War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [46]
“We paid for this in advance,” said thirty-nine-year-old Rifet Ramović. “The Serb soldiers stood by the buses when we left and demanded that each of us pay them 150 to 300 deutsche marks. People had to beg their neighbors for help so they could afford to get out. By the time we left, most of us had nothing.”
In the small living room of her new house, not far from where I had left Mirnes and his mother, Fatima Cura looked around. She and her husband started cleaning up the unfamiliar possessions scattered on the floor.
“I feel guilty,” she said. “This is someone else’s home. Is this right?”
Her husband did not answer as he knelt to pick up pieces of stale bread from the floor.
“We lived twenty-seven years together in our house,” she said. “We expected something like this, so we sent our children out.”
Their son was in Sweden and their daughter was in a refugee camp in Germany.
“Then one night last week the Serbs came and put a paper on our door saying we no longer owned the house,” she said. “The police took our keys.”
Eight days later they were driven out of Prnjavor. “We were beaten and pushed by the Serbs on the way to the buses,” she said. “We wondered if we would make it over the river alive into Croatia.”
Mirnes and his mother, like the others on the buses, prepared that night to sleep in a new, unfamiliar bed, still made up with the bedding used by the old owner and his wife. “All we have left from our old life together is each other, a few clothes, and Mirnes’ stuffed bear,” she said. “That bear has become the most precious thing we own.”
Later that day, I wandered the streets of the town. The collective lective occupation of the houses was unsettling. On Ibre Hodzic Street one light shone from the rows of windows. I knocked on the door of the apartment and found three elderly women, two Serbs and a Muslim, intently listening to the news on a radio. The three friends were struggling, as they had for more than three years, to make sense of the latest diatribes unleashed by the Serbs or the Bosnian government, the political agreements that might augur peace, and the advances and defeats that marked the ebb and flow of war.
But in the end it had come down to this: The Bosnian government had just reclaimed this town from the Serbs, and nothing had changed except the victims. As a result of this reversal of fortune, Dursuma Medić, a Muslim, would now have to watch over her two Serbian friends—who for the last three and a half years had taken care of her.
“We are three old women trying to survive a war,” said Burka Bakovik, fifty-two, a Bosnian Serb. “We have been friends since childhood. None of this hatred ever touched us. We all protected Dursuma when the Serbs ruled. Now she protects us. The only news we wait for is peace, and that hasn’t come yet.”
As we spoke I could see Muslim soldiers busy painting over the slogans left by the Serbs on the walls outside. “Only one Bosnia, all the way to the Drina” and “Victory is our destiny,” they wrote.
“The war began with words,” said Seka Milanovik, sixty-eight, the other Bosnian Serb woman, “but none of us paid any attention. The extremist Serbs and Muslims were misfits, criminals and failures. But soon they held rallies and talked of racial purity, things like that. We dismissed them—until the violence began.”
The women said the extremist groups soon partitioned the city and surrounding villages into Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim areas. And each religious group turned to thugs for protection.
“I live in this apartment for two reasons,” said Medić. “One is to protect my Serb friends. The other is because the Serbs burned my house down. I know what can happen when desperate people seek revenge. This is why I have to always be here.”
“My daughter and two grandchildren fled with the crowds,” said Bakovik. “I did not even have time to say goodbye. In a moment they were gone. Now I am alone and afraid.