One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [101]
The adults worked hard to create a safe space for young people, where the ethnic tensions that surrounded them did not have to exist. The children too were committed to this idea, for the most part. They wanted the past to be the past and did not dwell on it, did not show any eagerness to talk about these issues—it was talking about ethnicity that caused all the problems in their minds to begin with. History was best left below—on Mount Igman at least, soccer or arts and crafts were the more pressing concerns. The dog was not popular, perhaps, because he was a reminder.
I played soccer most days and watched Christof passing the ball eagerly to his Serb, Jewish, Croat, and Muslim teammates without hesitation—well, with a bit of hesitation because he could be a showboat in the game and wanted a bit of the glory for himself. As they all played together on the field strewn with shell casings, I took a short hike to the ruins of Hotel Igman and the abandoned Alpine Slide from the Olympic games, now riddled with bullet holes. In spite of the history right in front of me, the physical evidence that games are no match for destruction, I got the sense that as long as the children kept playing soccer, there was hope.
The children certainly had their resentments and their prejudices and their fears. Their futures were uncertain—when we left the mountain, economic hardship awaited every one of them. War criminals were still at large. Neither Ratko Mladic—the general responsible for the massacre of nearly 7,000 civilians at Srebrenica—nor Radovan Karadzic—the architect of the campaign of ethnic cleansing—had been apprehended and put on trial. Bosnia was essentially divided into two hostile states—the Muslim-dominated Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srbska.
Though under the banner of one nation, the divisions were still strong, and politicians still tried to fan the flames of nationalism that burned just below the surface. Each of the two states had its own parliament, police force, and school curricula, its own laws and regulations. They even had their own separate armies. The central government had limited responsibilities and limited powers. NATO forces still handled much policing in the country, maintaining an uneasy peace between the two sides.
Provisions in the agreement that ended the war and created the two separate states within Bosnia attempted to set up mechanisms that would protect “human rights.” A Human Rights Commission was established, which could make observations and issue reports, but had no power of enforcement. Refugee returns, arguably one of the most important factors in rebuilding society, depended on the ability of the refugees to trust the institutions of the state in their home area, especially the police force. Muslims who had been expelled were reluctant to return to Serb-controlled areas, and Serbs who had fled were reluctant to return to Muslim-controlled areas. Perhaps most troubling for children was the loss of friends from different ethnic groups who had left their homes and would not return.
The Dayton Accords, which ended the war in December 1995, set up a system that stopped the fighting but left the wounds created by the war largely unaddressed. There was no ecological approach to rebuilding the society—no effort made to address the underlying causes of the war, the interconnected effects of the war on a community level, or the circumstances that could lead to another one.