It's 4:20 p.m.
I'm standing over the Olympic soccer stadium in Sarajevo. From
one goal post to the other are graves-headstones of various sizes
and shapes, most unmarked. There is an IFOR base where the concession
stands once stood, with tanks, humvees, jeeps, and corrugated
metal Quonset hut barracks. The graves are offside, I think. They
go on up the hill.
Almost as soon as we arrive
at the stadium the word comes that we must leave immediately for
the airport to "meet the Serbs." Father Ivo Markovic,
our host in Sarajevo, has arranged the meeting. Our group divides,
some staying on at the stadium, some racing to the airport for
the 4:30 p.m. rendezvous. I go for "the Serbs."
On the way we pass the bombed
Franciscan Theological School where Father Ivo was taken prisoner
and Sister Isadora served tea to her captors. We are detoured
at the hole in the road where Asim Fazzic, who I met earlier at
the Bread of St. Anthony soup kitchen, was shelled and pinned
under machine gun fire one morning on his way to work. He ran
the printing press for the Oslobodenje newspaper for 41
years until his injuries stopped him. We near the airport where
a few lucky ones escaped the siege of Sarajevo through the tunnel
under the tarmac; most were shot on the runway by NATO troops
or others under orders to hold the line.
It's 4:40 pm. We arrive at
a police installation just past the airport. Father Ivo is there.
(His car now has "new" license plates so as not to attract
unwanted attention.) We are not just to "meet the Serbs,"
but to be escorted to Pale-the government stronghold of the provisional
Republika Srpska and home of Radovan Karadzic, accused by the
International Criminal Tribunal of "almost unparalleled acts
of cruelty."
Our car is assigned a military
guard for the ride up Jajolina Mountain. He introduces himself
as "Tyson, like Mike Tyson." He's in his mid-30s, short-cropped
sandy brown hair, flat forest green eyes, wearing the uniform
of the Serb Special Forces. He is very tense.
Our interpreter is 23-year-old
Anesa, a Muslim woman who has just returned to her family in Sarajevo
after four years as a refugee. She didn't really think of herself
as Muslim until seven years ago when the politicians began drawing
such distinctions. Tyson does not know that Anesa is Muslim. Father
Ivo is afraid that her slight accent will give her away.
Tyson tells us that he is
a professional policeman who went into the security forces when
he was 14. He says that when the war ends he will remain in the
military, but he will never work for any federation that includes
Muslims. He says, "Croats and Serbs have a long history together
in this land, but Muslims don't belong here."
The road to Pale takes us
through mountains that are still pristine with old-growth forests
and clear waterfalls, past the old bobsled track, the Olympic
village, and beautiful mountain-cabin homes. In Sarajevo below,
the trees were clear-cut for firewood or grave markers. Tyson
says that someday he would like to ski up here again and that
maybe it could be open to Croats too, "but Muslims never,
because dead heads are dead heads." In other words, the only
good Muslim is a dead Muslim.
Anesa translates all of this.
Tyson continues speaking to Father Ivo: "If you were a Muslim,
I wouldn't sit in this car with you right now. Muslims aren't
really anything, because they didn't even have a nationality until
Tito gave them one in 1974." (Before 1974, in order to vote,
Yugoslavians had to declare themselves Serb, Croat, or Undecided.)
Tyson tells us that his conscience is clear; that he is a good
soldier because he never killed a woman, child, or old person;
and that he has nothing personal against Muslims, but he can't
ever be around them.
Tyson tells another story
to illustrate his point. "During one of the last battles
in Sarajevo, we were digging trenches. The Croat and Serb units
worked together for five days, drinking coffee and digging each
others' trenches, even though we were enemies. The point is that
Serbs and Croats can understand each other. The Croats knew when
to shoot and when not to shoot. But Muslims are stupid like cattle.
They shoot all the time without stopping. If the Serbs could kill
the Muslims with stones there would not be enough stones in the
whole world to do this!"
Anesa continues translating
for Tyson: "I realized in the fighting how great a human
being's limits are. Many times I had to stay in my bunker for
48 or 72 hours just shooting my machine gun in the rain and snow."
After an hour on the road,
we approach Pale, capital of the Bosnian Serb republic. Tyson
becomes quiet again and agitated, perhaps afraid he has said too
much. He adjusts his beret. When we reach the headquarters he
hops from the car and salutes the officer approaching us, explaining
that we are a religious group from the United States here to meet
with the minister of religion. I ask to take Tyson's picture but
he covers the camera. Anesa tells me that he is probably on "the
list" for war crimes, and that's why he won't let me take
his picture or give us his real name.
We are escorted to an office
building, into a large plush meeting room. Tyson stays with the
car. As the Sniper Alley graffiti in Sarajevo puts it, "Welcome
to hell."
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1991,
I spent many mornings in my kitchen crying over the newspaper.
Each article I read brought me to tears as the war in the former
Yugoslavia escalated. From the very beginning, this war has been
steeped in religious imagery-some authentic, some perverse.
I read stories of white Orthodox
crosses painted on the front doors of Serb households so advancing
soldiers would know which houses to "pass over." There
were also houses marked with the Muslim crescent and the Roman
cross.
At the same time, in Sarajevo,
baking bread became a symbol of freedom and publishing the daily
Oslobodenje newspaper one of resistance. Sarajevans snuck
through enemy blockades, driving the treacherous mountain roads
at night without headlights, crossing sniper lines on foot, just
to smuggle flour, salt, maybe yeast, into the city. Workers at
Oslobodenje, from the publisher and editors to the men
who ran the printing presses, lived for weeks together in the
basement of the gleaming silver office building that was shelled
to the ground. Many lost their lives, or their minds, for the
power of the written word.
For years I have prayed over
the newspaper for nameless heroes of faith in Sarajevo and throughout
Bosnia, and for the nameless gray devils who slaughtered their
neighbors and used the rape of women as a message of war. What
did you go out into the wilderness to see? Jesus asked the crowd
on the Jordan. I guess I went to Bosnia to meet the sinners and
the saints, to see if they were at all like me.
IN PALE, WE MEET Mr. Davidovic,
a former history teacher who is appointed by the Serbian Orthodox
Church to fill the position of minister of religion for the new
Bosnian Serb republic. His job, he says, is to coordinate the
functions of the state with other religious institutions and,
particularly, to further religious education in the schools.
"Right now in the Republika
Srpska religious education is an obligation, treated the same
as mathematics, physics, history. As a ministry, we invite all
religious communities to develop religious education programs
and provide professors to teach these programs." (Note that
this is in the "ethnically pure" Bosnian Serb republic.)
In Pale, we also meet with
one of the Serbian Orthodox religious leaders, Metropolitan Nikolai.
"All Balkan wars are imported," he tells us. "The
importation of communism started everything. In 1945, the Western
world and America abandoned us to communism by making deals with
Stalin. Now for 50 years Serbs, Croats, and Muslims have been
forced to live together. It had to burst out!
"After World War II,
Europe gave birth to three evil children-Stalinism, Nietzscheism,
and Marxism. These three have put the whole world into hell. Intellectuals
accepted these children and now they are growing up, pushing religion
and spirituality to the margins. Now the state must intervene
to protect the church and institute a pedagogic process against
these evils. We must re-educate our children to erase the last
50 years.
"Before the religious
education ministries in our schools, all the children were atheists,
not believers in God. Now, three years later, the students are
saying that these classes are very good, and they must struggle
with the fact that their parents are still atheists. One little
girl came home from school and wrote on her bedroom door 'No Unbelievers
Allowed ' as a message to her parents. This is one good example
of how we are beginning the process of mental and spiritual change.
Our children are learning morality."
At the end of our interview,
the metropolitan leads us in prayer for deeper mutual understanding
between the faiths. I pray for warmth in a room chilled by fear.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN church
and state is one of the fundamental questions in the Bosnian conflict
and has been historically (see "A Legacy of History and Hatred,"
April 1993, by Elizabeth Holler). The Bosnian Croats are generally
allied with the Roman Catholic Church and the despicable history
of Vatican support for Nazi forces, resulting in the formation
of the Croatian Ustashe or death squads. Bosnian Serbs are allied
with Eastern Orthodox Christianity, specifically the Serbian Orthodox
Church based in Belgrade which, in many cases, allowed itself
to be used as a violent chastening rod for the communist regime.
The Muslims (sometimes referred
to as Bosniacs) have few religious alliances outside of Bosnia.
Prior to this war, they were not particularly tied to the Islamic
East; like most Bosnians, they thought of themselves as European.
However, they are frightened of becoming a people without a country.
As one Muslim man put it, "If the Serbs have Serbia, and
the Croats have Croatia, then we Muslims must have Bosnia!"
We take up this question
of religious dialogue and the relationship between church and
state with Islamic theologian Dr. Adnan Silajdzic in a coffeehouse
in the Muslim quarter of old Sarajevo (see "Islam on the
Verge"). "We must not fall back on simplistic answers
to complex issues," he says. "Everything happening in
Bosnia must be considered in the context of our modern world.
It is impossible to talk about what is happening in Bosnia without
also talking about neo-Nazis in Paris and church burnings in America,
because we are now a global civilization.
"We live in a very unsafe
world where the human has lost personal identity. This loss breeds
violence to reclaim identity, which is why world religions have
to dialogue. Each religion has its own ethic for addressing these
questions.
"For Bosnia to survive,
and these are also lessons for the West, we must have multicultural
and religious institutions where people of different faiths can
come to know each other, gain understanding about the other, and
develop a desire to be with those who are different from us-until
the dreams of the other become our dreams too."
ALL OVER BOSNIA we see these
dreams struggling for wings. In Bugonjo, there is a dim wooden
room with one long bench and a few crates. This is "Dobrotvor,"
the Serb ministry of charity serving mainly the elderly in this
now predominantly Muslim town. Down the street is the Franciscan
Church of St. Anthony where they have two church cars parked out
front, one of which is a hearse. But through the school windows
you can hear the sounds of children practicing their scales on
a donated piano; and Muslims, Serbs, and Croats line up for the
distribution of food from the church garage and for health care
at the clinic.
And in Central Bosnia's Rama
Valley, there is a 15th-century Franciscan monastery that has
become a wellspring of healing and a place where the gospel can
be dreamt again in Bosnia. The monastery (founded some 200 years
after Francis walked from Assisi through Bosnia to negotiate peace
with a Turkish sultan) was saved in 1968 from a Communist hydroelectric
project when one of the brothers negotiated with the engineers
to keep the water level of the new dam four meters lower than
planned. The monastery now sits like a jewel in the lake, surrounded
by foothills of the Dinaric Alps.
In 1992, five days before
Easter, there was news that Serb partisans would soon be shelling
Rama from the hills. Ninety percent of the population evacuated
the valley, migrating to supposed safety. The Franciscan prior,
Father Mijo Dzolan, with the other sisters and brothers at the
monastery, decided that as long as there were even a handful of
people left in the valley the Franciscans would stay. The Serbs
never shelled.
Two months later, Father
Mijo asked on the local TV station that the Rama community come
home and live in their valley. The whole population returned and
stayed for the duration of the war, despite severe shelling and
massacres by both Muslims and Serbs.
The people of Rama are a
beacon to all of Bosnia and the world. Their witness calls us
to the foundations of love, the practicality of nonviolence, and
the hope of pluralism. The Franciscans now want the monastery
to serve as a retreat site for soldiers, civilians, and children
suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome from all sides of
the war.
NOW IT IS 7:30 P.M., and we
are heading back down Mt. Jajolina. Tyson accompanies us again,
but he seems less rigid, more willing to talk personally with
Father Ivo about the war. Tyson is concerned about ecological
disaster an
d about the cancer rate in this area in five years,
because of "all the shelling, the poisons, poured into the
land and the water."
He shows us the bunkers from
which Serb soldiers shelled Sarajevo. He begins to tell Ivo how
he can't sleep at night, that he doesn't know how to heal after
such an experience. In the Special Forces they take no prisoners.
Father Ivo speaks to him about the Vietnam Syndrome, but Tyson
tells him that this experience is different: "This is the
Sarajevo Syndrome, because we had to defend our own homes, shell
our city, kill our own neighbors."
Tyson tells us of the number
of times he almost died. Once a grenade landed between his legs
but didn't explode. Once dynamite landed right next to him but
didn't explode. Once a bullet went right next to his ear but didn't
graze him. He says this is a sign that he is still a good man.
Ivo tells him that right now he is a young man and can deal with
his terrors but that without help they will get worse. Tyson says
that he doesn't drink. Ivo tells him that it is good he doesn't
drink because drinking would completely destroy him now. The car
is quiet for a long time.
At the bottom of the mountain,
I ask Tyson if he has a message for people in the United States.
He tells me he only has limited knowledge of the United States,
just what he reads in the newspapers. But he does say this: "America,
keep your peace. You don't know how precious it is and how terrible
is war."
Bosnia has two faces. The
first is the face of distrust born from the history of resisting
assimilation, of fighting against each side to colonize the other.
The second face is a very fine face of music, culture, and art
born of rich heritages, deep roots in the land, and sensitive
hearts. The first face is what the politicians use to conjure
up war. The second face is the one that will save Bosnia.
Rose Marie Berger, a pastor
of Sojourners Community in Washington, D.C., went to Bosnia in
June 1996 on a "reverse pilgrimage" hosted by the Ministry
of Money. Earlier pilgrimages resulted in the development of the
Rama Project, focused on rebuilding schools and clinics in the
Rama Valley. For more information about the Rama Project, contact
the coordinator, Diana L. Chambers, at (202) 328-7312.
Read other articles by:
Berger, Rose Marie
|
Subscribe to Sojourners today at a special introductory price and save $10 off the basic rate! Click here for details.
WE WANT TO HEAR from you! Click here to share your views. Or write to "Letters," Sojourners, 3333 14th St. NW, Suite 200, Washington DC 20010; fax (202) 328-8757. Please include your name, address, and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for space and clarity.
|
|
