One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [95]
The mockery in school did not stop. NATO doesn’t concern itself with child’s play. Christof learned to bully from the bullies, learned to shoot an insult like a sniper’s bullet because the insults were shot at him like mortars. No one trusted them; no one wanted them in their neighborhood. He and his family belonged to some other group, the enemy.
This was Christof’s first and only summer in the multiethnic youth group on Mount Igman. All five of us adults were determined to help him see things another way, to help him feel like part of the group, and I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this big good-hearted mutt could help if Christof would just stop throwing stones at it.
The multiethnic youth group with whom I was visiting on Mount Igman, run by the Jewish community in Sarajevo, began informally during the siege. As the former communist nation of Yugoslavia began to break apart in 1991, the Jewish community saw unsettling signs of rising nationalism—new flags and slogans, angry rhetoric, guns everywhere—signs that brought back painful memories of the Holocaust.
Before World War II, Jews made up 13 percent of Sarajevo’s population. By the time the war was over, they made up less than 4 percent Their numbers dwindled, as they did for all of Europe’s Jews at the hands of Nazi death squads or in concentration camps. Still others escaped to join the partisans and fight the German occupation, dying in combat to liberate their homeland from foreign invaders. Just down the hill from the soccer field stood a monument to the fallen partisans who liberated Yugoslavia from the fascist regime. Many Muslims and Christians in Bosnia hid their Jewish neighbors from the SS or the Ustashe (the Croatian branch of the Nazi party, essentially) at great peril to themselves. The war ended, and Marshal Tito took control of Yugoslavia, forging arguably one the most successful communist states in the post-war era.
Under Tito’s rule, ethnic tensions were suppressed and Jews were treated like any other member of the state. Yugoslavia tried to stand as an example of cosmopolitanism among the communist nations, and Sarajevo was the prime example. They touted their ethnic and economic harmony, wore it like a badge. They were the intersection of East and West, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Jew. The architecture in the city was a rich assortment of styles and eras. Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympic games, building a lovely Olympic Village, a new stadium and hotels, and a mammoth Alpine Jump on Mount Igman. Muslim, Jews, Catholics, Serbian Orthodox—all called themselves Yugoslavian.
This picture of harmony masked the nationalism brewing underneath the surface. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Serbian nationalism began to grow. The Serbian Orthodox Church aligned itself with Serbian nationalist politicians, largely due to the crisis in Kosovo. Serbs held a majority of government posts. At the same time, the Islamic revolutions around the globe—most notably in Iran—began to inspire Muslims to claim their own identity as a national group rather than a private religion as they had been defined. The Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs all claimed nationality, and the Muslims wanted the same. Agitation to that end met with hostility from the Serb majority in the Communist Party and the argument that