The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda
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The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250082718 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Picador |
| Publication date: | 04/21/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Key To My Neighbor's House
Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda
By Elizabeth Neuffer
Picador
Copyright © 2002 Elizabeth NeufferAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-08271-8
CHAPTER 1
BLOOD TIES TO BLOOD FEUDS
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? —Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Into the courtroom limped the defendant, tall and thin, favoring his right leg, "All rise," intoned the court clerk, and in swept the judges in their long flowing black robes. They settled into their chairs, shuffled their papers, adjusted their glasses; the prosecutors did the same. The defense attorney cleared his throat. For all the apparent ordinariness of their behavior, this might have been just an everyday trial about an everyday dispute, but it was not. This was a case about genocide, and these were the judges of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the first international war crimes court since Nuremberg and Tokyo.
The man before them, General Radislav Krstic, was accused of the massacres of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, killed by his troops as they captured a Bosnian town named Srebrenica guarded by Dutch United Nations peacekeepers. This—finally— was Marko Boškic's commanding officer. Already, much had been heard in this courtroom: the testimony of men who escaped execution squads, of mothers searching for their sons, of UN peacekeepers who saw civilians slain in cold blood. On November 1, 2000, the evidence was a telephone call, allegedly recorded between Krstic and one of his deputies, which appeared to link him beyond a shadow of a doubt to the horrors to which survivors had already testified.
"Kill all in turn," said the voice identified as General Krstic's. "Fuck their mothers!" The general, hearing the words, paled. "Don't leave a single one alive!"
In another courtroom a continent away on a different day, another witness would also testify to man's barbarity against man. The topic, again, was genocide: of how nearly 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slain in 100 days in a massacres of astonishing speed. This witness, General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian head of UN forces in Rwanda, wept as he spoke of his frustration that the additional troops he requested were not provided in time. "All the member states of the UN have Rwandan blood on their hands," he said slowly as tears coursed down his cheeks. "It seems inconceivable that one can watch thousands of people being massacred every day ... and remain passive...."
Europe and America had no military response when these crimes occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda. But they did have a judicial one. Under the auspices of the United Nations Security Council, they had taken the unprecedented step of creating a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, largely as a way of appearing to react to violence there without dispatching troops. World leaders then created a similar court for Rwanda, but this time out of shame: both for the slaughter they had failed to stop as well as for one they feared might still arrive.
The two courts, representing a dream nourished by human rights advocates since long before Nuremberg, had high-reaching aims. They would bring tyrants to justice, destroy cultures of impunity, uphold the rule of law, help reconcile the war-torn countries. They would shed light on the murky shadows of the past, on that troubling question of how people who once broke bread together killed each other. They would explain how madness came to grip two nations. Certainly no Rwandan could have predicted his country's tensions would be transformed into genocide. No Bosnian foresaw that their country would erupt into war. In fact, when anyone ever told me a story about life in Bosnia in the years before the war, it seemed always to be summer.
FAMILY AND FRIENDS would be sitting out in their gardens eating fruit plucked from their trees, or sipping thickly brewed Turkish coffee in a neighborhood café and chatting about trips to the beach or the mountains. The air was full of laughter, the sun was shining, the mood one of good fortune.
You could all but hear camera shutters clicking, preserving Bosnia and the country to which it belonged—Yugoslavia—if not in photographs then in someone's mind's eye. Click. See, we all got along, Muslim, Croat, and Serb. Click. Our town had a mosque, but it also had an Orthodox cathedral; we weren't religious, but we'd feast to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Bayram or the Serb holiday of Petrovdan; everyone went to Christmas Eve mass at the cathedral. Click. Click. See, we spent the summers at Croatia's beaches along the turquoise-hued Adriatic, the winters skiing the rugged mountains of Slovenia, visited Sarajevo to idle away the hours in cafés in the old Turkish quarter, went to the opera or the museums in Belgrade. Click. We were communists, but we experimented with capitalism; here we are in front of our holiday home, our vikendica, which we built from the money we earned working in Munich. We were open to the West; we crossed to Trieste, Italy, to buy our clothes, and look: Here are the photos of us all hosting international tourists at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
Click.
This was the world in which the Bosnian families I came to know had once lived. In fact, it was the only world they knew. Yugoslavia's leader, wartime resistance hero Josip Broz Tito, had governed the country from 1945 until his death in 1980. Under his rule, being Yugoslav mattered more than one's ethnic origin, than being Muslim, Croat, or Serb. Suddenly, within a few years of Tito's death, everything that happened to people depended on their ethnicity. Consider the story of Hasan Nuhanovic, who came from Vlasenica, a small town deep in the lush, thick forests of north-central Bosnia. In 1988, the year nationalism began to sweep across Yugoslavia in earnest, he arrived in Sarajevo to study mechanical engineering.
It was to Sarajevo that Bosnians always flocked, to this city that embodied the historic waves of culture, religions, and traditions that had swept across their country over the centuries. Its Bašcaršija market quarter, with its small wooden-fronted shops and cobblestone streets filled with the smell of spicy roast kebab, recalled the days of the Ottoman Empire. The Europa Hotel and other buildings, with their rich architectural swags and cornices, bore the stamp of Austro-Hungarian rule. The tall, graceless apartment buildings on the city's outskirts, on streets named after slogans, like "Brotherhood and Unity," bespoke its communist days. With mosques, Orthodox churches, and Catholic cathedrals, Sarajevo was a blend of Europe and the Orient, a city whose population was as intermarried as they were multiethnic, and who loved nothing better than to while away the hours sitting around smoking, drinking, and talking about anything at all.
Bosnians tend not to be overly tall, and at six-foot-three Hasan towers above almost everyone. Dark-haired, lean, and peering downward through his glasses with piercing hazel eyes, I imagine him standing in a crowd of students, hands on his hips, the crook of his head twisting the shape of his body into a question mark.
His days at the University of Sarajevo, Hasan would recall years later, were spent skipping classes and hanging out with his friends, discussions that began in the morning and ended late at night over brandy, in the student bar. As pop music blared loudly and cigarette smoke floated through the air, he and his friends talked about girls, the latest movie from the West, music—Hasan himself played the electric guitar. They clinked their glasses and toasted: After all, they were students at one of the best universities in the country, headed for the best days of their lives, in what they considered the best country of the world, Yugoslavia, with its six differing yet united republics: Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Slovenia.
All the young men looked the same in their student chic, dressed in T-shirts and blue-jean jackets, cigarettes dangling from their fingers, an occasional growth of late-night stubble. Sure, they came from different parts of the country, with different histories and religions, but no one who looked at Hasan and his friends could distinguish them along ethnic lines, and frankly, none of them cared to do so. They'd all grown up in the same way: drunk the popular Montenegrin beer "Nikšicko" or the Slovenian drink Cockta while eating Bosnian cevapcici and listening to the Sarajevo hit group Bjelo Dugme (White Button). The same influences had touched them all. It was no different from being an American and having grown up eating Southern fried chicken and Boston cream pie.
Which was why Hasan was so surprised one day in 1989 when hundreds of students from the university cut classes to attend a rally given by a rising nationalist politician named Slobodan Miloševic from Serbia. He watched as the buses wheeled up in front of the university dorms. Hundreds of well-dressed students, some carrying posters emblazoned with Miloševic's stolid face topped by his bristly porcupine haircut, clambered on, laughing and singing songs. They were headed for the Serbian province of Kosovo, where Miloševic intended to commemorate the six hundredth anniversary of the battle of Kosovo Polje, where Serb forces tried to defend Christendom against the Ottoman Turks and lost.
Looking back on it later, Hasan realized that was when he first sensed that his life, as he knew it, was over. The event seemed so very innocent—the battle, after all, had been in 1389—but what struck Hasan was this: Everyone he knew getting on the bus was of Serb origin.
Merely by getting on those buses, those students had separated themselves from Hasan, had defined themselves not as Yugoslav but as Serbs. Hasan was a Muslim. All that meant to him was that his mother, Nasiha, made baclava for her parents when they broke the traditional Muslim feast of Bayram. Now, suddenly, his being a Bosnian Muslim had become who he was, whether he liked it or not.
Nearly 1 million Serbs went to Kosovo Polje that day and cheered wildly for Slobodan Miloševic, and things were never the same again. Differences, not similarities, began to matter. At Hasan's university, students began singing long-banned Serbian or Croatian songs and enthusiastically marking long-forgotten holidays. Serbs in the dorms, drunk, would dance their native circle dance, the kolo, in the hallways. For the first time students began to divide up dormitory rooms along ethnic lines. All Hasan had to do was walk down the hall of the university dorms and look at the names on the door—ethnic background was not reflected in anyone's appearance but by their names—to realize that a major transformation was occurring.
What was happening was this: Communism was collapsing across Eastern Europe, and an atavistic nationalism was taking its place, spawning new leaders hungry for power. In Yugoslavia, the stirrings of political change came in the wake of Tito's death and the burgeoning economic crisis he had left behind. Once hailed as the richest and most open of the communist economies, Yugoslavia was on the verge of financial collapse, with some $20 billion in foreign debt.
For years, Yugoslavia's economy had prospered, in part artificially. In 1965 Tito replaced state socialism—and its unprofitable, subsidized industries—with a Western-style market socialism. Factories, left in the hands of their workers, downsized to compete and unemployment soared. The economy was rescued because neighboring European countries had labor shortages. Travel was visa-free and nearly 1 million Yugoslavs ended up in Germany or Austria working for several years, returning with dollars and Deutschemarks. The money in everyone's pockets not only boosted the economy but also contributed to a false sense of prosperity.
In the 1980s, economic hard times arrived. Europe, in recession, cut back on jobs for the Yugoslavs, and unemployment soared again. Inflation surged—hitting 2,500 percent in 1989. Industries, still indebted and not yet profitable, foundered. Workers went out on strike. Political chaos reigned. The collective presidency Tito created to succeed him swiftly proved unworkable. It failed to keep hold of Yugoslavia, allowing power to devolve back to republics—many of which were dominated by one ethnicity—whose relations dissolved into political backbiting and feuding.
The situation played right into the hands of a ruthless, power-hungry, forty-eight-year-old Serb politician by the name of Slobodan Miloševic. Nothing in his background augured that Miloševic would become a political mastermind or lead Yugoslavia into war. Born into poverty in the dusty, unremarkable town of Pozarevac, 55 miles southeast of Belgrade, Miloševic grew up in a household marked by loss: His father, a Serbian Orthodox cleric, abandoned the family and killed himself. Years later Miloševic's mother committed suicide, as did his uncle. Miloševic went on to study law at Belgrade University and then became a banker, eventually spending time in New York.
Returning to Yugoslavia, Miloševic skillfully sidelined his rivals and, aided by his equally ruthless wife, Mirjana Markovic, climbed his way up through the ranks to become head of the Serbian Communist Party. Shrewdly, he built a power base: transforming the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) through purges, outfoxing his liberal opponents by appearing to be on their side. His political genius, however, lay in recognizing the rallying power of nationalism. In 1987 Miloševic had become an overnight sensation after a speech in the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo in which he trumpeted the cause of the Kosovo Serbs over that of the ethnic Albanian majority.
Kosovo had long been a source of anxiety for ethnic Serbs, who had left the province due to harassment by Albanian extremists, a problem that Tito simply ignored. But Miloševic promised the Serbs that Kosovo was still theirs. (In 1989 he stripped the province of the autonomy granted to it by Tito in the 1960s.) Propelled into the limelight, Miloševic and his followers gained power, purging the media of critics and winning over sympathetic journalists as allies in state television and the principal newspapers. Soon all that was being published was Miloševics pro-Serb nationalist propaganda. His message was simple: Drawing on the myths, legends, and poetry long suppressed under communism, Miloševic created a sense of Serb victimization. The Serbs, he preached, are a heroic and glorious people who have suffered centuries of injustice because of their frustrated efforts to have their own state. Now is the time of reckoning: when the Serbs will have their reward—a "greater Serbia," a state for all the Serbs.
His drive for a greater Serbia would destroy Yugoslavia. Aided by another nationalist who acted as his foil, Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, Miloševic stirred up existing ethnic rivalries and, through propaganda, introduced new ones. Soon Croatia and Serbia were at war, riven by nationalist and ethnic discontent. Miloševic then imported the war to Bosnia, multiethnic since the early Middle Ages. He fanned the flames of nationalist hatred until Bosnia burst into ethnic conflagration. Neighbor would turn on neighbor, Serb against Muslim, Serb against Croat. The result was a kind of collective madness that spawned the worst atrocities and war crimes Europe had seen since World War II: mass executions, torture, the expulsion of millions of civilians from their homes, concentration camps.
Serbs, Croats, Muslims; nationalism began to define everything as Yugoslavia splintered apart. Once legends surrounding the region's history were let loose—with their accompanying message of long-standing historical injustice—the past suddenly became more important than the future.
"We were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated," said Miloševic at that same rally in 1989 that Hasan's fellow students attended, describing the battle of 1389 to the adoring Serbs who'd assembled to hear him. Then, in a portent of what his policies would bring to the region, he added: "Six centuries later we are again in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet."
HOW DID BOSNIA, where people had long intermarried and intermingled along ethnic lines, erupt into savage hostilities that would shatter the country? During the war, President Bill Clinton at one point dismissed Bosnia's slaughter as the product of intractable ethnic hatreds. But history is never so simple. If there were a generalization to be made, it was quite the opposite one. Until World War II, Bosnia's history, unlike that of some of its neighbors, was more one of ethnic coexistence than ethnic enmity, despite the steady ebb and flow of kingdoms, empires, and religions across it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Key To My Neighbor's House by Elizabeth Neuffer. Copyright © 2002 Elizabeth Neuffer. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Book One: BEARING WITNESS,
1. Blood Ties to Blood Feuds,
2. The Triumph of the Underworld,
3. Since Unhappily We Cannot Always Avoid Wars,
4. The Land of 1,000 Graves,
5. Our Enemy Is One,
6. No Safe Havens,
Book Two: TRIALS AND TRIBUNALS,
7. Peace Without Justice,
8. Searching for the Truth,
9. Bring Me His Body,
10. Having Clean Hands,
11. What a Tutsi Woman Tastes Like,
12. When the Victims Are the Serbs,
Book Three: AFTER JUDGMENT,
13. A Time of Reckoning,
14. Justice Must Be Seen to Be Done,
15. Justice on the Ground,
16. Rwandan Crimes, Arusha Justice,
17. When a Tribunal Is Not Enough,
Afterword,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,