Idajevo

Former Yugoslavia is in me. It has been since the 1984 Winter Olympics, the first clunky and cheap Yugo in my town, the Marxist econ professor going on about worker self-management, the B-movie "Force 10 from Navarone." I'm a fool for the place.

I first went to former Yugoslavia in December of 1993. I was more hindrance than help, a tourist in other people's misery. The border post between Slovenia and Croatia was backed up with supply trucks and donated old ambulances. The ship from Rijeka to Split held an equal number of aid workers and "volunteers," as many with NGO's as with the HVO. In Split I saw the UN blue berets on holiday, and the white mountains farther inland. I did not go farther inland or further down the coast. In shame I booked the next passage to Italy.

My second trip was in January and February of 2002: Zagreb and Belgrade, Sarajevo and Vukovar. I was based in Brčko as a guest of the Agency for Legal Aid, paid for by CEELI - the Central European and Eurasian Law Initiative. Brčko was a beacon for the rule of law. I was supposed to be a "legal expert" to the Kancelarija - in fact I was more of an office mascot. I will always admire the colleagues I met there, for the wounds they bore without losing sight of their commitment to a government of laws, and a future free of torture and ethnic hatred. I can think of a few million of my countrymen who abandoned those values in a heartbeat, without experiencing a scintilla of the horrors personally endured by my friends, the non-nationalist lawyers - Serb, Croat, and Bosniak - of Brčko District.

The third trip in May 2003 was also courtesy of CEELI, weekdays in Sarajevo, with one weekend training lawyers on Bijelasnica, another weekend on the road back to Brčko. It cheered me to enjoy Marko's hospitality again, now moved across the river from Gunja, and to see the new construction and the progress on the restoration of the library. I saw the new courthouse and the fine new offices of the Kancelarija. At the symposium I saw many of my old colleagues: Safet, Predrag, especially my wonderful interpreter Dubravka. On the way back to Sarajevo we followed the Sava and the beautiful gorge of the Drina via Zvornik, lunching on Serbian home cooking in Bijeljina on the way.

We were hosted in Bijeljina by the parents of one of the Sarajevo CEELI lawyers, whose family had relocated there from Grbavica toward the end of the war (under less-than voluntary circumstances which you may recall). I thought about a long walk I took above Sarajevo in 2002, from Pansion Čobanija up past the Catholic church by the brewery, east to a small Muslim cemetery, then back west past the Jewish cemetery and down through Grbavica and across the Miljacka.

I'd been thinking a lot about snipers that day, and I find that I think about them still. Before the trip that winter, I bought Joe Sacco's "Safe Area Goražde." I'd recommend it, but with its images of the bodies of child victims of the war, and a child of my own back in Idaho, I didn't want to bring it home. I sent it on to a old girlfriend who worked then as a prosecutor for the ICTY. When I mailed it to The Hague from the post office downtown, the clerk who inspected it cut the corner of wrapping paper just where the book displayed the fleur-de-lys. I cringed a moment, then the clerk slathered the book with the stamps of the Republika Srpska.

I knew the arguments, that all the deaths were Alija's fault, or Hans-Dietrich Genscher's, or Tito's himself. I couldn't square them with the individual brain, the individual nerve impulses, from the eyeball sighting the child in the scope to the squeezing of the trigger finger. I probably think about this more than is productive. Being a public defender by trade and inclination, and having argued for mercy for other murderers, I've tried to understand the sniper's reasons:

The lawyer had only just finished his cheese cream, and was sincerely grieved from what he had seen, heard and realized. His conscience prevented him from accept the fact that such beastly behavior could go on, and, had not be for various reasons (some real, some not) maybe he would not have restricted himself to try to understand.

"You see" he said "there must be something absolute on this earth, something that everyone who has a shred of decency would refuse to do. How can somebody hide himself for hours behind a rifle waiting only for a child to walk on the wrong side of the sidewalk?"

The man from Bijelijna took a quick drag on his cigarette and replied: "How would you know if that boy carries an hand grenade in his pocket? And how many times there was a knife buried under an old woman's gowns?"

"In that case I cannot accept the risk of murdering an innocent; I have the duty to accept the risk of dying myself, instead."

The man from Bijelijna sighed: "You may die all right, but they ordered that nobody can pass on that street, and if you disobey your orders, for whatever reason, maybe your folk will die too, and there is innocent people amongst them also. You must understand the Sniper's reasons."

A silence ensued, sudden and a lot less dramatic than their words. Then the Man from Bijelijna took his accordion and started to play a love song.

I suppose I might accept it, but I can't forgive it. This month they discovered more bodies in Brčko District. The wounds are still open. And I still retain some empathy, and some imagination.

One Friday night Judge Terry Shupe and I were walking from the Tito barracks and OHR back to the Hotel Posavina, our home in Brčko and one of several killing sites in the war. The mosque on that side of the Brka had yet to be rebuilt, and the moonlight fell on burned-out storefronts and Arkan graffiti. As we crossed over the pedestrian bridge, we both stopped to hear a faint singing wafting from the southwest: the azan, the call to prayer.

They were not all killed. The ideal is not dead. I have been to former Yugoslavia three times, and I'm sad that it does not seem that I will have a chance to return any time soon. I have moved from a town where I regularly could see many people from there, practice the jezik, and buy kajmak and ćevapčići to a town where I can't. I still have a jar of ajvar in the fridge, a big bag of Vegeta in my cupboard, and the lands of the south Slavs in my heart. It's been frustrating to lose my ability in their languages and my ties to their cultures, and hard to maintain this blog. I wish continued peace to my friends and all the people of that tormented place, as they will remain in me.

Christmas greetings, blessed Bajram, and Happy New Year to you. This blog is now closed.