Blood and Belonging (6 page)

Serbs scoff when you say Tudjman should have atoned for Jasenovac. “Are you crazy?” they say. His party was financed by Croatians abroad, in Toronto and Melbourne. And who were they? Old Ustashe.

But the problem of confronting the past runs deeper than that. The wartime Ustashe state was Croatia's first experience of independent nationhood. It has proved impossible for Croatian nationalists to disavow a nationhood that was fascist. Instead, Croatians evade the issue altogether, either by dismissing tales of Ustashe atrocity as Serbian propaganda, or by attempting to airbrush atrocity into crime by playing statistical sleight of hand with the numbers who died here. Finally, it appears, some Croats have dealt with Jasenovac by trying to vandalize its remains.

It is always said that aggression begins in denial and that violence originates in guilt. A nation that cannot repudiate a fascist past may condemn itself to a fascist future. True enough. But there is another equally imprisoning mechanism at work. If your enemies call you a fascist enough times, you will begin to call yourself one, too. Take your enemies' insults and turn it into a badge of pride. How many times in the weeks ahead do I meet Croats at checkpoints who say, “They call us Ustashe. Well then, that is what
we are.” And likewise, the Serbs: “You call us Chetniks. Well, that is what we are.” The two sides conspire in a downward spiral of mutually interacting self-degradation And where does that spiral begin? In the most ordinary form of cowardice, the one everyone of us knows only too well—telling lies about the past.

But that is not all. Jasenovac is not the whole suppressed truth either. It is not all there is to say about Croatia in wartime. If Croats cannot bear Jasenovac, it is not merely because of what was done in their name but also because of the partiality of what is remembered. At Jasenovac, Tito's Yugoslavia remembered Croatians only as murderers, never as victims. Tito never built a memorial center at any of the mass graves of the thousands of Croatians massacred as they fled before his Communist partisans on the roads of northeastern Croatia and Slovenia in May 1945. The guilt of Jasenovac became unbearable, not merely because it was great, but also because it was unjust. At Jasenovac you begin to discern the lie about the past that eventually destroyed Tito's Yugoslavia. The lie was that the Second World War was a national uprising against German occupation led by Tito's partisans. In reality, it was a civil war fought among Yugoslavs. Postwar Yugoslavia never had enough time to heal the wounds of that war.

Jasenovac is a place to make you ponder your inherited liberal pieties. Somewhere in my childhood, I must have been taught that telling lies eventually makes you ill. When Václav Havel said that people need to live in truth, he also meant that nations cannot hope to hold together if they do not come to some common—and truthful— version of their past. But there are nations with pasts so hard to share together that they need centuries for forgetting to do its work. To ask for truth, to ask for shared truth, might be to ask for too much. Yugoslavia might be such a
case. Fifty years was not enough time to forget.

Whatever the case, it is hard to continue believing in the healing power of historical truth when you stand in the middle of a vandalized museum. Some dark spirit, stronger than truth, was at work here. And it is at work on the road from Jasenovac as you drive away. Toward Novska, you pass Serb house after Serb house, neatly dynamited, beside undisturbed Croat houses and gardens. When you turn toward Lipik, it is the turn of all the Croat houses to be dynamited or firebombed, next to their untouched Serb neighbors. Mile upon mile, the deadly logic of ethnic cleansing unfolds. In village after village, they have ripped open the scar tissue over their common wound.

CRY, GIRL, CRY

I am in central Croatia now, in the heart of what was once one of the most complex multi-ethnic communities in Europe, shared between a Croatian majority, a Serbian minority, and several other groups—Germans, Italians, and Hungarians— besides. The 1991 war tore these villages apart, and now they are divided between Croatian and Serbian sectors, with UN checkpoints in between.

On all the roads that lead north from the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity, there is a continuous swath of devastation wherever you look: roofless houses, with a cascade of roof tiles and roof beams strewn about the deserted, weed-filled rooms; fire-edged window and door frames, brick walls pierced with tire-sized artillery blasts. Some houses have been raked by so much automatic-weapons fire that the plaster has been completely torn away, leaving only the pitted brick, the tree trunks outside the houses wearing a
glittering jacket of metal slugs. In the ditches lie small Yugoslav Zastava cars, riddled with bullet fire or twisted into rusted sculpture by a tank's treads.

At first the destruction appears to have no rhyme or reason. In some villages, not a wall has been left unsprayed with bullets, while in others, scarcely a house has been touched. After a while, you begin to work like an archaeologist, sifting through the clues to discern a pattern to what must have happened. There appear to be three typical forms of destruction. The most surgical form is dynamiting: the houses are collapsed in neat piles, with minimal damage to the houses next door. Families were driven out by their neighbors or by paramilitary militias and their homes were blown up. Many of these dynamited piles appear to have once been large, recently constructed houses, and it makes you wonder how many years of a man's or woman's life as a
Gastarbeiter
in a German automobile factory went into this, only to see it fall like a pack of cards.

The second type of destruction appears to have been accomplished by artillery fire, from the Yugoslav National Army guns that punched round, tire-sized holes in Croatian village walls. The third type of destruction is firebombing, which leaves fire marks on all the windows, and which would have been the work of marauding paramilitaries on both sides.

Some houses were daubed by the Serbs with the slogan “U' for “Ustashe,” which then marked them for ethnic cleansing. Others are marked with crudely and rapidly painted names of those who lived in them, as if, as they were abandoned, their inhabitants were hoping to remind the defenders that they belonged to the same side. I spent hours in these ruins, the dust in my throat, the sound of broken glass under my feet,
deciphering the clues to the shape of catastrophe.

Never say ethnic cleansing is just racial hatred run wild, just Balkan madness. For there is a deep logic to it. By 1990, this part of Yugoslavia was a Hobbesian world: No one in these villages could be sure who would protect them. If they were Serbs and someone attacked them and they went to the Croatian police, would the Croats protect them? If they were Croats, in a Serbian village, could they be protected against a nighttime attack from a Serbian paramilitary team, usually led by a former policeman? This is how ethnic cleansing began to acquire its logic. If you can't trust your neighbors, drive them out. If you can't live among them, live only among your own. This alone appeared to offer people security. This alone gave respite from the fear that leaped like a brushfire from house to house.

The West has to make up its mind about the emerging order of ethnically cleansed microstates that have taken the place of Yugoslavia. Nobody in the West wants to appear to be condoning ethnic cleansing, but every day, every hour, civilians are fleeing war zones, or being driven thence by men with guns, into the relative safety of their own ethnic enclaves. Ethnic apartheid may be an abomination, but for the more than two million refugees who have fled or been driven from their homes, apartheid is the only guarantee of safety they are prepared to trust. Civilian victims in the area are rightly indifferent to our scruples and our strictures about ethnic cantonment. For the West failed to save Sarajevo, where Muslim, Croat, and Serb lived together in peace for centuries. It is asking the impossible to believe that ordinary people will trickle back to the multi-ethnic villages they have left behind, simply in order to vindicate our liberal principles.

As you travel through the zones of devastation in central
Croatia, you also have the impression that you have fallen through some hole in time and are spinning backward into the past. You are not in 1993 but in 1943. In Serb villages, old ladies in black scarves and black wool dresses watch you suspiciously as you pass; ribbed hay carts go by, driven by old men in their Second World War khaki forage caps. Out in their back gardens, women are bending over their hoes. On the roads, militiamen, wearing the red, white, and blue shoulder badge of the Serbian Krajina, emerge from dugouts by the road to stop the car and search you. Everyone is wary. Few will talk.

In one ruined farm, formerly inhabited by Croatians, I came upon an old Serbian couple camped out in the remains of an out-building. They were in their eighties, and they had been driven from their home in Daruvar, forty kilometers to the north, by the Croatians. The old man was sawing up a piece of charred wood for the stove. The old lady was tidying up their tiny room, with its bed, its cracked window, table, two cups and two chairs, and spotlessly swept floor. They had rebuilt the roof themselves, and they survived on what they got from neighbors and the Red Cross. We sit on a stump, in the middle of the ruins, with glass, brick, and burned roof beams littered about, and when I ask them whether this war has been worse than the last one, the old lady replies, with bitter scorn, that this one has been much worse. “In the last one, we all fought the Germans. This time, there was just betrayal.” Neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. Can you ever live together again? They both shake their heads and look away.

When I ask them how they manage to survive, they suddenly seem to revive. “God will arrange everything,” they both say, in unison, exchanging a cheerful glance across
what must be fifty years of marriage. When I get up to leave, the old man takes my hand and holds it in a long, intense grip. His bright blue eyes stare deep into mine. “Truth and national rights. That is all we want. Truth and national rights.”

A mile away, across another checkpoint, this time in the Croatian village of Lipik, I come across a man helping a team of six women in blue overalls to stack up the usable bricks from the rubble of a flattened house. It turns out that he is the owner of the house, and the women are from a municipal detachment sent out to repair damaged houses.

Tomislav Mareković is the man's name, Yup to his friends. Yup is the caretaker in the local hospital and a trainer of the local football team in his spare time. I suspect, without knowing for sure, that he also is a prominent local supporter of the HDZ, the ruling Croatian party. Why else, I reason, is his the only house I can find in Lipik where the rubble is being cleared by a municipal work detail?

He shows me where his kitchen was, where the television set used to be, where his couch stood. Now there is nothing left but the foundations and a mound of bricks which the women are stacking in piles after chipping away the mortar. Next door's house was untouched. Why? I ask. Serbs, he says. We always got on. Now, he says, they are in West Germany. And the house next door? My parents', he says laconically. Suddenly he points out into the street. “That is where they left my father. There, in the street, for three weeks, before someone buried the body. And my mother, they took her to a barn and set her on fire.”

Yugoslav army tanks, dug into the hills above Lipik, were pounding the town and, under directions from local Serbian paramilitaries, were targeting Croat houses. When
Yup's house came under bombardment, he and his wife jumped in their car and fled to Zagreb, but his parents refused to come, thinking they would be safe. Days later, they were dragged out of their house by Serbian paramilitaries, possibly from the same village. They were shot and their bodies were burned. Yup tells me all this with a few sighs, a few pauses to light a cigarette, staring glumly into the distance. All the while, the women work silently around us, stacking bricks.

Yup declares a break and I sit down with the women at a trestle table in his tiny back garden. I want to know why the work detail is all-female, and they all reply, with much laughter and winking, “Because women are the best.” Left unsaid is the fact that so many Croatian males are away serving in the army. I tell them that I've noticed on the other side the Serbs aren't rebuilding. They're just living in the ruins, with their guns trained toward Croatia, waiting. “They're not rebuilding,” says one lady, matter-of-factly, “because they know they're done for.” Some of the other ladies nod, while others look down silently at the table.

Yup says. “Three of you are Serbs, isn't that right?” And three of the women beside me nod and look back down at the table. In the silence, they leave it to me to figure out how it comes about that three Serbian women are helping to rebuild a Croat's house. It can only be because they were married to Croats, have lived here all their lives, and find themselves now torn in two, as their village is. Then the Serbian woman beside me slowly begins to cry and a stillness descends over everyone. The Croatian women across the table look at her dispassionately, while she crumples into herself. “Cry, girl, cry,” says one, and reaches over and takes her hand.

WARLORDS

Back in 1989, we thought the new world opened up by the breaching of the Berlin Wall would be ruled by philosopher-kings, dissident heroes, and shipyard electricians. We looked forward to a new order of nation-states, released from the senile grip of the Soviets. We assumed that national self-determination had to mean freedom and that nationalism had to mean nation building. As usual, we were wrong. We hoped for order. We got pandemonium. In the name of nationalism, dozens of viable nation-states have been shattered beyond repair. In the name of state building, we have returned large portions of Europe to the pre-political chaos prior to the emergence of the modern state.

Large portions of the former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times: the warlords. They appear wherever nation-states disintegrate: in Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia. With their car phones, faxes, and exquisite personal weaponry, they look postmodern, but the reality is pure medieval.