War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [48]
Lukić and his followers raped young girls held captive at the Vilina Vlas spa outside Višegrad. Jasna Ahmedspahić, a young woman, jumped to her death from a window of the spa after being raped for four days. Then Lukić began to drive his captives to the center of the bridge. Lukić and his men taunted their victims, who were made to stand on the walls of the bridge, before pushing them into the water and opening fire with automatic weapons. He stuffed pork in the mouths of his Muslim victims and began to beat them to death with metal rods. Bodies, bloated and discolored from beatings and knife slashes, floated down the river, getting caught in the undergrowth along the banks. In one village, Slap, twelve miles down river from Višegrad, the villagers said they buried 180 bodies that floated up on the banks. One man was found crucified on the back of a door. On another occasion they found a garbage bag filled with human heads.
Human beings become pawns, manipulated and moved around a board like chess pieces. Those struggling to survive in a morally bankrupt universe find that there are few restraints left. The perversion seeps into the behavior of those who came with noble sentiments to help. The U.N. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia, just as aid workers in Africa did, used the money and power they wielded to frequent or even run prostitution rings. The most notorious prostitution ring in Sarajevo during the war, one that catered to the peacekeepers, the foreign community, and the gangsters—all those with hard currency—was run by Ukrainian troops. They had also cornered the market on black market diesel, although they had the annoying habit of mixing it with water.
The reporters, diplomats, aid workers, and peacekeepers who travel into war zones, without the restraint of law and amid a sea of powerless people, often view themselves as entitled. They excuse immoral behavior because of the belief that the work they carry out is for a greater good—the rescue of those around them—which outweighs impropriety. They become giddy with the admiration and social status that come with being protected and privileged. Diplomats who entered Sarajevo restaurants would be applauded. They had servants, new jeeps, nice houses, and clout. And they had power unlike anything they experienced at home.
The conflict created a new elite, foreign class. It was a class that fed off of war’s lawlessness and perversion. Students who spoke English in Bosnia and later Kosovo were soon making in a week more money than their teachers made in a year. Many lost all desire to study. It was not worth it. They paraded the new clothes and sunglasses they could buy with their dollars. Some began to look down on those around them with the same arrogance of those they worked for.
To those who are hungry, who spend all day in cold, gutted homes with no running water, who sleep on the concrete floors of overcrowded schools set up as refugee centers, who wake up and spend hours hunting for food or standing in long lines outside aid distribution centers, a little more humiliation is not much to endure. Many longed to enter the easy world of the elite. They would pay any price.
Many of those who set out to write their memoirs, or speak about the war, do so with shame. They know war’s perversion. It corrupts nearly everyone. To be greeted by an indifferent public, by people who would rather not examine, in the end, their own darkness, makes the effort Herculean. After each war some struggle to tell us how the ego and vanity of commanders leads to the waste of lives and needless death, how they too became tainted, but the witnesses are soon ignored. It is not a pleasant message.
As would be the case with war literature in the millennia following its creation, The Iliad describes the bonds of honor between fellow warriors. Soldiers, while