One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [96]
But the Jewish community who remained in Bosnia—some two thousand of them—never forgot who they were, though they generally tried to stay below the radar of nationalist debates. They tended the old cemetery in the hills, where the graves dated back to the sixteenth century. They maintained the old Sephardic synagogue in the Turkish quarter; they understood how easily a people could be lost, despite the illusion of harmony and prosperity, and how dangerous the revival of ethnic nationalism could be. They also remembered the great kindness many of their neighbors had shown them during the Nazi time. Perhaps more than any group in Yugoslavia, they remembered the sting of war, which put them in an historically unique position in the early nineties: the ethnic conflict that erupted was not about the Jews.
At their annual meeting in Belgrade in June 1991, arguments between the Jews of Serbia and Croatia broke out over the question of independence. That month, Slovenia and Croatia had declared their independence from Yugoslavia—something Belgrade opposed because 12 percent of Croatia’s population was Serbian. The arguments between the Jews living in Serbia and the Jews from Croatia were fierce. There were loyalties among the Jews, of course, but these Jews were also members of nations and not completely immune to the patriotic fervor of the time. The Croatian Jews argued for the necessity of an independent Croatia, while the Serbian Jews argued with equal vigor for the maintenance of a state led by Belgrade.
The Bosnian Jews found themselves isolated from the other Jewish communities, who spent much of the meeting arguing with each other. Loyalties divided between the family of Yugoslavian Jewry (who had met together every year since the end of World War II) and the national identity of the Jewish members. The tensions at the meeting made it clear that greater violence was coming. If the Jewish communities fell to bickering among themselves, what would happen between the other ethnic groups?
Jacob Finci, the head of La Benevolencija, the humanitarian arm of the Bosnian Jewish community at the time, recalls a visit to the beach in Croatia that summer when, in the parking lot, he experienced of shudder of terror. A group of men draped a Croatian flag over their car and stood around it drinking and singing patriotic songs. What struck Jacob was how much the nationalist flag of Croatia resembled the flag he had seen as young boy, fifty years earlier: the flag of the Ustashe, the Croatian Fascists. It was then that he was certain there would be no more peace in the Yugoslavia.
As independence movements stirred throughout the Balkans, tensions were highest in his home country of Bosnia, the most ethnically mixed of the former republics of Yugoslavia. Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and a trained psychiatrist (and, oddly, an amateur poet of mediocre ability), stated that if Bosnia tried to declare its independence, they would be on a “highway of hell.”
When the Bosnian parliament overwhelmingly passed a referendum on independence in April 1992, the Serb MPs boycotted the vote. Soon afterwards, both sides erected barricades around the city.
On April 6, 1992, during an independence rally, Serb forces and Bosnian police clashed, starting the civil war. True to his threat, Radovan Karadzic and the head of the Bosnian army, Ratko Mladic (both currently under indictment for crimes against humanity), did indeed turn much of Bosnia into a hell for the Muslims: mass rapes and massacres spread throughout the country. Under the banner of Orthodox Christian zeal and patriotism, Serbian nationalists aimed to “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim population. They forced Muslims from their homes, stole their identity papers, and destroyed their mosques and cultural sites. While Muslim forces were also guilty of human rights abuses, little evidence suggests that targeting civilians