War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [64]
Following the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, the Bosnian Serbs were required to relinquish the suburbs around Sarajevo to the Muslim-led government. A few days before the handover, I stood with a group of ragged Bosnian Serb police officers in blue uniforms. They lined up in a small park and sang. Their voices were barely audible over a scratchy recording of the old anthem of the kingdom of Yugoslavia. The thunder of ammunition exploding in burning buildings drowned out whole stanzas.
The police officers lowered the Bosnian Serb flag from the front of the Grbavica police station, kissed the cloth, and folded it. Milenko Karisik, deputy interior minister for the Bosnian Serbs, proclaimed the officers “heroes” and reminded the few onlookers that the police were the first to raise the rebel Serbian flag in the suburb four years ago.
“We saved this area militarily but we lost it at Dayton,” he said. “Maybe this generation of Serbs won’t come back, but in future generations the Serbs will return.”
The roaring fires in buildings, the bands of drunken Serbs cruising the streets in cars without license plates, and the fear etched on the faces of elderly people who peered through the plastic sheeting nailed across their window frames, illustrated that whatever authority these police officers had wielded disintegrated days ago.
More than a dozen fires sent billows of smoke and flames into a gray, overcast sky. Italian peacekeeping troops, who gunned their armored personnel carriers swiftly through the debris-strewn roads, did little to stop the looting and arson. Of the approximately 60,000 Bosnian Serbs from the five neighborhoods and suburbs that had been scheduled to be turned over to the federation, all but a few thousand had fled.
The repeated explosions came from setting alight the ammunition and grenades that arsonists had planted inside the buildings. Though some of the people who set the fires were vandals, others destroyed their own houses. An elderly Serbian couple who did not want to be identified were driven out of their apartment when a neighbor set his apartment ablaze, setting off explosions.
“What is happening now makes the thought of the Muslims coming here a relief,” said the woman, fighting back tears. “We tried so hard to save our apartment. It was all we had in the world.”
“People are burning their houses because they are bitter and angry,” said Milorad Katić, the mayor of Grbavica. “They don’t want to leave their houses for the Muslims to inhabit.”
Most of the 2,000 or so Serbs who remained locked the doors of their buildings and barricaded themselves inside their apartments.
When one elderly woman unlocked the front door of her building that afternoon to let in a man who lived there, he brushed her aside and began to dump gasoline in the hallway. She ran desperately outside to find some Italian soldiers who rushed in and prevented the man from starting a fire.
But most were unlucky. I saw two women toss basins of water at a fire on a floor above them, but they soon had to flee as the fire spread.
“We struggled for so long, we endured so much over the last four years,” said one woman, “and now we are burned out by our own people.”
It was the final act of war, the self-destruction that comes at the end of the campaign of hate and death and violence. I wandered the streets nervously, trying to stay out of the way of drunken groups of armed police who fired rounds into the air. Reporters who had covered the siege of Sarajevo longer than I showed little pity. They muttered that it was what the “Chetniks” deserved, although the victims, from what I could see, were mostly elderly pensioners. This was the apocalyptic end of war, of all wars. The Serbs, like all who are defeated, were consuming themselves.
I made my way to the Vlakovo cemetery and met Nikola