THE CITY THAT DAYTON FORGOT
Cohen, Andrew
The City that Dayton Forgot Bosnia's imaginary peace falls apart in Brcko BY ANDREW COHEN If there's another war in Bosnia, it will begin here in Brcko. We're in the Zone of Separation, near...
...I was afraid the Muslims would lake revenue...
...We're not talking about a pickup truck here," Cuculo says...
...he says...
...All the furniture you sec here, we brought with us...
...I probably paid for one of those tanks personally...
...I'hev don't want am Muslims...
...In early September, the Muslim-identified SDA staged a huge rally just outside Free Brcko...
...We'd been over it before, but we're kinda wary of bridges anyway, so we jumped it...
...Cuculo ordered the Zone closed to prevent a head-on collision between competing Serbian and Bosniak construction crews...
...For me the biggest tragedy is that I left my photo albums there—I haven't even got a picture of mv son...
...The refugees won't be going home anytime soon...
...Serb officials call it a "biological frontline...
...Dragan claims...
...I called back to OP on hiy radio, and they said it was a car, but I knew it wasn't a car...
...A visit to the biological frontline: 1 stop in front of the least demol-ished-looking house in the Zone of Separation, where I find Ha jro Karamovic, head of a Bosniak construction company...
...I'm afraid to try...
...In the imaginary Bosnia crafted at Dav ton...
...convince .ill sides that ethnic partition is economicallv cra/v...
...to tell you the truth, because of the extremists...
...After Dayton gave Sarajevo to ihe Muslim-Croat Federation, the unrecognized government ol Republika Srpska quietly organized an evodus...
...1 onk...
...Anyway, my house...
...As always, politics is the catch...
...The Bosniaks never had control ol Brcko...
...The Muslims should go to the places we've left, in the Federation...
...handing me the picture...
...I'll shoot them the ne\t time thc\ come...
...Now, let me ask vou a question: What is Dayton...
...oft the Ainu's Arizona trail...
...I spent more than fifteen years working in Germany, as head of a construction company, and I put every pfennig thai I earned into that house...
...The theory is simple: Start with a port citv like Brcko...
...Ninety percent of the Serbian population"— some SI).IKK) people—"left Sarajevo Surely \ou heard We e\en went back to the graveyards to dig up 0ur ancestors' bones and bring them here We left behind property that has been in our family for 500 \ears...
...In the three Brckos there are eleven war-crimes sites (including three mass graves), eight USAID projects...
...Vito sa\s...
...Is that a German camera...
...There's a great whorehouse there...
...So far...
...The bombings began on July 11...
...We asked them to slow down...
...allv reported that N \l< > chopped .. iv..-clear bomb on Bosnia last summer < i.-culo went on Serf"' radio lecentlv...
...saying there was "no room" for them in the Republika Srpska, and that Serbs needed their "living space...
...Here, as you go out — there's t h e h o u s e where 1 used to store bricks and wood...
...This place was a wreck—the ceiling had a grenade hole in it...
...I used lo have one like it...
...He used to be a law student (before he was a soldier), and he's even got penny loalers...
...I'm not kidding: They planned this war for eight years, in mosques, so Serbs wouldn't know about it...
...Snyder and Raube have been here for four months, rotating in and out of the Army's McGovern camp, close to Brcko proper, and OP-9, an outpost further south, in Bosniak territory...
...Just in the Brckos, with millions more waiting in the wings...
...I hive a large armed force on hand to keep thintzs quiet...
...If you do not elect a leader of vour own faith...
...The mud is actually an American army trail, nicknamed the Dr...
...Brcko used to be a bustling port city, Yugoslavia's largest...
...They were attacked, and—I don't know for sure—I heard that one of them died...
...In early July, the Office of the High Representative—the ranking international organization in Bosnia— authorized a private-property commission...
...Dayton said that the Republika Srpska had to eleel a Serbian president...
...Hajro says evenly, choosing his words with care...
...In Free Brcko, you'll find 30.000 people like me...
...They've threatened to put mines here, too...
...The Serbs have good reason to be nervous about holding on to it: Bosniak and Croat armies almost captured the city last spring, but the Dayton agreement obliged them to stop their offensive...
...he explains...
...Hajro looks like an elderly kibbutznik...
...I didn't think Serbs' rights would he guaianlccd, lot one tlunu...
...Of course, we were allowed lo go back lo Brcko lo vote on election day...
...He scowls, and produces a battered document on Repuhlika Srpska stationery...
...I find Hajro's old house—three stories, line woodwork, apple orchard in the back...
...We didn't even know if the houses really were theirs—it all might have been politically motivated, an attempt to establish 'facts on the ground' before the arbitration...
...300 meters from OP-9...
...The whole thing wobbled when I smacked the concrete on the other side...
...and the next day they're gone...
...I ask Hajro for the address of his old house, and tell him I'd like to go there...
...I've been a refugee for four years, in 'Free' Brcko...
...Hajro says, and offers me a seat at his cramped workbench...
...Amcnean-stvle...
...Strangely enough, the preferred form of anti-American propaganda in Brcko is music videos...
...It's a numbers game...
...instead of stars there were swastikas and little skulls-and-crossbones...
...One of them eyes my camera case...
...Chctniks...
...The thought of civilization leads to the tough question: Is building these houses just a numbers game...
...I'd appreciate that...
...A vear atio...
...you will be slaves, and deserve to be...
...Then they started raising it back up, and I thought, 'Aw, shit.' I managed to get my leg out, and do this Stairmaster move, and roll on top, up with the gunner, screaming at him the whole time...
...Wait a minute...
...we'll be their servants, and if we don't listen to them, we'll he shot...
...An even belter omen is the American government's willingness in spend money on reconstruction...
...I wanted lt> vote for the Joint List— it's the only party that has Croat...
...you know, she even won a competition—Best Backyard in Brcko...
...We've heaid that American helicopters have dropped a vellow powder over Dubo| " Richard Holbrooke drove past ILtpo's houses on election dav and said...
...Hajro had little faith in the elections...
...Since July, the reconstruction of almost 200 Bosniak houses has been approved, though only eight or ten have been started...
...the Rvan plan would work In realitv...
...it's like something you'd have in a civilized country...
...There was really only one possible road that the bombers could have gone down, between the blown-up houses—the other path leads right to our checkpoint," he says...
...Uh-huh...
...They're mining their own houses and accusing us...
...900,000 on the Serb side, and $750,000 on the Federation side...
...The TV cameras missed the ev cut the day before, which was just as well: An I s I a m i c hod/ declared...
...He brightens immediately...
...There was some kind of domestic dispute at a hotel...
...The plan calls for a four-lane highwav...
...standing in front of a red buck house in the snow...
...Raube and Snyder got lucky...
...Vito-mir Popovic, the Serbian arbitrator, has refused to meet with his Federation opposites on the grounds that "Brcko is Serb and will remain Serb...
...This is the "open-city" approach, also known as the Ryan plan, after its foremost proponent...
...forklifts...
...Welcome to Brcko, the City that Dayton Forgot...
...Next thing, we get a letter from the prime minister...
...The government of Re-publika Srpska takes the position that Brcko itself is beyond dispute, and that the point of the arbitration is simply to widen the corridor of Serb-held land by extending the Inter-Entity Boundary Line...
...There was a blue and yellow wire sticking out...
...Jihad is cv en thing...
...I know how he lech | don't want to hate anyone...
...111 polling stations (municipal elections are slated for November 22...
...there was another cache of building material, in the Muslim village of Brod," Cuculo recalls...
...however it's impossible to get to Ravne Brcko from Free Brcko without crossing disputed Serb territory...
...Bill Clinton and the leaders ol the Repuhlika Sipska have a neat confluence ol interests...
...one caller warned...
...or Croatian...
...and hv wasn't asked a single question about in*, upcoming elections...
...Can vou imagine having to run away from that, in vour pajamas, to the sound of grenades'.' Chased by tanks from the Yugoslav army...
...The partition isn't just geographic...
...Hajro should go to Sarajevo...
...Hajro asks...
...We're talking shingles from Hungary, German eighteen-wheelers...
...Serb, and Bosniak candidates...
...We have permission from IFOR for 150 houses, which should be built bv New Year's...
...We're all Chctniks here...
...Hverv dav here is now a dav in which 200 people do not die...
...Pepper, where a few days ago someone set a booby trap for them big enough to kill an entire platoon...
...But the Bosniaks didn't control Brcko...
...Yes...
...Pepper trail don't look like much more than piles of extra-large matchsticks...
...He is telling me that the place he had to leave in Sarajevo "because ol Dayton" was "twice as big as this.' Vito's story is not aboul tanks, grenades, and pajamas, but about following orders...
...asking us to move OP-9—it's "in the way ol infrastructure improvement...
...We heard nothing, so we started back, and shit...
...On June 10...
...You see, whoever did it knew we would have to follow them up that path...
...The same night, another bomb destroyed an election polling station thai had been used to store bricks and wood...
...Bill Clinton is giving them weapons, and now they want war...
...About ten pounds of it...
...My taxes were so high...
...In mid-September, when the Federation tried to send its arbitrators to downtown Brcko along with a group of economists...
...I do...
...Zarko comes to me the next day and says, 'We have to build houses, too...
...twenty-six closely watched weapons-storage areas, more than 800 American soldiers under the command of the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR), and 30,000 Bosniak refugees who want to return to their homes...
...Just barely across the line...
...there was nothing bin death here...
...He elaborates: "We had a lamp worth 1,500 DM...
...We've been seeing strange snakes and lizard^ latelv...
...The Brcko area is the sole point of contact between Srpska East and Srpska West, a two-kilometer corridor surrounded by hostile territory: Croatia on one side, and 30,000 angry Bosniaks on the other...
...Maybe all the bricks have already been scavenged...
...suddenly there were twenty-five new roofs...
...What do vou think is going to happen here...
...But all the candidates were Serbian...
...There wasn't anyone around when they blew, and no bricks or shingles...
...We can't go back...
...That house cost me more than one and a half million Deutschemarks"—he writes the Injure in my notebook, repeating it in German—"1.5 million DM...
...They kept right on...
...They aren't exactly welcome in Republika Srpska...
...She used to import flowers from Sweden...
...Cuculo says...
...Later the engineers told us it was an inertia mine— sensitive to sound, light, and motion...
...the citizens did...
...Snyder disagrees: He thinks the Bosniaks blew up their own houses...
...and Bosnian president Alija Izctbegovie '^rcalcning...
...complete with veiled women, Arabic slogans, bearded mujahadcen...
...Vito is a preppy...
...They come in and put the roof on...
...That got some plav on Serb TV...
...They blew il up only a few days ago...
...the arbitrators haven't even agreed on the area under arbitration...
...Three reconstructed Bosniak houses were destroyed at 3 a.m.: a few weeks later, another three...
...Raube suspects the two drunk men arrested at the hotel that night mined the bridge...
...We had two cars...
...They could have shipped our bodies home in a shoebox...
...The architects of the peace agreement dodged the question, consigning the fate of the city to binding arbitration, with a December 14 deadline...
...and the city was maybe 70 percent Bosniak before they did...
...I asked a Serbian friend of mine to go there, he came back with a message from this guy: 'This house belongs lo me now...
...Ask him for that...
...The text of the Dayton agreement, however, does say that the arbitration concerns only the "Inter-Entity Boundary Line...
...Those houses weren't very far along-just frames, really...
...Back at the outpost...
...A good portent for the Rvan plan is the intcrethnie Arizona market, which sprang up in the Zone south ot McCiovern...
...The Serbs drove more than 30,000 Bosni-aks out of their homes in Brcko during their ethnic-cleansing campaign in 1992...
...others were sent lo Brcko i didn't dale stay...
...and Ravne Brcko (held by Croatian separatists...
...Some Sarajevo Serbs were told to no In BikImki...
...Two men grabbed machine guns and started shooting up the establishment, firing into parked cars, that sort of thing...
...Snyder says, "a little box about two inches square...
...Without Brcko, the Serbs say...
...Serbian Prime Minister Uros Klikovac warned IFOR that construction in Republika Srpska territory was an invasion, and that he couldn't be responsible for what happened next...
...The Bosniaks and Croats argue (correctly) that without Brcko the Federation will have no rail access to Europe, and no reasonable trade route with Croatia...
...you can, but on your own responsibility.' But I know that recently, three men took their families from Free Brcko and tried to go back to their houses...
...At one recent meeting, a curious IFOR information officer asked the chief ol police when the Bosniaks lost control of Brcko proper...
...Vito is saying...
...Karadzic used to talk about the "Berlin" solution—building walls so that Serbs...
...In the grey ram, the blown-up houses off the Dr...
...Repub-lika Srpska president Biljana Plavsic called the visit an "invasion" and warned she "couldn't be responsible for the group's safety" The team ended up spending the day behind barbed wire at Camp McGov-ern...
...Randol 1 Rvan...
...To do that, you have to go to Free Brcko...
...There was a second explosion and immediately a third one...
...My wife had a crystal collection, and a rose garden...
...The SDA's new nationalism is not particularly popular in Free Brcko...
...A political provocation'7 "I'd like to go back to my home, that's all...
...If we do...
...Whether or not the I'nilcd States should be financing the consolidation ol proln-l'aseist states, time and capitalism don't heal everything...
...Fontenot likes in talk about how a Croatian pig farmer recent]) brought a trucklnad ol sows all the way from Split to sell llieni to Serbs and Bosniaks...
...The commission hereby gives Muslim house #174 of Karamovic, Hajro to Rusul-jas, Vitomar and all the things found therein...
...The Republika Srpska prime minister was going around with the local police chief, Zarko...
...Repub-lika Srpska would be cut in half...
...The problem was that Dayton never determined who would ultimately control Brcko...
...Could you widen the roads for our trucks?' I said...
...Needless to say...
...I had to no some-where" I he Serbian construction crew working on the "biological boundary" on the edge of Brcko is less conciliatory...
...Plavsic recently denied that Muslim refugees had the right to return to Serb-held areas like Brcko...
...Free Brcko" (where Brcko's mayor from before the war heads up a government-in-exile...
...There are actually three Brckos: Serb-held Brcko (which used to be Bosniak...
...We're in the Zone of Separation, near something called the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, ankle-deep in the mud that divides the "Republika Srpska" from the Muslim-Croat Federation...
...He doesn't want am "incidents...
...I about got crushed," Raube recalls, "The ramp on the Bradlee started to drop, and I was already running out with my weapon and everything...
...You can tell Bill Clinton...
...Rauhe and Snvder are standing guard with some morose soldiers, who complain that they haven't left the base in months...
...You can drive for ten minutes down one road, present your identification to three sets of police, buy stamps from three different postal systems, and find yourself in need of three different currencies...
...There appears to he an American consensus about how to heal Bosnia...
...Interestingly enough, no map was included in the final version of Dayton...
...Is your camera really made in Germany'1" he asks...
...They had beaucoup ammunition...
...Another video cuts back and forth between footage ol IFOR on patrol and in- Hitler \kLos: Rcpuhhka Srpsk.i lelevi-ior, .,c;i...
...Make Brcko an international city, or rather, an inter-entity city...
...no matter whether they were Serb or Bosniak...
...Colonel Gregory Fontenot savs...
...Brcko is also a showcase of sorts for anyone who needs proof that the unified Bosnian state imagined at Dayton is little more than a fiction...
...On June 20...
...We popped a flare, went down the path to a short bridge patched with boards...
...I think if we would have had more people with us, it would have gone off...
...The real responsibility for Brcko, however, rests with the international arbitrator, British diplomat Robert Owen, and with a group of hardline nationalist representatives, one from each ethnicity...
...You can't call Ravne Brcko, either...
...Snyder produces a square white manual, the Bosnia Country Handbook: There's a picture of a small metal box, and a caption: "SuperQuick Fuses are used for booby traps, demolitions, sabotage, and diversionary actions...
...He recently returned from Bosnia...
...The guv who lives there now is a refugee from Sarajevo...
...I invited over the Serbian mayor of Brcko...
...Hajro pours me a Coca-Cola...
...In response...
...a former Bosien Cilchc columnist who is now an official of the I'tilled Nations High Commission on Refugees in Bosnia...
...Brcko area—see map...
...it would take out a good chunk of the Muslim construction...
...Raube figured out where the bombers must have fled...
...shared hv Repuhlika Sip-ska and the Federation—a kind of NATO protectorate...
...The booby-trapped bridge is right between the collapsed houses—a stretch of concrete and some planks spanning a ditch...
...That was under one board, and under another board were two sticks of C-4...
...net them working together...
...He said...
...You see...
...They've been blowing up houses in threes, so I immediately knew what it was...
...Don't even think of coming back.'" He pauses...
...On September 2. when Raube and Snyder were out on patrol, three Bosniak houses blew up in Brod...
...ito shows me a snapshot ot himselt...
...The first such video I saw featured a skinhead wearing sunglasses and an American flag...
...Thus did the Brcko corridor begin to resemble the West Bank...
...Croats, and Muslims "would not have to live or work together...
...Multiethnicity...
...Two hundred people a day not Living is the beginning ot it...
...I still have a house in Brcko...
...with 1(H) meters on either side, plus a single railroad track, and clearance for that...
...We had better eondi-1 ions in our trenches," I ask Vito how he came to be in this particular house...
...says Dragan, as his crew sulks around him...
...Radovan Karadzic reportedly made continued Serb control over Brcko one of the conditions of his resignation...
...two kilometers from here, but I haven't seen il since the day they chased us out...
...Brcko is a city doomed by the logic of partition: desperately strategic, yet completely indefensible...
...Vito lives there now...
...Remember, please, that's what we've been lighting tor...
...I asked Colonel Cuculo if I can visit my house...
...From Brcko you can't call Free Brcko, which is about ten minutes away, because the phone lines have been cut...
...The answer is never," the man said, visibly losing patience...
...It we can't return to Brcko—well, there will be trouble...
...Nevertheless, in early May, according to Lieutenant Colonel Tony Cuculo, the Federation dropped a large cache of building materials on the Serb side of the Zone of Separation, near Brcko proper...
...That's what we found...
...It" was apparently a message for the Muslim refugees who had been returning to their homes, emboldened by the presence of the American military...
...After the third flash, Raube and Snyder ran back to the base, and exactly seven minutes later most of the platoon was driving toward Andrew Cohen is a senior editor of Boston Magazine...
...as a result, Brcko proper is now almost purely Serb...
...Vito rummaccs in his coffee table, and comes up with a snapshot of someone who turns out to he Hap'o's nephew "1 would like to tunc m\cn \ou the photo album...
...Cuculo had attempted to head off the bombers, but he stumbled upon another "incident...
...the explosions in Bradlee armored cars...
...His company plans to build 1,000 houses in the Zone...
...and he saw it and went bananas...
...The Serb position seems to be contradicted by a map left over from one late-night session at Dayton—Brcko is circled, next to the words "to be arbitrated...
...Maybe there weren't any bricks to begin with...
...You should take a picture...
...itn savs, lilhng two glasses with plum brandy...
...In the meantime, the Serbs have been building their own houses, dozens of them, all facing out onto the Muslims' in a solid line along the border of the Zone...
...It's a letter from the Commission for Refugee Shelters, dated March 3. 199h...
...Sergeant Christopher Raube and Corporal Luke Snyder, dressed in "full battle rattle"—forty pounds of Kevlar, each— are showing me how to get to a nondescript bridge, about half a mile down Dr...
...and since 1 was a soldier...
...He's drunk, and successfully menacing, "Sometimes 1 find Muslims sleeping in these houses," he says, gesturing at the row of new cottages...
...so far...
...the one in w hi., h refugees can return to their homes jnd elections are free and tan...
...though it fell short of a declaration ol war...
...Tile rest is time and capitalism...
...The Serbs may have taken it in 1993...
...The Muslims started building with a vengeance, seventeen men on a roof...
...isn't exactly popular...
...At about 12:10 in the morning, I saw a flash of light," Snyder says...
...You don't hear much talk like this on the Srpska side...
...In early September, the twenty-five-year-old sergeant and the twenty-two-year-old corporal led a routine patrol from outpost nine, a few miles outside the town of Brcko...
...who told me that there was in fact a 1993 plan for a "Brcko beltwav" right through IFOR checkpoints...
...The Serb Republic that emerged from the September 14 elections has a sort of contorted hourglass shape: Brcko is the neck...
...Pepper Bypass, just behind the Delta Company outpost in northeastern Bosnia, near the Croatian border...
...Foster freedom ol movement, and freedom of the press...
...Now it is the last piece of contested land in postelection Bosnia, and probably the first place where war will resume if NATO leaves this Christmas...
...When I saw that C-4, that's when I knew it was something put there for us...
...People have hope again, Thcv'ro rebuilding...
...I'se it to miarantce impartial access to the port and the rail lines...
...he says...
Vol. 60 • December 1996 • No. 12
