By FRANK BAJAK

The thematic and chronological heart of a six-week journey we began in Istanbul in early September was Bosnia-Herzegovina. The visit was long overdue. In the 1990s, I was an AP correspondent based in Berlin and opted not to physically cover the holocaust perpetrated on Bosnia’s ethnic Muslims. We had three young children.

Former Yugoslavia is a historic battleground of Turks and Serbs further complicated by Austro-Hungarian meddling. And Bosnia’s recuperation is only partial. The political morass that preceded the three-decade-old siege of Sarajevo still festers.

We would approach by land from the West.

Our gateway was Trieste. It’s part of Italy now but in many ways is more Austrian and Slovene (read: clean and orderly). Trieste was imperial Vienna’s main port, a 19th-century shipbuilding and naval redoubt and cosmopolitan magnet for dockworkers and traders from all over. It became an Allied protectorate after Tito’s partisans expelled the Nazis in a vengeful spectacle with slain accused collaborators dumped by the hundreds into nearby limestone crevices.

We only stayed half a day. Travel writer Jan Morris’ elegiac last book, “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere,” argues convincingly for a longer sojourn including a visit to Miramare Castle, built by the ill-fated Austrian royal who would be crowned Emperor Maximilian I in Mexico only to be executed by the locals in 1867. Trieste is not what you’d call a party city. It shuts down at 11 p.m. — save a few Turkish groceries and a döner kebab joint near the rail station (We arrived rather late from Rome).

Next up was Ljubljana, even more Habsburg in orderliness and architectural grace. It bustled with tourists who typically pair a visit with excursions to Slovenia’s fetching alpine destinations (Spandex-clad cyclists boarded our inbound train lathered from exertion).

The Slovene capital’s auto-free (mostly) center is a big draw. Our B&B was on the Ljubljanica river near the Dragon Bridge. As a chatty waiter at a riverside café remarked upon learning we’d be in town less than 48 hours, “It only really takes one day to see Ljubljana.”      

The six-hour 1995 BBC documentary “The Death of Yugoslavia” was a touchstone for us. Oft cited by historians, it is a remarkable act of journalism and makes it quite clear who ignited and prolonged the ethnically targeted violence. Slovenia figures in Act I. Its break with Belgrade was swift and nearly bloodless (about 66 dead); Its borders contained the smallest ethnic Serb population of any Yugoslav republic.

A pride of Ljubljana is the architect Jože Plečnik. A student of the Viennese modernist Otto Wagner, he would also renovate Prague’s Castle between the wars. Plečnik’s imprint is everywhere in the compact city. So are living vestiges of socialist Yugoslavia. Some good ones: Free education and health care.

We had wished to travel to Sarajevo by rail but were stymied by the political stalemate that has hexed Bosnia since the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords ended the war with no victors.

Getting to Zagreb by train was easy. But on to Sarajevo, forget it. Direct rail connections linking Bosnia’s capital with those of Croatia and Serbia don’t exist. It’s an 8 1/2-hour bus trip from Zagreb to Sarajevo, about the same from Sarajevo to Belgrade. Border crossings can be a hassle, and many of the buses lack toilets. We opted to fly.   

In Sarajevo, my colleague Aida Cerkez graciously showed us around. A brave and resourceful wonder woman who ran the AP office during the war, Aida drove us through the hills overlooking the city so we could see it from the perspective of the Serb gunners who rained shells on civilians. Then she took us to what’s left of the 850-meter tunnel the besieged Bosniaks dug under the U.N.-held international airport. It was a lifeline she traversed more than 50 times — the foot traffic ran in one direction at a time, it was so narrow — hunched over as she humped in supplies including vital satellite comms equipment.  Journalists working in Sarajevo (including the AP crew) were careful not to disclose the tunnel’s existence. Then John Burns wrote it up in The New York Times. 

Our wonderful hostess at the Halvat House B&B in Sarajevo had at the time relied on the tunnel for supplies to feed the foreign journalists she and her husband lodged at the time.

In 1992, AP’s John Daniszewski wrote about Cerkez as a young mother preparing a “survival backpack” for her son, Igor, in case she were killed but he survived. She would later dispatch him and her mom to Germany. The AP hired her, first as a fixer then as a reporter. Two years later, Cerkez was named Sarajevo bureau chief.

She was sure she would be killed and recalled the times she’d hunch down at the wheel of the AP’s Land Cruiser, yell “Geronimo” and floor it through Sniper Alley – where Serbs in high rises had a clear shot at the avenue that linked the airport with downtown. She’d hum Elvis Presley’s “Peace in the Valley” to calm her nerves.

“I was so sure that I was going to die that I flew to Frankfurt ,” she recalled, where she told AP’s regional director, Steve Miller, it would be the last time he’d see her. She started crying. “I’m not sorry for myself. But for my son.”  Steve came through. The AP arranged a life insurance policy for her. It ate up a big chunk of her paycheck. But it gave her piece of mind.

Aida is now news editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)  and co-wrote a short film, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, based on a relationship she developed researching the 80th anniversary of the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.

The Sarajevo magnicide would spark World War I. Aida found a man who witnessed it. He’d lived in the same home all his life — but in five different countries — and it wasn’t clear to him who was decimating his city in 1994 and why. Aida had to explain.

“What is This Country Called Now?” is about what Aida learned from the nonagenarian: That her work was vital even if she felt demoralized, ineffectual, ready to leave. Chronicles of murders and disappearances during WWII were woefully incomplete, the man told Aida. Too few journalists were around. Aida was inspired to carry on. 

Igor’s father is a Serb, Aida a Muslim. Their union, which ended years ago,  exemplifies the ethnic tolerance of Sarajevo — it had former Yugoslavia’s highest rate of mixed marriages.  Aida considers herself a Yugoslav and objects to Bosnia’s political shackles. It has three presidents: an ethnic Croat, Serb and Bosniak (Muslim). Igor (surname Spaic) is journalist. But if he were to aspire to the presidency he’d be shut out. The constitution created under the Dayton Accords bars people like him who are a mix.

“We still don’t know how this is going to end — one country or three. We the anti-fascists are keeping it together,” Aida said.

The political stalemate hamstrings Bosnia. There is much dysfunction. Take the railways. We tried to buy a one-way return from Mostar at Sarajevo’s station the morning we traveled there (by bus). But such tickets can only be had in Mostar — and nobody is limiting sales, we learned. We had to elbow our way onto the train at Mostar. Passengers outnumbered seats. Less than two weeks later the road to Mostar was washed out by a torrent of rain. More than a dozen people died in the flooding. They apparently had no warning.

In Mostar, more than a few gutted hulks of buildings harken the war. Not so in Sarajevo, where nearly 10,000  civilians died, including almost 1,500 kids. Graveyards abound and shell- and bullet-pocked buildings bear witness. New construction diminishes them. So, too, with Sarajevo roses — shell-impact craters later filled with red resin to serve as memorials. I shuddered seeing one in the center of the Markale market. A pair of Serb mortar attacks killed dozens there, finally persuading NATO to begin bombing the besiegers.

We took the aerial tram to the abandoned, graffiti-strewn bobsled run overlooking Sarajevo where Serb gunners positioned artillery and, on a day trip, saw “The Bridge on The Drina” in Višegrad, a 16th-century marvel built under Ottoman rule and enshrined in prose by the 1961 Nobel literature prize-winner Ivo Andrić. The stone bridge’s strength and constancy work as counterpoint to the violence and intolerance that play out the bridge.

The ethnic hatred driving Serb nationalists traces to their defeat by the Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389, while Croat nationalism surged over Serb attempts at hegemony in the wake of WWI. Croat collaboration with Nazi occupiers (the Ustasha regime) exacerbated matters. An Ustasha government was installed in wartime Sarajevo, rendering it a scorpion’s nest of lethal intrigue.

After visiting enough Sarajevo museums we had serious atrocity fatigue. No less because Palestinian children were at that moment being slaughtered by Israel with scant international opprobrium. The parallel with the Serb siege of Sarajevo was obvious.      

On our last day in Sarajevo we visited its rebuilt city hall, which in addition to housing the local government is part museum, part national library. Serb separatists gutted it with shelling in the early days of the siege, incinerating almost two million books and drizzling black ash about the city’s Turkish quarter. One exhibit catalogues the Serb war crimes punished by the International Criminal Court. There were 90 convictions in all, including of separatist leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic for genocide and crimes against humanity. They are serving life sentences.

After all the immersion into what hateful Serb separatists had done to Sarajevo, my wife in particular had some trepidation about to our next stop: Belgrade.   

Suggested reading:

“The Bridge on the Drina” and “Bosnian Chronicle” by Ivo Andrić. The author won the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature and was a Yugoslav diplomat. Both were written during World War II. The first is a historical novel that uses the bridge built by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century — heavily reliant on the labor of local Serbs — to tell story of the fateful and ultimately unhappy, often violent clash of civilizations, of racial disharmony, economic envy, human foibles. Over five centuries many of the region’s Serbs resist Islam while others serve it and assimilate. Christian-Muslim relations sweeten and sour, often depending on outside pressure. Ottoman gives way to Austro-Hungarian rule. “Bosnian Chronicle” takes place in Napoleonic times in Travnik, then the Bosnian capital. It is more about the inner workings of power and diplomatic intrigue.   

“The Fracture Zone:” by Simon Winchester. I’m a big Winchester fan, particularly “The Professor and the Madman” and was not disappointed by this 1999 book. It narrates a trip he takes from Vienna to Istanbul as a correspondent for The Guardian during the Serb-Kosovo war — the opposite direction we took on our six-week trip. His job: Try to understand what precipitated the recent bloodletting. One dramatis persona in Winchester’s history-laden travelogue is long dead, the severed head of the grand vizier of the Ottoman sultan who tried to overrun Vienna in 1683. Vienna’s city museum has Kara Mustafa’s separated noggin, but won’t display it. The torso’s in Anatolia. 

“Balkan Ghosts” by Robert D. Kaplan. I read this book when it first published in 1993 so I can’t assess the updated edition. Credit Kaplan with raising the alarm with his reporting that Yugoslavia would self-immolate. Kaplan took a lot of heat from scholars for arguing that the peoples of the Balkans had some wort of an innate predisposition for violence, for often accepting “fancy for fact” and a rather simplistic premise that the 21st century would boil down to a battle between (Turkic) Islam and Christianity. Were the Ottoman Turks and Austro-Hungarians brutal overlords in their occupations of these lands? Not always. Did they persecute based on religion? Not necessarily. Better to read Ivo Andrić for the nuance.

I have not read Rebecca West’s 1943 classic “The Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” It’s long and, many say, overly tendentious.  

Films:

“No Man’s Land” directed by Danis Tanović. Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 2002. A biting, darkly humorous morality play on the front lines of the Bosnia war near Tuzla. The cast of characters includes U.N. blue helmets, journalists and, of course, the men doomed to fight and die. Priceless: when the two protagonists – a Serb and a Bosniak soldier – argue about who started the war while hunkering together under Serb bombardment.   

“Quo  Vadis, Aida?” directed by Jasmina Žbanić. This 2020 feature follows a U.N. translator’s anguished attempt to save the males in her family from being hauled away to slaughter with Srebrenica’s other men in 1995. The massacre of more than 8,000 men and boys — who Dutch peacekeepers failed to protect — was the most egregious single act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs (these under Ratko Mladić’s command). The movie is beautifully acted and emotionally draining. 

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