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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 13KB | 275 lines

                                                                                THE BALKANS, Page 36

The Ruin of a Cat, the Ghost of a Dog


As the world wonders what to do about Serbia, a tour through
the terrified streets of Sarajevo shows that there is less and
less to save. The war has served its barbarous purpose.

By LANCE MORROW/SARAJEVO


    A line that turns up in Balkan propaganda catches the
spirit of things: People must decide whether they choose "to be
the carcass or the vulture."

    A fog rises this morning from the carcass of Sarajevo. The
city has a clinging, ragged aura about it. Fog seeps through
shattered buildings and seems to puff through the bullet holes
in windows.

    The vultures sit in the hills. Drunk on slivovitz and
nationalism, they fire through the intermittent radiance.

    Serb artillery shoots from the slopes on one side of the
city, and Muslim shoots from the other. Sometimes they throw
shells at each other. Sometimes they drop them into town. The
big shells arrive with a crisp, concussive WHUMP! But sniper
fire you hear only at the shooting end -- an irregular
background noise of flat, hard pops. You look up wildly at the
hills and imagine the snipers squinting through cross hairs.
You wonder what they may be able to see through the mist. You
pause to decode the physics: the sound you hear has been taking
its time, traveling a lot more slowly than the bullet itself.

    The Renault sedan scurries across the Miljacka River on the
little bridge where Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke
Franz Ferdinand in 1914. A brainless loop of history: the 20th
century, after all its adventures, has arrived back in Sarajevo
again, working on blood feuds and apocalypses. Lessons learned:
possibly none.

    Along the streets, we catch the haggard, unslept faces of
the besieged, a glimpse of their trudging, cringing body
English. Shops boarded up. The driver, who is, improbably, a
Russian, pitches the Renault along, overrevving and popping the
clutch, to the National Library. It is a splendid 19th century
Moorish building that has been hammered so often, so heavily,
that it is a gutted shell. In a city where more than 17,000
have been killed and 110,000 wounded since the siege began last
spring, it may be odd to be disturbed by the fate of a
building. But to murder a library is metaphysically sinister and
wanton. What dies, of course, is more than individual life --
the stuff of the civilization, the transmission of past to
future, goes up in smoke. It is not an accident.

    That is the deeper wiring. We ask the driver about mere
electricity. None for 17 days, he says. Do he and his wife
fetch water in buckets from a central supply somewhere?

    "My wife does not," he says. "She was killed by a shell 67
days ago." Stunned silence. I cannot see his face. We mutter,
"Sorry." The driver hurtles on.

    Elie Wiesel arranged this visit to parts of what used to be
Yugoslavia. He tells a press conference later that Sarajevo
looks to him like "a ghost city, a tragedy formed into a city,
like a city in Germany in 1945." He says, "I saw a cat that was a
ruin of a cat. I saw a dog that was a ghost of a dog." He says,
"I feel the time has come to weep."

    I am not moved to weep, but rather to feel anger and
disgust. This is not tragedy. The word tragedy would give this
business too much moral elevation. What has happened in Bosnia
is just squalor and barbarism -- the filthy work of liars and
cynics manipulating tribal prejudices, using atrocity
propaganda and old blood feuds to accomplish the unclean
political result of "ethnic cleansing." The displacement of a
million innocent civilians, turned into refugees, is not a
consequence of the war, but precisely the purpose of the war.
It has worked.

    Wiesel leads his delegation into the palace of Alija
Izetbegovic, Muslim President of the shrunken republic of
Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is only an archipelago of besieged
fortresses now. Wiesel has come to try to project a little of
his luminous sanity and decency in the war zone, to hold
everyone to a higher standard and possibly to make some of the
killers ashamed of what they are doing. In an ornate ceremonial
room painted toxic green, Wiesel, wonder rabbi out of
Auschwitz, sits side by side with Izetbegovic, whom the
nationalist Serbs see as the spearhead of a fundamentalist
Muslim state, the nightmare of Islamic conquest drifting up out
of the 14th century from the Battle of Kosovo, which locked the
Serbs into 500 years of Turkish rule. Gunshots outside. No one
even blinks. Part of the mise-en-scene.

    An elegant, doleful man named Miroslav Jancic, poet and
former diplomat, introduces himself. Sarajevo is a
concentration camp, he says in quiet anguish. "How do you eat?"
I ask. "Not well," he says. "This shirt used to fit perfectly."
He inserts two fingers between his neck and the buttoned white
shirt collar. Possibly the worst crime of the war -- worse even
than the ingenious atrocities that are the specialite de la
maison of the Balkans -- is the systematic starvation of entire
populations by the Serb fighters surrounding cities like Tuzla
and Srebrenica and Sarajevo.

    A surreal transition: in armored personnel carriers
supplied by the United Nations Protection Force, we make our
way from the besieged to the besiegers. We pass through the
lines, through checkpoints and no-man's-lands, to the
headquarters of Radovan Karadzic, the Serb nationalist
chieftain. Karadzic is a poet and, in civilian life, bizarrely
enough, a psychiatrist. A sleek, fattish man with an expensive
double-breasted suit, bushy eyebrows and flamboyantly styled
long hair. I try to conjure up a psychiatric session with this
healer. I see certain Hippocratic problems with a head doctor
who would lead his patients not out of murderous fantasies but
deeper into them. After you've spent a short time in Bosnia,
your mind seems to slip into hallucination.

    Karadzic says, with some accuracy, "This is not an
ideological war. This is just two close neighbors who hate each
other." Then the hallucinations begin. Elie Wiesel asks him why
he is besieging Sarajevo.

    "We are not besieging Sarajevo." Oh.

    Why did the Serbs destroy the National Library?

    "We did not destroy the National Library. They did. You can
see. It is ruined by fire from the ground floor up. We could not
have done this. They removed their books and burned the
building."

    Entry from notebook: God didn't make little green apples.
And it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.

    The drama has several simple, fierce motifs. One is Revenge
and Counter revenge (Newton's third law: For every atrocity
there must be an equal and opposite atrocity). A second motif
is Complete Denial (We did not do it; they did). Which yields
the third theme: Everyone Is a Victim, which means of course
that everyone is justified in committing any act. We-They. We
victim; They did it. The dynamics of rage and outrage
reverberate through the mountain forests and down the
generations.

    Karadzic, the Balkan commando-psychiatrist, explains, "This
war is a conof World War II -- the same families, the same
revenge." Everyone agrees about that. After the war, Tito and
communism merely suppressed the blood hatreds. Tribal memory
and the fierce dynamic of revenge went into a kind of holding
pattern for nearly 50 years. With the collapse of communism,
all the terrible deeds committed during World War II (and World
War I, for that matter) came streaming back, demanding
vengeance. The Croats' alliance with Hitler, and the savage
enthusiasm of the Croatian ultra-nationalist organization
Ustashi in slaughtering Serbs from 1941 to 1945, created a vast
accumulation of hatred and blood debts. A Serb will say,
"Croats are a genocide people."

    Dusko Zavisic, a young Serb photographer who has escaped
from Sarajevo, told me that as a boy he was taken to visit the
museum at the World War II Croatian concentration camp at
Jasenovac.