Journal excerpts/August - October 1997

 ZAGREB

As soon as I entered the city I knew I was in a country struggling for a sense of identity.  In the taxi, the head rests covered with advertisements for motor oil, Croatian Radio blared the news with over-modulated post-communist urgency, and the sad constructs of 1970s’ public housing flew by – lone outposts girding the older, once-imperious, central city. 

***

This is a city where the message machine for Srdjan Dvornik of the Anti-War Campaign ends with “This telephone is probably tapped by the police”, but your image is of overweight dark-browed men in frayed brown leather headsets whose guts can’t escape from their own metal chairs. 

***

“The Serbs made a terrible strategic mistake.  They should have taken Zagreb first.  Once you take the capital of the city, the rest of the country falls.  They didn’t.”

***

OSIJEK, EASTERN SLAVONIA

For the first time in six years a mass has been held here.  Now, it’s outdoors, in front of the scant remains of a bombed-out church.  In the shade it’s 90 degrees.

A crowd of locals gather, mostly old men in shirtsleeves, and old women crying silently.

The few young ones chew gum with their Walkman headphones hanging around their necks.  While on the perimeter, Armed UN Personnel stand idly by, hands on their hips.

Photographers and TV cameramen scurry around a picnic table which serves as the altar, complete with white tablecloth, chalice, and flowers.

A choir with mandolins, guitars, bass, and electric organ accompany the crowd in hymnals.

It was in September of 1991 when Osijek, along with the neighboring and more famous Vukovar, sustained constant shelling by Serb artillery for 87 straight days.  On one day alone, sixty-five sorties were carried out by the Federal Air Force on Vukovar.

Today, Vukovar lays stranded.  The  shells of buildings stand gaping over the Danube.  In Osijek, you can not wander past the UN barbed wire, or the empty fields which are planted, at last estimate, with 800 thousand land mines.  This area, Eastern Slavonia, comprises only 4 thousand square kilometers.  

Today is a busy day for the UNTAES (United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia).  In addition to the mass celebration, the journalists, and visiting clergy, they have to scramble to squelch a forgery.  Extremists in Osijek have posted phony UN notices on the houses of returning Serb refugees, ordering them out of their newly resettled homes.  Of the 200,000 refugees who fled during the war, only 30 thousand are expected to resettle.  None have passports.  Only a tiny fraction have resettled.  There are barely enough houses for the Croat natives.  And the UN pullout date is June of next year.  Meanwhile, the local Croats feel the UN has overstayed their welcome.  They want them, and the black market they help sustain, out.

***

...what began as an overwhelmingly daunting task, one I initially rejected until I received the contractual promise of final editorial control, gradually became an intellectual as well as geographical adventure. But one mystery, among many, remained:  why would the Croatian government and Tudjman be willing to allow an American biographer uncontrolled license to his life story, when the press and the media in his own country labors under such strict sanctions and control?  Did they think I would simply swallow the party line?  Even after my warning to them that I would not be uncritical?  As with everything in the Balkans, there were at least seven sides to every story.  I quickly became aware of the cavalcade of opinions and political alliances among the many players where I was now enmeshed.  To uncover the range of the story, I had to play the game.  New concerns appeared.  Would I be able to play the Balkan Game, in a land where losing the game often had fatal historical results?

***

SARAJEVO

Sarajevo International Airport: Arrived via Bosnia Airlines on a Soviet plane.  A portable military control tower on the tarmac, the front line of the Bosnian war, a sitting duck for Serb artillery from all sides in the adjacent mountains.  Surrounding the airport are rows upon rows of modest two-story houses without roofs, their dark sockets leading to empty wooden shells.  In between these ghost structures, three or four families have set-up homes, with laundry strung across the tiny balconies, and a TV satellite dish angled outward.  It is two years after the war, and Sarajevo has had its spirit drained.  It is a ghost town without ghosts.

***

What is it like to live in Sarajevo?  Just like New York:  bad transportation, holes in the streets, people with guns, corrupts politicians, and lots of cafes.

***

"No one is calling Milosevic a fundamentalist when he smuggles arms in from Iran."

***

Have discovered what I call “the Balkan Onion”, the layers of truth are revealed one at a time, each one disclosing more of the mystery of Balkan nature and history, each one offering a vision greater than the whole while destroying that which held it together...

***

Scratch off the surface of any citizen in post-war Balkans and the national hatred emerges.  With the right amount of drink, even the most multi-ethnic, tolerant, democratic-loving Bosnian will spew hatred.  That's the result of being shelled for days and months on end, and being shot at by snipers year after year.  It would severely test anyone's tolerance.

***

NEW YORK

Now that borders are drawn, patrolled by the UN, now that the army continues being modernized with western consultants and illegal arms shipments, now Tudjman turns even more attention to the media, his image on the press and TV, treating it as another political tool to cement his place in history as the father of the new “independent” and “democratic” Croatia.  But what does he know of democracy, this ex-communist general, jailed twice for speaking his mind?  What example was set for him, as he sat in his jail cell, thinking of his family, of the Croatia he wanted so desperately to give them?  And, after all, democracy is so messy, so unresponsive to the desires of an autocrat, so hard to reign in without the help of an army and a willing and pliable national media.  When you command an army, it marches.  The public must be herded with a different tactic.

copyright 1997 - 2004 Joe Tripician  

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