New bridges, old divides
Salil Tripathi
Among the most heart-rending sights I have come across was in 2003, on the way from Zenica in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Banja Luka, the largest city in Republika Srpska. The federation and the republic are two parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina right next to each other, like neighbours in unhappy proximity forced to reconcile. Resentments remained and simmered; they had no choice but to stay where they were.
The jagged boundary between the two was drawn at the Dayton Accord of 1995, from the debris of the war in Yugoslavia, with the Serb part forming the republic, surrounding the older federation from all sides, allowing only for a small access to the sea in the south. Together, the federation and the republic formed the state Bosnia and Herzegovina. That awkwardly shaped map of nations within a nation was an attempt to rebuild a shattered state; but what the men and women were doing that afternoon in that old airport hangar was far more poignant.
They were trying to categorize the skeletal remains and bones they had uncovered in the many mass graves that peacekeepers and international organizations kept stumbling upon in the aftermath of the war. They identified the body parts and laid them neatly to put together the shape of a human being again. Another lot of experts worked in the fields, looking for and deactivating landminesthe weapon that a US army veteran once described to me as the soldier that never fails, never sleeps, lying in wait to blow up someone, even if it is years after the conflict.
Assembling such skeletal remains has two purposesone is to try to find out how people had died in death camps, in order to build evidence that prosecutors could use in their cases against the perpetrators. The other is to identify the remains, and pass those on to relatives and survivors, who hoped to bring a dignified end to the lives of their loved ones. Both roles are necessary; the experts I met were performing the more wrenching task of bringing many personal tragedies to some closure. They were trying to make a whole from shattered partsbut what kind of a whole was it?
I had reached these parts a few years after the war had ended, and the worst atrocities were at least a decade old. I had gone there to listen to those stories and write about the continued discrimination against returning refugees who belonged to a different faith, a practice that threatened to revive the hatreds that had torn this region apart. I travelled through villages and cities with crumbling bridges, pockmarked buildings, broken windows and sepulchral dance halls where there was nobody left to dance
The Bosnian war of 1992-95 showed what happens when there is no collective action. In the case of Yugoslavia, the failure was colossal, as it had been in the case of Rwanda in the same decade. I recall the faces of the brave survivors I met near Manjaca, in Prijedor, in Banja Luka, and in Sanski Most (which is in the federation); men and women rebuilding their lives, and not letting the past hinder the present. I met a Bosnian woman living with her Serb boyfriend, able to see beyond the divide the war had attempted to impose on them. I met a group of men, their eyes lighting up when they heard I was born in India; their hero was Satish Nambiar, the Indian officer who commanded peacekeepers for some time during the war. I saw a factory where the managers kept records of Muslim and Croat employees in separate folders, coded by different colours, as if to make the task easier for future perpetrators of ethnic cleansing. I saw a large cross on a hill, overlooking the city of Mostar, where the bridge that connected the two halves had been destroyed deliberately and was then being rebuilt. Twenty years later, the international community remains there, to prevent hostilities from resurfacing. Accused war criminals are being tried in international tribunals.
The wars that tore apart Yugoslavia ended because the international community did ultimately act, giving meaning to the doctrine of responsibility to protect, where countries take action, even using force, to prevent mass atrocities, even if all the necessary approvals from the UN Security Council havent come throughnot because it makes strategic or political sense, but because of the humanitarian imperative.
There have been successful interventions in the past. Think of Indian troops in what became Bangladesh in 1971; Vietnam stopping the methodical insanity of Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot; Tanzania halting the macabre rule of Idi Amin in Uganda; and US-led forces bombing Serbia. But the US attack on Iraq stopped that, because the clear moral case for that war was neither articulated, nor were the arguments convincing.
Rebuilding the past is important, but not easy. Whats been broken cannot be made whole again easily. Earlier this month, my friend Eric Ellis, who was a reporter in East and South-East Asia the same time as me (in the 1990s), was travelling through the region. During breakfast, at a hotel in Dubrovnik, a Croatian woman told Eric, rather sourly, that the bridge in Mostar now looks new, as if it detracted from its beauty. I reminded her who destroyed the old one, Eric told me.
Forgiveness is important; the world cant move on otherwise, and we keep fighting the battles of our past. But so is remembering. We owe it to those who lost their lives. Anniversaries are moments to reflect.
Da Se Ne Zaboravi (Dont forget Srebrenica), solemn posters are saying in Bosnia and Herzegovina this month. We must not.
Livemint
