Black Past, Grey Future?

Before I left for Bosnia in early March, 1996, I did some reading, obtained briefings, and found in the basement an old Serbo-Croatian phrase book. In large print on the cover it said, inaccurately: 'With this book you need never be at a loss when conversing with Serbo-Croat speaking people.' However, there were some useful phrases inside, such as 'Where can I buy a rifle?' and 'How many Men of War are lying in your harbour?'Thus equipped, I stepped onto the scarred apron of Sarajevo airport with four companions: a former (and, I thought, still active) Russian intelligence officer, a Dane (who was ill and had to be given oxygen during the flight), a Swede, and another Canadian. The Russian impressed us as a crisis hardened international because his luggage included a tennis racquet. All of us were taking up long-term assignments with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the instrument chosen by the Dayton peace accord for delivering elections, human rights, and democratization to Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a raw afternoon with snow on the ground and the feel of more to come. We piled our luggage and ourselves into the back of a van and set off for town. Exploratory conversations begun that morning in Vienna shut down as we drove through a corridor of devastation.The shock was just beginning. A few days later I took the long drive to my post in Bihac in northwestern Bosnia. Neither my briefings nor CNN had prepared me for the human desolation. This was 1996 and the peace was only five months old. Most of the day's journey was through ruins. Towns and villages gutted, some by armed conflict but most burned or blown up by one or other of the opposing ethnic forces. Bosansko Grahovo was a grim example. It had been a town of about 3,000 people, with small lumber mills and a furniture factory. On this first visit, there was not a living thing -- except for one mournful dog standing in the snow by a row of demolished terrace houses. I travelled with a kind of hollow pain somewhere between chest and stomach.I also learned that to move about in Bosnia you needed not only a road map but an ethnic map. Take the town of Drvar -- a Tito stronghold during the Second World War. It was important to know that it was 99 per cent Croat. It was essential to know that before the Bosnian war it was 97 per cent Serb. Prijedor had been 44 per cent Muslim, 42 per cent Serb, and 6 per cent Croat. It is now about 98 per cent Serb -- and so on with similar dramatic inversions across the country.After places like Bosansko Grahovo and Drvar, Bihac wasn't so bad. The centre of what became known as the Bihac pocket during the war, the town was my base for seven months in 1996 and another seven months in 1997. The climate is not unlike that of Ottawa. The winter is long but not as cold, which is just as well as there is almost no central heating. The food is haute cholesterol -- fried beef, mutton, veal, and fat-laden french fries. Because of demented driving, the roads are more lethal than the minefields. But the setting is splendid. Bihac lies in a wide mountain valley, astride a turquoise river. It was predominantly Muslim before the war, and now it is more predominantly Muslim. The electronically magnified voice of the muezzin heralds the day at 4:55 am.Bihac had not been physically overrun. It had withstood a siege almost as long as Sarajevo, and with that city, Srebenica, and a few others, shared the much caricatured distinction of having been designated a 'safe area' by the United Nations. Unlike Srebenica, it survived. The United Nations and its military arm in Bosnia, UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Force) can take little credit for this. Survival was largely the result of good local military leadership and the resilience of the community. Almost encircled by the Serbs, Bihac had one open corridor that ran north to the Croatian frontier. It was sealed when a rebel Muslim group led by Fikret Abdic established a modus vivendi with the Serbs. …