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Surviving Peace
A Political Memoir
By Olivera Simic, Pauline Hopkins, Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein Spinifex Press Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2014 Olivera Simic
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74219-894-1
CHAPTER 1
Journeying Through War and Peace
When the leaders speak of peace The common folk know That war is coming. When the leaders curse war The mobilisation order is already written out.
— Bertolt Brecht, 'When leaders speak of peace' in Selected Poems (1975, p. 133)
A year ago I was invited to present a paper at a law and history conference in Melbourne. While I was setting up, the chairperson of my panel approached me and asked how he should introduce me to the audience. As soon as I began muttering a few words, he interrupted, asking: "Where are you from?"
"Yugoslavia," I replied.
The confusion was etched on his face. "But that country doesn't exist any more."
I replied with a grin, "Okay then, I was born in a country that exists no more, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. That country might no longer exist, but it existed at the time of my birth. I also speak a language that exists no more, for that matter."
My colleague was apparently so bewildered by my statement that he later felt the need to share our exchange with the audience. Several people approached me afterwards and told me that it was very unusual to hear someone still introducing herself as Yugoslav. Not many people would do so these days, they suggested.
But I do. I am a Yugoslav without Yugoslavia. I identify with the country I was born in; I am homesick for the place that exists only in my distant memory: the beautiful old towns, rivers and mountains, and the part of the Adriatic coast that was Yugoslavia. I speak a language that was declared dead when the war broke out in 1992. I was fortunate not to lose a close family member, but like many Yugoslav people, I lost so much. The beginning of the war meant the end of my physical belonging to the country I was born and grew up in, the country I loved, the country I left and soon abandoned. I tried to move on, to forget destruction and war, to run away from it all. But, as Meša Selimovic writes: "Numerous times have I tried to run away, and I always stayed, although it does not matter where one physically lives. Bosnia is inside of me, like blood" (1975, p. 323). The further I was from home, the closer home was to me, to my heart, to my mind. The connection to my homeland was not severable by distance but, as many migrants will know, on the contrary, was made stronger by it. The smell, the sound, the sky and the sun of my home haunt me. They are always with me.
My home town, Banja Luka, is the second-largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the largest city in Republika Srpska (RS). It is RS's administrative capital and an important regional centre for education, business, arts and culture, although Sarajevo remains the capital. Banja Luka is well known for its parks and avenues and the Vrbas River which is why it is often called 'the city of greenery'. The oldest cultural heritage site is the Kastel built by ancient Romans and fortified by Ottomans who settled on the banks of the Vrbas. It is located in the centre of the city and often hosts theatre and music festivals, as well as art exhibitions. I spent my youth in and around the river which is a popular spot for swimming, diving, rafting, canoeing and kayaking. Some of the best taverns were built next to the river and my favourite, 'Scout', was right on the bank. We spent many nights drinking, singing and laughing next to the rough, greenish water of the Vrbas — not anticipating that many of us would never again enjoy its beauty.
My parents are both Orthodox Serbs and were members of the Communist Party before the 1990s. I was raised in a middle-class family and educated in my home town where I lived until the war started. I was proud to be a 'Yugoslavian girl' and belong to what I regarded as a heterogeneous multicultural, multilingual and multi-religious community.
My family was a typical Yugoslav family. Like many of my friends, I grew up in a two-bedroom unit, sharing a room with my older brother. At the time I believed that this room was 'my room', although it was not only shared with my brother but would also be turned into a living room whenever we had guests. I considered these living arrangements to be perfectly normal back then. I never thought it should be any different or that, heaven forbid, I lacked privacy. The right to privacy — sacred in Western countries — was absent in socialist Yugoslavia, and I only learned of its existence once I found myself outside the borders of my country. We were all living happily in our small units not knowing that, in the West, 60 square metres of living space was considered to be totally inadequate for a family of four.
In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992), Croatian journalist and writer Slavenka Drakulic describes this day-to-day reality and the absurdity of our 'simple' lives in the former Yugoslavia. Trivial aspects of our lives in Eastern Europe, such as cramped apartments, shopping, cleaning houses and cooking, are brilliantly captured by Drakulic. Drawing her analysis primarily from her own autobiographical essays, she talks about how communism influenced the lives of people living in Eastern Europe by invisibilising — in an almost benign way — some of their fundamental individual rights, such as self-expression and privacy. After all, as she notes, communism is "more than a political ideology or a method of government, it is a state of mind" (1992, p. xvi). Indeed, it was a way of life, and with it came the philosophy that collective values always prevailed and were considered far more important than the individual. Communism discourages individualism and creativity. We co-existed only as part of a tribe and were raised to put the interests of our community and neighbours before our own. Any manifestation of individualism was considered selfish and offensive, and any person who put their own interests first would be bullied and ostracised by the community.
Still, our country ensured that we all had free education and medical care. We did not know about homelessness. Our borders were open and many Yugoslavs travelled to shop in Italy, Germany and other countries in Western Europe. We were the envy of other citizens of Eastern Europe, especially those 'under the Soviet boot', such as Poland, or what was once Czechoslovakia. We could do things they were forbidden to even think about. We watched Hollywood movies and listened to pop and rock music from all around the world. My parents had all the records by ABBA and Boney M, and my teenage hero was Billy Idol. We wore jeans, smoked cigarettes and considered ourselves 'hip'. We kids from the cities despised those living in villages and considered them uneducated and primitive peasants. We were divided along rural/urban lines — not along ethnic/religious ones. Many of us still consider these times as precious, so it comes as no surprise that some people from the former Yugoslavia are still nostalgic about the period when strongman Josip Broz Tito held the country and its people together.
The real trouble began with Tito's death on 4 May 1980, when I was only seven years old. I still remember vividly the day he died. I was with my friends in the communal space in front of the building where we lived. We were busy playing 'Izmedu dve vatre' ['Between Two Fires'], throwing the ball to one another, when I heard my mother calling me: "Olja, come home now." I never dared to argue with my mother. She was strict and I had learnt not to challenge her. So I picked up my yellow Disney ball and went home. My father was sitting on the kitchen bench listening to the news on the television. It was late Sunday afternoon, and I could smell roast chicken and potatoes, my favourite meal. I was hungry, but did not dare to ask for food. Somehow I knew I would not get it, and might even be scolded. I instinctively went into the kitchen to look for my mother who spent most of her days cooking. She was not there. I found her on our verandah, curled up on a small, red stool, smoking and crying. With a cigarette in one hand, she wiped the tears rolling down her cheeks with the other. She raised her dark-brown teary eyes and said, "Tito has died." I stared at her. There was sorrow but something more in her voice too. She was devastated by the news but not necessarily because she loved him. In retrospect, I think she was already worried about what was to come.
In the preceding years, all across the country there had been great concern about the prospect of a future without Tito, hanging over us like a black cloud. I sat on the white plastic chair next to her and did not know what to say. I could hear the distant voices now coming from our TV. My father turned up the volume. His face was filled with shock and grief and it sent a shiver down my spine. Echoes of the same TV channel were coming from the other units in our four-storey green and yellow building. Everyone was watching the latest devastating report on Tito's death. I knew I was supposed to be sad, and I remember I tried to cry but I could not. I felt ashamed, not really knowing why. Elvir Kulin, a Bosnian ex-combatant, described in his memoir the general reaction to Tito's death:
The most traumatic event in the lives of all Yugoslavs was the death of Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito in May 1980. Tito was beloved by many people, and I saw my neighbours with tears in their eyes when they heard the news. I noticed that my parents and people in the neighbourhood were worried about what it would be like without Tito. They were concerned if Tito's successors would have his wisdom and experience to run the country with different ethnic groups and religions each wanting to assert their authority. I was only five then and didn't know or care much about politics ... According to a Bosnian Muslim death custom, when someone close to you died, you turned off the TV and put a clean piece of cloth over it. When Tito died, my parents did this to our TV for 40 days, and I was upset I couldn't watch it (2005, p. 13).
My parents, and in particular my mother, are to this day nostalgic about Tito's time. For years afterward my mother would say, "We had such a good life when Tito was alive. What we have now is not a life any more." With his death and the demise of communism, Yugoslavia was on the brink of disaster. It was as if, with his death, we all died too. And, in a sense, we did. The time of peace and relative happiness vanished for ever.
Growing up in a Yugoslavia that silenced any expression of religious identity under its mantra of 'brotherhood and unity', I was unaware of my own ethnicity, and that of my family, until the time of Tito's death. One afternoon, in the spring of 1986, I came home from school and asked my father who I was. He did not understand my question. I explained that I had not been able to give an answer to my teacher when asked about my ethnic origin. My father said, "We are Serbs." As a thirteen-year-old I did not give a second thought to what my father told me that day. The fact that I did not know my ethnic origins and religious background was not unusual then, since it was not generally discussed. Not long after that I became painfully aware of what 'ethnic' belonging meant.
Despite all the worries about our future after Tito's death, most people could not have imagined a fullblown war being even a remote possibility, either at that time or twelve years later at the beginning of 1992, when war was indeed at our doorstep. We had no idea that the war in BiH would be such a bloodbath because people were so ethnically mixed. But, as Bertolt Brecht once said, "war ... always finds a way" (1941/1972). In April 1992, war certainly did find its way and engulfed us all until December 1995. When it broke out I was nineteen years old, had just finished high school, and believed that the whole world was at my feet. I loved my city, enjoyed my friends. Together we discovered vodka, and gin and tonic; we smoked locally made Plavi Ronhil cigarettes and chased boys. It was 'cool' to smoke back then — behind the backs of our parents, of course. We did not know what 'war' meant, how to prepare for it, what to think about it.
The Second World War was still a vivid memory for our parents and grandparents, but although we had been taught about it at school, my generation had never actually experienced war. We did not know what to make of an official declaration of war in our country between those Bosnians (mostly Bosniaks) who wanted to uphold the independence of BiH, and those (mostly Serbs) who did not, the forces of RS. We pretended that nothing was happening, that it did not matter to us at all. Still, my parents and other older people could sense danger in the air. They knew that old grievances between Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats had not been settled after the Second World War. My parents and grandparents had never dealt with the past at a community level and had never gone through any reconciliation processes despite the horrific crimes that various ethnic groups had committed against one other. Strongman Tito had banned any discussion about inter-ethnic killings and enforced a collective 'amnesia' amongst Yugoslav people. In her memoirs, Tito's wife, Jovanka Broz, noted that Tito never denied the mass killings and extermination camps, such as Jasenovac in which hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Romas and Jews perished in the Second World War, but he and the leadership of Yugoslavia "put it aside after the war" (Jokanovic, 2013, p. 59). Jovanka said that the leadership was
busy with many issues that needed to be dealt with, some very urgent life issues ... [W]e moved that aside but we paid a price later on ... [L]ots of resistance ... and injustice accumulated over the years and then finally erupted as a volcano ... [B]ecause of the 'brotherhood and unity' no one was allowed to talk about past atrocities (p. 59).
For us, the younger generation, war was an abstract idea, something we simply could not imagine. In any case, at that stage the war had not reached our homes, and draft calls had not yet been issued, at least, not in the city where I lived. War was raging in Croatia (the neighbouring republic) but it seemed far away from us. We would watch the TV news about the shooting and slaughtering in Vukovar and other Croatian cities but it did not really bother me or my friends. Our oblivion to the obvious chaos that was happening less than 500 kilometres away is hard to explain. I held the same indifferent views about it as I had once held for the Iraq–Iran war (1980–1988) which we had watched live on our TVs. Although this war was happening in my country to my people, it had not yet happened to me or to someone I knew. I was too busy going out, partying, and making plans to embark on my first trip down to the Adriatic coast without my parents.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag writes about how it seems normal for people "to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify" (2004, p. 89). Sontag analyses the role, uses and meanings of images, in particular images of war and destruction, and whether such images can move people to "do something" or will leave them indifferent. She describes her meeting with a woman from Sarajevo in 1993 whose reaction to the TV scenes of war in neighbouring Croatia had been similar to mine:
In October 1991 I was here in my nice apartment in peaceful Sarajevo when the Serbs invaded Croatia, and I remember when the evening news showed footage of the destruction of Vukovar, just a couple of hundred miles away, I thought to myself, 'Oh, how horrible', and switched the channel. So how can I be indignant if someone in France or Italy or Germany sees the killing taking place here day after day on their evening news and says, 'Oh, how horrible', and looks for another program. It's normal. It's human (p. 89).
So we turned our heads and kept on living as if nothing were happening. But very soon we were to experience the very same kinds of scenes we had watched from our comfortable armchairs in that short-lived pre-war peace. War found us unprepared in 1992, even though there had been plenty of warnings. The villages were the first to be subjected to its full-blown destruction and casualties when they were attacked by warring military forces. This was a war in which those in the 'ethnic minorities' were either killed or expelled by those in the 'majorities': Serb villages were attacked by the Croatian and Bosniak armed forces, and vice versa (Nizich, 1994, pp. 25–52). While men from rural areas were the first to be drafted into the war, poor women from these areas were disproportionately the victims of rape and sexual enslavement (Soh, 2008). Although women of all ages were affected, girls between 8 and 12 years old were among the 'favourite' prey of soldiers. Those of us who lived in the cities and were lucky enough to belong to the presiding ethnic group could continue for a little longer to live under the illusion that war might not reach us. As Lara Fergus, in her novel My Sister Chaos, writes: "The problem was finding the end point, knowing at exactly what stage a war had become a direct danger to you, knowing when you should stop trying to live your life and start running for it. I was looking, but I couldn't see it" (2010, p. 51). Our problem too was to predict and determine a direct danger to us; to know when we should start leaving our residences and run for our lives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Surviving Peace by Olivera Simic, Pauline Hopkins, Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein. Copyright © 2014 Olivera Simic. Excerpted by permission of Spinifex Press Pty Ltd.
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