From Zagreb to Mostar Our correspondent finds out firsthand what war has wrought in Bosnia
Kelly, Mary Pat
Mary Pat Kelly FROM ZAGREB TO MOSTAR A Bosnian Journey The fighting had stopped in Bosnia. At Split airport the lines of UN peacekeeping troops were heading out, while civilians like ourselves...
...The relatives of the dead and missing have painted the names of loved ones on bricks and improvised a two-block-long wall in front of the headquarters of UNPROFOR, the UN peacekeeping force...
...Broken glass littered the sidewalks and through the gaps where walls and windows had been we could see the empty shells of a market, pieces of furniture in a restaurant...
...Doesn't he know the shooting is over...
...Then we went into the dining room for a meal, eggs fried- Bosnian style...
...At Split airport the lines of UN peacekeeping troops were heading out, while civilians like ourselves were moving in: reporters, aid workers, pilgrims headed for Medjugorje, businessmen-all very purposeful, but also very normal looking...
...Anna had been sent to Vares when things got bad in Sarajevo, then Vares came under attack and she fled with her grandparents...
...There were no lights in the station...
...The Krajinian Serbs were antagonistic toward the U.N...
...Many were young men in camouflage dress and quite a few were drinking...
...Not that Zagreb did not contain its own testimony to loss...
...With a relaxed attitude born of our "war" experience so far, we boarded the train for the three-hour trip from Split to Knin...
...Most had simply removed their uniforms and joined the refugees...
...We'd have a nice dinner at a local restaurant, and tomorrow start asking hard-hitting questions of the Croatian army spokesman...
...Thank you," I started, "but"-except that no "buts" were allowed...
...For Tymchuck the most heartening dimension of his whole experience has been the cooperation he's seen among nations in their peacekeeping tasks...
...it was "Bohsnia," with an open vowel that echoed beyond us into a place that was far away, and lost...
...But by whom...
...We would find a hotel...
...In fact, he preferred to talk about his years on the boats that lugged cargo around the Great Lakes and through the Saint Lawrence seaway...
...Hotel...
...I asked...
...How then do you identify who you are...
...Our pillowcases were embroidered...
...Then she turned and spoke quickly to her mother...
...she asked...
...We'll take them out for a nice dinner," Martin said...
...There would be a tourist office in Knin to hook us up with a place to stay...
...No one bothered with small talk...
...And so we met Anna...
...When the area had been in control of the Krajinian Serbs, the UN had monitored the few Croatian villages...
...It didn't happen...
...Word came that her father had been killed...
...through Anna, we got down to the story so common in this part of the world...
...A voice from the next bench said, "Seven o'clock...
...But when you're gesturing for another fruit tea or pilsner as you listen, there is a distance between reality and the stories about the reality...
...He told me he doesn't have to pay...
...This town had been blown apart...
...But now the colonel was heading back to Canada...
...What time do we get to Knin...
...The questions rushed out of her...
...What had we been thinking...
...Good weather will test the peace," said a member of NATO Commander, Admiral Leighton W. Smith's, staff...
...What age have you...
...When NATO bombed Udbina airfield nearby, they had been attacked...
...Even Martin and I exchanged an amused look that said, "What a self-dramatizing Johnny-come-late-ly...
...The colonel had come late to military life and had no interest in waxing eloquent about the fine points of strategy or in bragging about his army's victory...
...It was dark when we arrived in Knin...
...The next day, the Croatian colonel told us "the Serbs fought as they could," when I asked if he was surprised that the Krajinian Serb army had not put up more of a battle...
...No hotel," she said...
...Her Croatian grandparents, who were in their mid-fifties, came from Vares, a village about thirty miles north of Sarajevo...
...A street of cafes and bars has neon shamrock signs, courtesy of Guinness...
...I mimicked writing...
...Zagreb itself is celebrating in a subdued way...
...I was not about to start in with, "Now if this is any trouble, we'll be happy to go...
...Nor did they pronounce Bosnia as we did...
...In 1991, the local Serbs had created a separate country, the Republic of Serb Krajina...
...She had learned her English from a German couple...
...Bosnian style," they said again and again...
...First, special cakes for Saint Nicholas Day...
...Now we had to eat...
...Candles and flowers keep vigil in front of sections where place names appear again and again: Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar...
...The Croatian family that had welcomed us or the Serbian family who had abandoned it...
...What is your husband called...
...There were some civilians, among them a few women and children, and a lot of shopping bags filled with giant-sized detergent boxes...
...it has the sense of a city edging toward a boom...
...Outside of town at the UN Force Headquarters, Colonel Shawn Tymchuck said, "There was no battle...
...We saw no moving cars, but many abandoned ones-some flattened by tanks, others burnt...
...It's something like that," he said...
...The people of Mostar fled...
...We heard desperate stories of refugee displacement from members of the International Rescue Committee, whose offices stayed open during the worst sieges of Sarajevo and Mostar...
...He answered with another question: "We had people living in our compound who were in mixed marriages-how did they decide who they were...
...as we got closer I saw there were no windows either...
...The first jolt of reality was our fellow train passengers...
...Dogs barked, and we started up the hill into what Anna said were the suburbs...
...But then...
...As in Knin, we asked ourselves will a year of peace give these people a chance to rebuild and to reconcile...
...We slept downstairs on a pullout sofa bed in the living room filled with cabinets displaying crystal glasses...
...Adult elaborations on the flight from Vares, the time spent in the barracks, the grandmother's fear that if she returned to Vares, now in control of Bosnian Muslims, she would have to wear a veil-all were passed through Anna...
...The women laughed...
...To this question all factions answer: "It has to...
...My mother says you will stay with us...
...Her grandfather, silent during all this talk, now said something...
...For Anna, we were like oversized kittens and she couldn't wait to show us off to her grandparents...
...she repeated...
...But then he told us how Mostar used to be one big family...
...The rain let up, but icy puddles filled potholes...
...We had just come from three days at the Intercontinental Hotel in Zagreb...
...Anna's mother had left to go to the university in Sarajevo and study economics...
...Bosnian," her grandmother said, and all repeated so there was no mistake, "Bosnian cakes...
...The schoolbook sentences couldn't quite contain her energy and her curiosity...
...The gentle drizzle on the coast at Split was a heavy cold rain in the mountains...
...He did not think any of the remnants of armies in Bosnia or in the Krajina would challenge NATO troops directly...
...The British television producer who carried a flak jacket and helmet received a lot of condescending smiles...
...No problem," I thought, "we'll treat them to a taxi ride...
...It is a big house, but far from the station," Anna warned...
...Every morning when I brush my teeth I look at the holes in the trailer...
...They have come in from the villages around and taken over the town...
...that, by some interpretations, is what started the war...
...But will it last...
...She met her husband, also a student, and they married and had Anna...
...We had long conversations with military men who had been in grave danger, who had lost comrades in the conflict...
...He shrugs, "We tried...
...The speaker was a little girl of eleven or twelve, blonde, with glasses...
...The people who are here now," he said, "are not from Mostar...
...And the cakes, the coffee, the eggs were Bosnian food...
...The conductor came for our tickets...
...From the headquarters above Knin, the countryside spread out...
...Finally she announced herself exhausted...
...The cookies commemorated a Christian saint, but they had the heavy, dense sweetness of Middle Eastern desserts, and the coffee was poured from the kind of one-handled pot common in Jerusalem...
...We came to an intact villa with three stories and a balcony...
...But the war is over, and all these people have made it through alive...
...The Croatians arrived and the Serbs left...
...She could not quite conceal her surprise, but Anna and her mother were both explaining...
...Some spit on the flag of the UN when they come to pray," the Swedish UNPROFOR guard tells me from his position surrounded by sandbags...
...The reality of what had happened to the people of the former Republic of Yugoslavia was hard to grasp...
...I was afraid the answer was going to be "religion...
...Why was I going to Knin...
...And whose glasses were those...
...How did anyone...
...we asked...
...We're waiting for spring...
...Cosseted in a beautiful (and reasonably priced) room, we breakfasted in a dining room where waitresses insisted that we sample the multiplicity of pastries...
...But how could there be reconciliation in a town where no one who is now there had lived there before...
...Laughing filled in for any missing words...
...If she was to continue, we all would have to pay her for this work...
...Where do you live...
...Anna's grandmother opened the door...
...A small hotel, a nice B&B...
...By now we realized that if they hadn't invited us we would probably be under interrogation at the police station, or on the train back to Split...
...Seven," she said, "or seven-and-a-half...
...Groups of soldiers passed, and I was very glad we were walking with Anna and her mother...
...Somehow her mother had gotten to them, and the four of them spent the next year moving from camp to camp, finally ending up in a place they called "the barracks...
...Now they were trying to help the Serbs that remained, mostly old people...
...The Croatian army and their Bosnian allies had prepared their offensive for a year, but "a small number of very determined defenders would have stopped them in their tracks for a long period of time," says Colonel Tymchuck...
...She settled us adults into the only heated room and started to host the evening...
...When we fly from Zagreb to Split, the starting point for a trip to Knin and Mostar, we have come to expect war, but with all modern conveniences...
...And where was I staying...
...A few months ago they had been assigned to this house where Serbs had previously lived...
...They blame us...
...He said nothing," a delighted Anna said...
...A Nigerian soldier had been shot in the head and his vehicle stolen...
...Our guide was the son of a mixed marriage, true of 60 to 70 percent of the marriages in the area...
...After two hours of playing cards, singing, telling stories, there seemed no reason to say no...
...UN forces were under siege here at this camp...
...We wanted to hear the inside story of the push that reclaimed Knin from the Serbs in August 1995...
...She leaned across a young dark-haired woman and spoke to us...
...She wriggled in her seat and laughed as we used pantomime to expand our common vocabulary...
...There was nothing but darkness and the rain...
...Mixed marriages were very much on the mind of the aid worker that took us into Mostar the next day...
...These potholes had been made by shells...
...Already we were experts, as insouciantly casual about risks as the most war-weary correspondent...
Vol. 123 • February 1996 • No. 3
