One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [103]
Before the war, the suicide rate in Bosnia was around eleven per 100,000 people. Since the war, the rate has almost doubled, to around twenty suicides per 100,000 people in 2003. Discussing the problems of depression in Bosnia—psychological and economic—a woman who had lost her husband to a mortar told me with a shake of her head, “You know…we’ve survived the war. Now we have to survive the peace.”
Her youngest son, a fifteen-year-old who had been a baby at home when the mortar came through the wall and killed his father, sat with us a while but felt no desire to talk about the past. He was more concerned with the present—the struggling economy, the war criminals still at large. He did not stay in the room long to talk, and he seethed with a bit of anger toward his mother when she spoke lightly of any times during the siege. He was not entirely comfortable with an American, his mother explained when he left to go out with friends. He suspected America was waging a war against all Muslims and thought I might be judging him, hating him secretly because he was Muslim. He may, however, just have been a shy teenager.
“After the war,” she told me, “he always tried to protect me, keeping the shades drawn, avoiding windows. He could not understand why people fixed the glass in their windows or greenhouses…he thought they would simply be shattered again by mortars or grenades.”
The aftermath of the war affected her youngest son deeply, and he remained terribly protective of his mother, even as she and I spoke. Before leaving, he ran me through an intense interrogation about who I was and why I was visiting. Though he spoke decent English and very good German, he refused to speak them in front of me, other than to ask what I was doing in Sarajevo, preferring to talk to his mother privately in Bosnian when I was present, even to have her translate, though he understood everything I was saying. His mother suspects that his anger and his trouble in school, despite his intelligence, go back to the loss of his father.
“He is very much like his father,” she said. “I loved his father very much, and my son is stubborn just like him. He reminds me more and more of him every day.” Her eyes grew moist, though she did not cry. She entertained countless journalists in her home during the siege, she told me, and had told her story many times. Telling her son’s story, however, was harder for her. He, like teenagers the world over, was struggling to figure out what kind of adult he would be.
As poverty grows in Bosnia, as the post-war economy stagnates, young people are left with few options. Frustration grows daily and politicians on all sides seem incapable of making things work. The two parliaments constantly block each other’s initiatives. Al Qaeda has begun to get a foothold in the region, forming safe houses in Sarajevo; right-wing clerics are gaining prominence. Several suspects have been arrested in Bosnia under terrorism laws, charged with planning suicide bomb attacks on American and European interests in the Balkans.
At the same time, the Serbian nationalists continue to honor and protect former war criminals. At the funeral for the mother of the former Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, people carried signs and political banners proclaiming him and General Mladic heroes. This environment of high tension and little opportunity is a hard one in which to grow up, in which to heal. Everyone is tired of fighting, but peace has its own challenges.
Children manage the minefields of peace and of recovery from the trauma of war in radically different ways. Jaca engaged directly with her memories, telling stories, reading about politics, asking questions. Omar never thought much about it at all. Christof rarely spoke of the war, though the consequences of it loomed large in his interactions with the other children and with our dog.
I spoke with dozens of children in my time in all of the conflict areas