War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [44]
At dusk in 1995, after being smuggled through Serbian lines ringing Sarajevo in the back of a jeep belonging to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, I was taken to a large school in the Bosnian town of Zenica. There Bosnian Croats, in essence Bosnians who were Catholic, were huddled after being driven from their homes by Arkan’s militia. They were some of the 10,000 Muslims and Croats who had been driven from their homes in Bosanski Novi, Sanski Most, and Prijedor over the last four days in one of the periodic waves of ethnic cleansing by the Serbs. As usual, the men of fighting age had been separated and detained. About 5,000 of them were now missing.
The displaced, robbed of every possession and then driven on buses to Muslim front lines, sat on the cement floor. Children wailed. The smell of cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies mingled in the dimly lit rooms. There was no electricity. Kerosene lamps provided a dim light. As I pushed through the crowd, hastily jotting down notes, it became clear that most small villages had lost nearly all their draft-age men. The men had been gathered in town squares and beheaded, beaten to death with sledgehammers, forced to dig their own graves and to watch as their daughters or wives were raped in front of them. I was not surprised.
The women who had been raped were easy to spot: sullen, broken, and uncommunicative. Most did not want to speak of the experience. I learned about it through others. The scene was typical. I looked into the blank, uncomprehending faces of the children and despaired for the next generation.
In town after town in Bosnia and Kosovo, warlords turned universes upside down. They preyed on the weak to fulfill their own carnal lusts and desires. They stole and raped, murdered and abused, and their immoral universe proved ascendant. In village after village in Bosnia, Afghanistan, or the Congo, the killers and their militias ruled. They were once embraced as saviors, shielded by the myth of war, but they had become parasites.
These militias, without the discipline or military code of the professional soldier, were frightening. They were populated with criminals, misfits, and children who drive around with car trunks full of weapons they did not know how to use. They killed and tortured according to whims and moods. They enjoyed turning us into pawns, playing with our fear, holding us as “guests” while they unleashed a lifetime of bitterness upon those around them. Once in a village in Kosovo I found a local warlord from the Kosovo Liberation Army with enough weapons dangling off him to outfit three or four fighters. He began barking orders to his hapless followers and when they did not heed his demands started firing into the dirt. Blood began oozing out of one of his combat boots. Determined not to let his visitors see his self-inflicted wounds he clenched his teeth and limped away. It was among the rabble, the barbarians, that I longed for the Roman cohort, the drilled and organized mass that makes up professional armies.
In wartime nearly everyone becomes an accomplice. The huge dislocations, the millions who lose homes and property, are often compensated with the property of those that were forced out. Those who had their homes taken away from them in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serbs were later given the homes of Serbs who fled the suburbs of Sarajevo. The moral destructiveness of ethnic cleansing, like the psychic wounds of war, thus reverberates throughout a society. Families who are stripped of all they own and then handed by the state apartments