Rose of Sarajevo (10 page)

YNA, the fourth-biggest army in Europe, was in a sorry state. Deserters were leaving in droves, among them non-Serbian soldiers who didn’t want to fight, and Serbs who weren’t ultranationalists. Discipline was virtually nonexistent, and the chain of command was broken. It was not clear who was leading and who was following. That’s how the people of Vukovar had been able to continue to resist an army that was far more formidable on paper than on the battlefield.

After heroically engaging the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, Vukovar finally fell. The Vukovar police identified the bodies of some five hundred civilians alone, and the hospitals were overflowing with the wounded. The Croatians living in Vukovar accused Zagreb of failing to come to their aid and suspected Tudjman had sacrificed them in an effort to sway international opinion.

Nimeta studied the latest list of casualties and fatalities. Stefan Stefanoviç had been lightly wounded, treated at Vukovar Hospital, and discharged.

Dubrovnik was now under Serbian fire, artillery riddling the picturesque city. When the handful of soldiers from the Croatian National Guard charged with defending Dubrovnik and its outskirts turned tail and fled, YNA swept into the area unopposed, pillaging villages and towns one by one, then burning down the houses they’d pillaged as they advanced. The defense of Dubrovnik fell to a small group of National Guard soldiers. Taking up positions in the old city fortress, they were determined to fight to the end.

Ivan asked Nimeta to travel to Dubrovnik to report on the latest upheaval. The Hotel Argentina, which had become famous during the ongoing war, was full of foreign correspondents and delegates from the EU. And that was where Ivan wanted Nimeta to stay. Burhan didn’t normally get involved in his wife’s business affairs, but he finally exploded.

“We’re going home, Nimeta. Ivan can find himself a new war correspondent.”

“He didn’t want to send me to Croatia, Burhan. In order to find you I—”

“All right. But we’ve been gone for months. It’s time for us to go home. Mate can go to Dubrovnik.”

Nimeta was taken aback by Burhan’s decisive tone, but she didn’t push him. They prepared to head to Sarajevo, from which they would travel to Bosnia with a group of journalists two days later.

As they were having a drink at the bar on their last night in Zagreb, Burhan leaned toward his wife, whose back was to the door, and said, “Look at that guy who just came in. Isn’t he a journalist friend of yours?” Nimeta turned round and looked. Several men were standing at the entrance to the bar, talking to the waiter, one of whom was Stefan. Her husband had stood up and was beckoning to Stefan to join them. Stefan left his friend and limped over to their table. He shook Burhan’s hand before he greeted Nimeta, who was riveted to her seat. Stefan leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“Won’t you have a drink with us?” Burhan asked.

Stefan pulled out a chair and sat down. “How’s it going, Burhan? Nimeta was worried about you, but it seems that you’re fine.”

Stefan had lost weight and looked at least ten years older.

“Yes, we’re finally going home tomorrow,” Burhan said.

“Stefan, how are
you
?” Nimeta asked, a slight quaver in her voice. “I heard you were wounded.”

“Who would make up gossip like that?” Stefan laughed. “After what I’ve seen, I’d be ashamed to say I was wounded.”

“Were you fighting?” Burhan asked.

“I was in Vukovar. Believe me, when that was over, I was completely done in every sense of the word. I’m headed back to Dubrovnik tomorrow.”

“Back into battle?” Burhan asked, a note of respect creeping into his voice.

“Yes,” Stefan said. He downed the glass placed before him and turned to Nimeta. “I’ve escaped death this time, but there will still be plenty of opportunities.”

When Nimeta didn’t respond, Burhan jumped in and said, “God forbid.”

“There are moments when death is preferable to life,” Stefan said. “War is the most vile and horrific thing that can happen to a man.”

Thanking them for the drink, he got up. As he shook Burhan’s hand and made his farewells, he said, “You’re a lucky man.”

Nimeta kept her eyes on the floor.

Burhan laughed bitterly and said, “My luck won’t last long. Our turn’s coming up.”

Nimeta summoned the strength to stand up and take Stefan’s hand.

“Godspeed, Stefan,” she said in a low voice. “May God watch over you.”

She kissed him on his sallow cheek. The corner of her eye glistened.

After Stefan had walked away, they ordered another drink.

“Nimeta, I can see how upsetting that must be,” Burhan said. “It can’t be easy to send a colleague off to war.” When Nimeta didn’t say anything, Burhan continued. “Your friend said I was lucky but, like I told him, it’ll be our turn soon enough.”

And it soon was. The Serbian and Croatian leaders had agreed on only one thing: Bosnia and Herzegovina would be partitioned between them. Although Burhan couldn’t have known that, his instincts were sound.

SHIRT OF FLAME

September 1991 to March 1992

As war raged in Croatia, Nimeta and Burhan made it safely to Sarajevo, a city helplessly awaiting its fate like a sacrificial lamb. The people of Bosnia were tense but calm. With a fatalism that might be peculiar to Islam, they gravely and patiently waited for disaster to strike.

President Alija Izetbegović was doing everything in his power to delay international recognition of the separatist republics of Croatia and Slovenia. The Bosnian president was well aware that such premature recognition would put Bosnia in a difficult spot. Bosnia would have no choice but to secede from Yugoslavia the moment Croatian and Slovenian independence were recognized, thereby risking civil war with the ethnic Serbs living within the borders of Bosnia. The only alternative would be to remain a part of the Yugoslavian federation, which would mean being under the Serbian fist, along with Kosovo, Vojvodina,, and Montenegro.

There was only one other person who shared Izetbegović’s concern: Lord Carrington, the man charged with bringing peace to Yugoslavia. Margaret Thatcher’s first foreign minister, Lord Carrington had a record of successful diplomatic operations. When Hans van den Broek, then chairman of the EU Council of Foreign Ministers, asked Lord Carrington to come up with a peace plan for Yugoslavia within two months, the British foreign minister had chuckled to himself. Only a fool would have believed that peace was possible within two months, and Lord Carrington was no fool. Furthermore, at his first meeting with Tudjman and Milošević, he’d immediately seen the map taking shape in their minds.

Neither the Serbs nor the Croats were particularly upset about Slovenia’s separation from Yugoslavia. They were too busy calculating how they would carve up what remained of Yugoslavia once they themselves declared independence. Carrington knew that without careful consideration, planning, and mutual approval from the remaining republics, official recognition of Croatia and Slovenia on an international platform would lead to all of Yugoslavia being divided between Croatia and Serbia—as well as to an end to the aspirations of the other peoples of Yugoslavia. The only republic able to evade disaster would be Slovenia, because it was populated exclusively by Slovenians.

Meanwhile, Radovan Karadžić, who realized that Bosnia and Herzegovina would have no choice but to eventually declare its independence, had begun to systematically implement in Bosnia and Herzegovina the tactics then being used in Croatia. The Serb Volunteer Guard under his control, Arkan’s Tigers, were now battle hardened. Karadžić knew from experience that the stronger side almost always struck first and won. Some things never changed, even in the twentieth century.

In early September, the Bosnian Serbs asked the federal army to protect the four “autonomous” regions they themselves had declared. This time, they apparently feared not the fascist Croats but the fanatical Muslim Bosnians. The army wasted no time in responding to this dubious request. By the end of the month, troops armed with heavy artillery had surrounded the regions in Bosnia and Herzegovina that the Serbs had designated as “Serbian,” not only effectively creating a state within a state but using these same territories as a base from which to attack Croatia.

Fed up with the Serbs’ games, Alija Izetbegović called on parliament to declare Bosnia’s neutrality on September 14. In response, Radovan Karadžić accused the Bosnian president of assisting the “bloodsucking Croats,” and the Serbian delegates walked out and boycotted the vote. Karadžić continued to busily line up all the pawns that would transform Croatia into a bloodbath. Ever more inflammatory propaganda was being broadcast in the Serbian autonomous regions within Bosnia, ludicrous conflicts were being deliberately provoked and then quelled with the help of the federal army, and Serbian civilians were openly being armed to the teet
h . . .
The Serbs had done their homework well.

But they weren’t finished yet.

Izetbegović and all of the heads of the other republics had approved the plan drawn up by Lord Carrington, which offered equal protection to all of the republics, with full recognition of their ethnic groups, languages, religions, education, and flags. Even Milošević had initially appeared to favor the plan—even the Republic of Montenegro, which always followed Milošević’s lead, had approved of the Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan—but he was merely biding his time. On October 18 he did an about-face and emphatically rejected it.

Milošević was in something of a quandary. He wanted all ethnic Serbs living in the various republics to be consolidated in a single Serbian state, and he did not want any Serb anywhere to be relegated to minority status. Milošević had risen to power by securing rights for the Kosovo Serbs. But under the Carrington-Cutileiro peace plan, the same rights he had demanded for the Serbs would be extended to the Albanians and all others as well. So he rejected the plan.

Although time was passing, there had been no progress in securing peace for Yugoslavia. Milošević had found an excuse to turn down every proposal put before him. Finally, former US secretary of state Cyrus Vance joined the commission and attempted to hammer out a deal. Vance put a new proposal on the table: a UN peace force. Even Serbia, which had rejected the idea of a peace force out of hand, seemed to be warming to the idea when another obstacle emerged: Germany.

In early December, Tudjman had traveled to Germany and met with Prime Minister Kohl and Foreign Minister Genscher. Germany, whose antipathy toward the Serbs has been an open secret since World War II, ignored Carrington and threw its full support behind Tudjman. While Britain and America were being cautious about recognizing Croatian independence, Germany guaranteed that it would recognize this new state.

During that period, Ivan did some research into countries supporting Bosnia and came up with the idea of doing a program designed to lift the spirits of the Bosnians. Nimeta was presented with an offer she couldn’t refuse. She was to visit Ankara for three days, where she’d meet with the Turkish prime minister and foreign minister, and then travel to several major cities around Turkey to sound out the public.

Nimeta was in high spirits when she went home that day. “The most amazing opportunity has come up, Burhan,” she said when her husband got home. “Ivan wants to send me to Turkey. You haven’t got much work these days. And the children will soon be out of school for the New Year’s break.”

Burhan did indeed have a great deal of time on his hands. Construction, along with most other sectors, had come to a standstill in Bosnia. Other than stocking up on a few staples at the corner store and the butcher, nobody was doing any shopping. In fact, nothing was being bought, sold, or produced. Hearts in their mouths, the Bosnians were simply waiting for the first bullet or bomb. Not hesitating for a moment, Burhan said, “All right, let’s go.”

Nimeta clapped her hands like a delighted child, and her delight soon spread to Fiko and Hana. The children were unable to contain their joy at the prospect of visiting this fairy-tale land they’d heard tales of from their elders. They had long fantasized about this foreign place where half of their family now lived.

“I’d like to come too,” Raziyanım announced. “I haven’t been to Istanbul for nearly twenty years.”

“But Grandma, who’ll look after Bozo?” Hana asked.

“Am I your cat sitter?” Raziyanım retorted.

“We’ll leave Bozo with Azra,” Nimeta said. “I’ve looked after her dog a million times when she’s been away.”

“Good then. Now that you’ve found a nanny for Bozo, I’m coming too.”

“Mother, keep in mind that I’ve got to go to Ankara for a few days. You’ll have to stay in Istanbul with Burhan and the kids.”

“I’m going to find my relatives and stay with them,” Raziyanım said.

“How can you possibly expect to find any of your relatives? God only knows where they’ve ended up after all this time. And they’ll undoubtedly be busy with their lives anyway.”

“Unfortunately, your generation has forgotten the meaning of family,” Raziyanım said. “It used to be that a relative was a relative, even if you hadn’t seen them for forty years. Blood really was thicker than water. And let me tell you something else, Nimeta: if I find my great-aunt’s children, I plan to visit Bursa as well.”

“Visit where?”

“Bursa. It was the first city my relatives settled in when they migrated. They say it’s a lot like Sarajevo. At the foot of a snowcapped mountain, the same marketplaces, the same domes—”

“Mother, don’t be silly. Even if you manage to track down their addresses, the cities, the houses, even the marketplaces have all changed. People change too. Do you really plan to just show up at the door of complete strangers?”

“They’re family.”

“How will you even speak to them? Do you expect them to understand your Turkish, or to know Bosnian?”

Raziyanım ignored the question. “I won’t be staying in a hotel in Istanbul; I’ll be staying with my relatives. In the mansion in Erenköy.”

Nimeta was happy to leave behind—if only for a brief time—her anxious countrymen and their dispirited conversations in her gloomy country that was so fatalistically awaiting war. Her family hadn’t gone on a trip together for ages. Even just a week away with the kids would be a return to the carefree, happy days of before. She knew, however, deep down that nothing was the same—indeed, that nothing would ever be the same. Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Sarajevo were changing fast.

Even Istanbul wasn’t what it had once been. Raziyanım looked in vain for the car ferries in which they’d waited in line for hours the last time they’d visited the city. A fairy-tale city, it stretched out in all its grandeur along the shimmering blue waters of the Bosphorus, which flowed beneath a pair of imposing bridges linking Europe to Anatolia.

When Nimeta had first visited Istanbul as a girl, they’d been able to fish in the Bosphorus by casting their lines directly from the balcony of their relatives’ home in Arnavutköy. She wanted Fiko and Hana to see this house perched on the water, but it was no longer on the coast. The sea was gone. The cool indigo seawater that had shattered like shards of crystal when you jumped into it was gone and had been replaced by the kind of murky, dirty water you’d find in any port city in the world. When they went to Erenköy, there was no trace of the leafy gardens or the mansion where they’d spent their summers. The houses, the pines, and the plane trees had been displaced by towering concrete apartment blocks. Raziyanım’s relatives had moved from the many-roomed mansion with its hand-carved decorations on the high wooden ceilings to a housing estate in one of the newly developed neighborhoods springing up across the city—to an apartment that didn’t even have guest rooms. Young people spent hours in frenzied traffic to reach offices where they worked at a frenzied pace. Too timid to plunge into the chaotic daily life of the city, the very elderly watched from the windows of their homes as life streamed by. For Raziyanım’s peers, the hosting of guests, which had once been one of life’s greatest pleasures, had turned into a chore.

Nimeta and Burhan checked into a newly restored hotel located on the site of a former mansion in the historic district of Sultanahmet so that their children would be able to see the nearby Ottoman monuments and architectural masterpieces.

“Salih Zeki and Gül Hanım had a mansion surrounded by a garden somewhere around here,” Raziyanım said.

“Mother, if Salih Zeki and Gül Hanım are still alive, they’ve probably celebrated their hundred-and-thirtieth birthdays by now,” Nimeta said. “I’m sure they’d be overjoyed to see you if they could recognize you, though.”

“Stop talking nonsense. They’ve got children and grandchildren. At least one of their descendants must be living in that house.”

Nimeta followed her mother as she set off to locate the old mansion in the street behind Ibrahim Pasha Palace. Raziyanım stopped in front of the derelict building on the corner. Its facade still bore traces of pink paint.

“It was here,” she said.

A few birds took wing from their perches on the eaves of the gutted building. Raziyanım marched into the small grocery store on the opposite corner. She inquired first in English, then German.

“Tourist? You want carpet? Coca-Cola?” the grocer asked.

“Mother, please. Just let it go,” Nimeta pleaded.

Gesturing toward the ruined house, Raziyanım produced a few words in broken, heavily accented Turkish: “Bosnian family here? That house? Salih Zeki Bey and Gül Hanım from Sarajev
o . . .
Saadet Hanım?”

“Ah,” said the grocer. “You’re asking about the old owners of that house. They died a long, long time ago.” He wagged his cupped hand back and forth several times to indicate just how many years had passed. “Their daughter, Saadet Hanım, is dead too. The grandchildren sold the house. The new owner was going to turn it into a hotel but couldn’t. Seems there’s an antique city under the foundation or something.”

“Let’s get going, Mother,” Nimeta said. “We’ll check the phone book back in the hotel. We’ll call all the Kulins we find, all right?”

That evening they found two Kulins listed in the directory, but Raziyanım changed her mind at the last minute, saying, “I’ve never met the grandchildren. I don’t know how they’d welcome me.”