Michael Dobbs - Down with Big Brother

“Weapons, weapons,” the villagers chanted together, looking as tough and as rugged as the mountains that rose around them.

As we toured more villages on the eastern bank of the Neretva, the cause of the commotion became clearer. A long line of trucks and tourist buses had arrived from Montenegro, disgorging some three thousand disheveled reservists. Part of this ragtag army was billeted at the Mostar military airfield, but others were camped out in the open. When they were not lobbing shells into Croatian and Muslim villages, the reservists spent most of their time scouring local bars for women and shooting their guns into the air. The arrival of the reservists had seriously strained intercommunal relations in the area. Muslims and Croats viewed the newcomers as a direct threat. Serbs saw them as a potential ally in a future battle, even though they were careful not to show their satisfaction in public.

After crisscrossing the Herzegovinian countryside, we eventually came across several dozen Montenegrins lounging outside Slobo’s bar in the tiny village of Potkosa. The tables were littered with empty beer bottles. The government ministers got out of their limousines. There was a clatter of safety catches being released and cartridge clips being jammed into position as the two armed groups faced each other across the remote mountain road.

“Hi, guys. Can I speak to whoever is in charge?” said the deputy prime minister, trying to be friendly.

There was no reply. The Montenegrins played with their automatic rifles. The deputy prime minister retreated.

The sun was dipping behind the starkly beautiful mountains when the motorcade moved off. Suddenly we heard the sound of shouting. Our police escort had practically run into a barricade blocking the road, half a mile up the hill from Slobo’s bar. Excited-looking soldiers waving M-76 automatic sniper rifles and Kalashnikovs appeared out of the woods on one side of the road. A row of ruined houses on the other side blocked any escape route. Each of the twenty or so cars in the motorcade was covered by an armed soldier.

“Turn your engines off. Don’t move,” shouted the soldiers, aiming their weapons directly at us.

Our driver reached instinctively for his German-made pistol. But he quickly understood that the situation was hopeless. We had driven into an ambush. One shot, and there would have been a bloodbath. During the moments that followed, we were left to ponder the true balance of power in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The ministers who were trapped in their Mercedes and BMWs could lay claim to the legitimacy of the ballot box, but it was the other side that possessed the guns. Furthermore, the government was itself bitterly divided over the future of the republic. The Serb members of the government commission shared the views and goals of the people who were threatening us with their guns. There was little doubt which side was better placed to win an eventual confrontation.

After about ten minutes the deputy prime minister was allowed to leave his car and approach the command post on foot. After another ten minutes of tense negotiations a JNA officer appeared and ordered us to return to Sarajevo. The gunmen disappeared back into the woods, as silently as they had emerged.

BACK IN SARAJEVO, the politicians were quarreling over the significance of the Montenegrin incursion and the prospects for avoiding all-out war. The Muslim politicians were desperate for foreign intervention. They were bombarding both the European Community and the United Nations with appeals for peacekeepers to be sent to Bosnia before rather than after real fighting broke out. Preoccupied with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the war between Croatia and Serbia, no Western capital showed any sign of listening to these appeals.

The clandestine arming of the Serb population had presented the Muslim-led government with a terrible dilemma. Militarily it would have been prudent for it to arm its own supporters, just as the Zagreb government had done prior to the outbreak of war in Croatia. Politically, however, such a step would have provoked a final rupture with the SDS and the collapse of the multiparty coalition. Rightly or wrongly, the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, believed that the best chance for preserving peace lay in being as conciliatory as possible toward the Serb minority. For this reason, he chose the opposite path to that followed by Franjo Tuđman of Croatia. In Bosnia, unlike in Croatia, Serbs could not legitimately complain of discrimination. Attempts by Belgrade television to portray Izetbegović as a Muslim fundamentalist bent on creating an Islamic state in the heart of Europe would have been laughable had they not been so sinister.

A short man with a sad, rumpled face and a kindly smile, Izetbegović struck a tragic figure in the fall of 1991. In his doubts and well-meaning equivocations, he was more like Hamlet than the ayatollah Khomeini. He still believed that the best chance of preserving Bosnia-Herzegovina as a multiethnic community lay in preserving Yugoslavia as a federal state. As proof of his sincerity, he had gone along with JNA demands for the disbanding of territorial defense units established by Tito, on the ground that they could become the basis of rival ethnic armies. But the army had double-crossed him. Instead of remaining neutral in the conflict, it had distributed arms to Serb rebels. In what was supposed to be a training exercise, the JNA was even preparing for the coming war by digging artillery positions in the mountains above Sarajevo. 6

As the leader of an ethnically based party, Izetbegović must bear his share of responsibility for the fratricide that tore Bosnia apart. At the time, however, his main failing appeared to be an excessive optimism and naiveté. After the European Community recognized the breakaway republics of Croatia and Slovenia in December 1991, he believed he had no choice but to take Bosnia out of a Yugoslavia that would be dominated by Milošević. But he failed to provide his own people with the means of defending themselves against the inevitable Serb onslaught. He deluded himself into thinking that war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was unlikely for the simple reason that it was too ghastly to contemplate.

“The result of a war here would be terrible,” he told me in the presidency building in Sarajevo. “There would be neither victors nor vanquished. It would be a catastrophe. Every second person in the republic has a weapon, either legally or illegally. It would mean a general war in Yugoslavia. Everybody has an interest in Bosnia, and everybody would be drawn into such a war. The war would spread to Serbia, through Sandžak and Kosovo. A war in Bosnia-Herzegovina would lead to war in Europe.” 7

The headquarters of Karadžić’s SDS Party was only a few hundred yards away from the president’s office, but it was like entering a different world. Unlike Izetbegović, Karadžić knew exactly what he wanted and had a clear strategy for achieving it. He made no secret of his belief that Serbs were entitled to two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina—even though they accounted for only one-third of the population—and were prepared to go to war to attain their territorial goals. There could scarcely have been a greater contrast between the soft-spoken Muslim intellectual and the ranting Serb nationalist, who had previously worked as a psychiatrist for the Sarajevo football team.

The day I went to see Karadžić, Sarajevo was buzzing with reports of a fax that he had allegedly sent to SDS offices around Bosnia. A copy of the “instructions” was published by the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobođenje , along with an SDS statement that it was a “dirty fabrication.” “In the event of resistance to the legitimate and humane demands of the Serbian people, you must be merciless,” Karadžić had supposedly told his followers. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” 8