests coincided even less than those of the agencies through which they worked. Not wishing to upset a precariously balanced apple cart, the international community avoided any bumps in its path, even at the expense of the mission itself.

So Bosnia remains divided into three hostile regions-Croat, Serb, and the Muslim-led remainder-their boundaries semi-porous membranes. Foreigners can travel from one entity to another, and even fool themselves into believing they are in the same country. But for Bosnians the borders are as real as the war that created them. For them crossing into new territory can mean harassment, a beating, expulsion, or violent death-particularly in Croat- or Serb-held regions.

On election day last September I passed through one of these invisible membranes with Les Campbell, a Canadian working with the National Democratic Institute on a project to advise and nurture Bosnia's nascent democratic political parties. Once our jeep was parked in Bosnian Serb territory it attracted crowds of children who gathered in front of it and pointed at the front fender in wonderment. The car had been purchased 200 miles away in Zagreb, and the children had never before seen a Croatian license plate. "I've found people curious about the car, but not aggressive," Les said reassuringly. But he'd affixed Canadian flags to the bumpers, just in case.

In Bosnia, license plates are a primary form of identification, and they can even assist in navigation. Winding along mountain roads through stunning vistas and blacked-out tunnels, our passage into the Republika Srpska was marked only by the sudden and complete change of the plates on passing vehicles-the Bosnian fleur-de-lis replaced by the Serbian S-S-S-S motif. The letters stand for "Only Unity can Save the Serbs"- their rallying cry during the war. "Unity" was to be achieved by killing or expelling non-Serbs; "salvation" through the erection of death camps. This four-lettered motif is repeated on flags, graffiti, and political party logos. The Republika Srpska is awash in ersatz swastikas.

Srpska's forests, mountains, roadside sawmills, and compact lumber towns looked every bit like northwestern Maine: picturesque, rugged, contemptuous of outsiders. Its resemblance to the land of my childhood was disorienting. Expecting to round the bend into Farmington or Rangely, I instead confronted a French armored column, a billboard plastered with pictures of Radovan Karadzic, or a checkpoint manned by Srpska police in their unlikely purple camouflage jumpsuits. The toughs I went to high school with would have hooted at such attire, whose color scheme seemed suitable only for charging into a setting sun.

Outside the polling station in Sokolac we were accosted not by the police, but by a well-dressed Serb Èmigré who had returned from Switzerland just to cast his ballot. "Why does the world tell such lies about the Serbs?" he demanded. "All these stories about concentration camps and mass graves-these never existed! Nobody was killed in Srebrenica, and yet you journalists show pictures of corpses they are digging up. Is this any way for democratic countries to behave?" He patted my shoulder warmly, smiling as he spoke. "We're saving Europe from the Muslims and you treat us like criminals?"

A few days later I traveled to Mostar to write a story on Herzeg-Bosna, the Bosnian-Croat mini-state declared dead by U.S. envoy John Kornblum a month before. Despite intense U.S. pressure, the year-long administration of the city by the European Union, and the signing of several diplomatic agreements, Herzeg-Bosna continues to trumpet its sovereignty and its contempt for the Dayton Accords.

Mostar is a small city, bitterly divided since 1992 when Bosnian Croats launched their dirty little war against the Sarajevo government. Backed by Croatia, the Bosnian-Croat army challenged the Serbian patent on genocide and ethnic cleansing, pushing non-Croats out of seized villages and the western side of Mostar. Outside pressure forced an end to the Croat-Muslim war, but the Croats' renegade state quietly lives on, protecting its citizens from centuries of multiculturalism.

I crossed the Neretva river on a NATO-built pontoon bridge erected over the remains of the graceful stone footbridge pictured on virtually every tourist knickknack sold in Bosnia before the war. Pieces of the sixteenth-century structure were blown into the river by Croatian shells and can still be seen amid other bits of wartime flotsam.

From the opposite bank, I took my first right past parallel taxi stands- one with Croat plates, the other Bosnian-and disappeared into an urban no-man's land of devastated buildings, overturned cars, and shell craters. I was almost run down by a taxi ferrying passengers across this neutral zone; terrified of stepping on a land mine, I had refused to yield the pavement and face the treacherous shoulder. A few minutes later, a red-checkerboard flag flying from a burned-out ruin notified me of my arrival in Herzeg-Bosna. A block or so after that, I stepped into the parking lot of a fully functional four-star hotel (European Union headquarters, as it turned out) and then out onto a bustling main street straight out of Croatia proper.

Here Croatia's extra-territorial project is laid bare. There are look-alike police and soldiers in look-alike Croatian uniforms. Also nearly identical flags, stamps, and-of course-license plates. The Croatian kuna is the official currency, and companies and goods from the motherland are everywhere-in sharp contrast to shops across the river.

Most Herzeg-Bosnans have Croatian passports. The ruling Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ) is an appendage of Croatian President Franjo Tudjman's own party of the same name. Its leaders not only attend the HDZ's party meetings in Zagreb, they show up at parliamentary meetings.

"Herzeg-Bosna isn't going anywhere," one of its political leaders screamed at me. "You and your newspaper should go dissolve yourselves." He then dissolved our phone connection. The only thing obstructing the appearance of Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia seemed to be the Dayton agreement and its foreign implementers.

Back in Sarajevo, Zlatko Hadzidedic was explaining to me how his country had wound up in such a mess. Hadzidedic's serene gaze and slow, measured speech give him a Buddha-like quality, an impression reinforced by a cleanly shaven head. So his thesis, "Bosnia will not strike back," presented orally and in a small bilingual book, took me by surprise.

"The Freemasons planned everything," the youthful writer told me, receiving my skeptical vibes with a calm smile. I learned from Zlatko that the Masons had been conspiring to destroy Bosnia for some time, as part of their geopolitical strategy to maintain British power and sabotage multiculturalism-the latter being a threat to their traditional monopoly on transnational power. By using this paradigm, Zlatko noted, he had been able to predict international policy on Bosnia all the way down to the structure and nationality of military deployments.

"Dayton represents a compromise between British and American interests. While Britain has sought to destroy this Muslim geopolitical entity and replace it with its Western Christian equivalent [the Bosnian Croats], Clinton-who is Irish Catholic-just wishes to be reelected."

Whether besieged by Masons or not, the Muslim-led multicultural entity is certainly faced with destruction. The Dayton Accords are the only thing preventing the establishment of a Greater Croatia and Greater Serbia, with a few Muslim reservations as buffer zones-Gaza Strips for the twenty-first century. Privately, the spooks, diplomats, U.N. officials, and NATO personnel agree: In this climate, Bosnia-Herzegovina's chances of survival are slim, and the future of its children is dark and gloomy. n

Colin Woodard is a correspondent for the The Christian Science Monitor. He is currently based in Zagreb, Croatia.