Editorials/In Bosnia/Dread October
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
In Bosnia by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina perhaps it was not such a good idea for me to absent myself from America's current outbreak of political doubletalk and hot air. The...
...And the arms embargo should be lifted so that those menaced by the well-equipped Serbs can defend themselves...
...Most were women and children—the men are either fighting, imprisoned, or dead...
...Blood remains on a sidewalk from a recent sniper assault on civilians...
...Half its 120,000 citizens are dead or in refugee camps...
...The mentalities of these ethnically and religiously diverse peoples are different from anything we Americans can appreciate...
...What we have is an ill-sprung black Volkswagen driven by an oddly lackadaisical Croatian corporal, lost in the rock music pounding from his tape deck and oblivious to the bruised condition of his passengers: Forstmann, the British historian Andrew Roberts, a Croatian-American diplomat, and me...
...Such barracks are peaceful now, but again they put me in mind of the Middle East...
...A bespectacled nun and a cigarette-smoking priest are eager to take us to the "ethnically cleansed" Mostar to show us how the Serbs, (continued on page 18) 16 The American Spectator November 1992 with artillery and air strikes, have bombed out Croatian hospitals, churches, schools, libraries—"anything relating to our history," this Croatian nun declares...
...Roused by the plight of the refugees in erstwhile Yugoslavia, Ted Forstmann, the American entrepreneur, has flown his jet into Croatia's sparkling port of Split...
...Just two years ago all the peoples of Yugoslavia—the Slovenes, the Serbs, the Muslims, the Croats, and the rest—were anticipating the fresh breezes of liberty...
...The political hot air in these parts contains shrapnel...
...Other warlords in the former Soviet empire will see the rewards open to those who practice "ethnic cleansing" such as I have just seen in Mostar...
...Six hundred thousand refugees now languish in Croatia...
...Then came the ethnic wars...
...There Forstmann assures the nun, the priest, and assembled officials that he will gather up supplies for the refugees' winter...
...They cost Croatia $2 million daily, or 20 percent of its budget—and that budget also has to support250,000 soldiers in a population of some 3.5 million...
...The day before, in Zagreb, we had visited a children's hospital where war's innocent victims stumbled around on twisted limbs...
...We had been promised a "motorcade with police escort...
...and Croats, all crammed into flimsy barracks, unready for winter...
...This last eventuality could prove more horrible than the present butchery...
...In many ways this battle-scarred and militarized area puts one in mind of Israel, despite our laid-back corporal...
...She did not exaggerate the destruction...
...The prayers continue, but now there is war...
...CI...
...But, of a sudden, with the expiry of dictatorship, ancient and mysterious animosities flared, provoking the strong to fall upon the weak, to expropriate their homes, and frequently to kill them...
...Then in the stillness of the Spansko refugee camp, we met Muslims, Serbs, Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...I had envisaged Mostar to be a village...
...Croatia did not anticipate this growing refugee population, and as there is no foreseeable end to nearby wars there is no foreseeable end to the refugee problem...
...As we drove to Mostar we stopped at the religious shrine Medjugorje, where in 1981 the Blessed Virgin allegedly appeared and urged prayers for peace...
...Under the Communist dictatorship all had lived in a relatively peaceful stew, small numbers of Serbs spicing up a Croatian neighborhood, minorities of liberals living among both groups...
...Its entire infrastructure is gone...
...The West should threaten the Serb army with destruction from the air...
...And something more is necessary...
...We take a left into the interior, up and down hills of gray stone, toward one of the less publicized of the area's many war zones...
...If Sarajevo falls, the Serbs will reinvigorate their assaults on Croatia and other areas...
...It is a large city, now quite dead...
...Already they are the source of prostitution and begging...
...The city's gutted surgery hospital is now a Beneath the occasional boom of artillery fire we are hustled into a deserted hospital, the center of which is sufficiently fortified to lay on lunch...
...The consequence has been one of the cruelest pages of history in this century...
...Every significant building and home in a city that once would have been worthy of the most prosperous regions of Italy has been badly damaged...
...A hundred or so fresh graves, with copper-colored dirt heaped a couple of feet above each, have taken over a once-elegant park...
...And from that memorably named city we bump along the memorably beautiful Dalmatian coast, round hairpin turns...
...The restlessness in the eyes of the boys suggests that soon hooliganism will begin, and then the kind of political dissatisfaction and irredentism that gave birth to the PLO...
Vol. 25 • November 1992 • No. 11
