The Fracture Zone Part 2

I would like to say it was the great Gothic Cathedral of the a.s.sumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary that dominated my view of the Croatian capital when we finally stepped down from the train at Zagreb station later that night. It was not. Its two towers, illuminated by golden floodlight, pierced the night sky from the top of the low hill on which they and the old Archbishop's Palace stood. But it was the ordered magnificence of the structures in the square outside the station that first caught my eye. This was Vienna, I thought, all over again. Some of the buildings were faux-Renaissance, some art nouveau, still others born of that Viennese radical architectural school that grew out of-and was, in part, a reaction to-nouveau and was called the Sezession. This may have been a Slav city, but the stylistic influence on its center was pure Hapsburg, from the station itself to the boxy and colonnaded Esplanade Hotel, which loomed fortresslike and severe, to the left of the imposing square. It had been commissioned by the Wagons-Lits company, someone said, for pa.s.sengers coming in from Paris on the Orient Express (it was always a.s.sumed that anyone of any cla.s.s who arrived in Zagreb would be bound to do so by rail).

The hotel and the cathedral, both of which are relatively modern structures (the first cathedral was knocked down by a furious earthquake in 1880), have something in common-a feature that offered us the first terrible glimpse (and so soon beyond the comforts of Vienna!) of the true horrors of the Balkans.

The imposing, green-washed Esplanade Hotel, as darkly imposing and majestic inside as its outside suggested it should be, turned out, according to the staff, to have been the headquarters during World War II of the Gestapo. And the cathedral, half a mile away, was in some sense a spiritual refuge for those Croats who were committing dreadful crimes either at the behest of the Gestapo or on their own frighteningly warped initiative.

Croatia in the days following the German and Italian invasions was run as a supposedly self-declared and notionally independent fascist state; and though the Wehrmacht and soldiers from the Italian army were everywhere to lend support, it was run princ.i.p.ally and with blood-chilling ruthlessness by Zagreb's dreaded home-grown terror organization, the so-called Insurrectionists, the Ustas.h.i.+.

The men who peopled this appalling organization of unutterably violent Croat separatists, a body that had existed since the thirties, first came to worldwide attention when, in 1934 in Ma.r.s.eilles, they a.s.ssa.s.sinated the Serbian king, Alexander I (Alek-sandr Karadjordjevic).* The uncanny connection between cathedral and hotel is that for an indecently long while, beginning in April 1941, the Ustas.h.i.+ were receiving their orders from the Gestapo officers at the Esplanade while at the same time, and even more chillingly, they were said to be receiving their moral imprimatur and, for a while, their blessing, from the archbishop up in the Zagreb cathedral. Sezession mansion and Gothic church were thus united, at least for a while, in the underwriting of one of the great b.e.s.t.i.a.lities of modern times. The uncanny connection between cathedral and hotel is that for an indecently long while, beginning in April 1941, the Ustas.h.i.+ were receiving their orders from the Gestapo officers at the Esplanade while at the same time, and even more chillingly, they were said to be receiving their moral imprimatur and, for a while, their blessing, from the archbishop up in the Zagreb cathedral. Sezession mansion and Gothic church were thus united, at least for a while, in the underwriting of one of the great b.e.s.t.i.a.lities of modern times.

From the evidence collected in the years since the war, it seems that almost every dire act the Croat madmen perpetrated against the Serbs-the butchery, killings with knives and mallets and hacksaws, the throat slittings, the ax murderings either because the Serbs were members of what many Croatian Catholics considered the apostasy of the Orthodox Church, or because they were reckoned to be Communists-was said to be done under the invigilation and approval of one of the more allegedly diabolical figures that the modern Roman Catholic Church has produced.

He was called Alojzije Cardinal Stepinac, and his consecrated remains, lately blessed by the pope, lie in the cathedral today, in an elegant tomb not far from a celebrated Durer bas-relief, and under the gold stars and azure sky of the cathedral ceiling. His memory is revered by thousands of Croats still-I watched a line of several dozen young women with their children waiting to kneel before his tomb, to kiss his image and mutter incantations over their rosaries. Yet seen by today's standards, Stepinac seems hardly worthy of such unswerving Christian devotion. He was by too many accounts to disbelieve a cruel, dogmatic man, a puritan zealot and a bigot, and a figure who was cynically used by the Ustas.h.i.+ to give moral authority to the terrible things they were doing to the Serbs who lived among them.

One side of his zealotry was harmless enough-he was a stickler for the unvarying protocols of church ritual, he took a Franciscan oath of poverty, he believed that Masons were everywhere plotting, and he railed against the immorality-as he saw it-of such innocent pursuits as sunbathing and mixed swimming. But he also made sermon after impa.s.sioned sermon condemning those who wanted-as many intellectuals did in those days-an end to the schism between the Eastern and Roman churches. The archbishop's firmly held belief, at least as a young man (and he was first inducted into the Zagreb cathedral chancery when he was only thirty-two) was that the Orthodox Church represented a perversion of holy truth, and all who held to the Byzantine beliefs should be shunned, converted, or worse. His belief mirrored precisely the stated policy of the Ustas.h.i.+ regime, which famously and chillingly said of the Serbs that the only way to deal with them was to ensure that one-third were exiled, one-third were converted, and one-third were killed.

The most egregious example of Stepinac's alleged tyrannies had to do with both conversion and killing. He is said to have directed, and on occasion presided over, the forced conversion to Catholicism of tens of thousands of Orthodox Serbs at the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, seventy miles away from Zagreb. The conversions were given, or forced, just moments before the camp's Ustas.h.i.+ thugs set about the men with hammers and axes, killing them in such numbers and with such viciousness that even the n.a.z.i Germans-who had taken industralized killing to high art-were hard put to outdo. They were made Catholics, the Croatian church leaders.h.i.+p later explained, to ensure that after their deaths they could go to heaven.

By chance a trial concerning the horrors of half a century ago at Jasenovac was going on in the Zagreb county court on the day we arrived. A former camp commander named Sakic was being prosecuted for ma.s.s murder and war crimes-an effort by the eight-year-old Croatian state to make some amends for, and come to terms with, events that had taken place in the name of its people. On the days that we spent in the city, a Jewish former inmate named Josip Erlih had been brought in from Belgrade to testify: He told gruesome stories of men being machine-gunned to death because they were Jews, or of Serbian farmers being beaten to death with mallets, axes, and picks, or of the hanging of large groups of Chetniks, the most prominent and active of the Serb partisan fighters.

Some 350,000 prisoners had been killed at one camp, he said-40,000 of them alone Gypsies. Anyone who departed from the Croatian Catholic norm-Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, gay men-was regarded as beneath contempt. "There was so much killing. The Ustas.h.i.+ tried to burn the bodies in the incinerator but gave it up because of the terrible stench. They tried to make soap from the prisoners' corpses, but gave up that effort, too, because the bodies were so frail and there was not enough fat in them for that."

Mr. Erlih's testimony, given in a quiet courtroom on this ordinary warm spring day in a town that, beyond the courtroom, was bustling merrily with all the pleasantries of European cafe society, was heartbreaking. "Abuse and beatings took place on a daily basis," this neatly dressed, dignified old Belgrade Jew told the court, "because every Ustas.h.i.+ officer had unlimited power, and the possibility to kill without being punished. Day after day I saw the women and children of Jasenovac going off to be killed. They knew where they were going, but they did not cry. They were singing."

And they were singing, too, in the cathedral, on the day we visited. A small chorus of nuns from a distant nunnery were rehearsing old compline psalms. There was still a line of housewives in front of the cardinal's tomb, many of them carrying bags of fresh farm produce from the nearby Dolac vegetable market (to which Mrs. Thatcher had once been taken, as stall holders liked to tell me). Had these women any idea, I wondered but was unable to ask, what this man was really supposed to have done? Or had they thought the stories about him to be mere propaganda, dismissing any errors as those of a naive man with poor judgment? After all, there are some who believe that late in the war, when the scale of atrocities grew truly vast, Stepinac declared himself publicly against the Ustas.h.i.+s' murderous campaigns. One biographer says that he harbored Jews in the cathedral grounds, another who interviewed him in the 1950s said that the old archbishop felt himself to be a victim, a cleric placed in an impossible position and forced "to suffer for his church."

Certainly the Vatican has been grateful for his stand against Communism; certainly the Holy See has sympathized with his stated aim of preserving Croatia as a civilized and Western-looking Catholic state, not allowing it to fall prey to either the hated Eastern ways of the Orthodox Church or to the even further Eastern ways of the Muslims. Pope Pius XII made him a cardinal in 1952, and if the Vatican then ever investigated his infuriatingly vague wartime record, which came complete with a diary with a large number of puzzlingly missing pages, it never said what it found.

And then in 1998 Pope John Paul II came to Croatia and announced the formal beatification of the cardinal, and the possibility remains that he may yet be declared a saint. His standing now is very different from what it was when he died in 1962: He had been under house arrest then, accused of having collaborating with the fascists. But then again, in 1962 his country was Communist, and dominated by Serbs. Today it is Catholic, and dominated by his own. The legacy of Alojzije Stepinac is a clouded and confused affair, suffused with dreadful stories, and mired in the cla.s.sic Balkan hatreds, ancient and modern.

The criminality, or culpability, of the cardinal's wartime role has yet be proved, and may never be; the terror inflicted by the Ustas.h.i.+, by contrast, is admitted, and recorded, just as the n.a.z.i crimes were, in stupefying detail. The historian Milovan Djilas painted an all-too-vivid series of descriptions of events he saw as a partisan fighter. He wrote, for example, of an incident in 1941 when a gang of Ustas.h.i.+, together with some Muslim toughs who were along for the ride, rounded up all the Serbs in a village called Miljevina and slit their throats while hanging them over the edge of the community wine vat, so that their gus.h.i.+ng blood would take the place of grape pulp. There are stories, too, of Ustas.h.i.+ thugs capturing Serb partisans and tying them down and cutting their heads off with saws saws-sawing their necks, back and forth, back and forth, with deliberate and agonizing slowness. with deliberate and agonizing slowness.

The common feature in all of these accounts, of course, is that the victims were Serbs. Which might beg the all-too-obvious question that had puzzled me long before I first came to the Balkans: What, if this was Croatia, were the seemingly very large numbers of Serbs doing there in the first place?

The answer goes back to the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs, as so many of the trials of the region seem to do. I had my first proper explanation of it when we picked up a hitchhiker on the main road from Zagreb to a once-important little town called Karlovac, thirty miles to the southwest. She was a young student named Maria Oreskovic; she was twenty-three, a Croat, a Catholic, was studying economics, and when we picked her up, she was on her way home. I told her I knew that Karlovac had played some important role in Balkan history but confessed that I wasn't sure quite what. Maria was only too happy to help. "I give directions," she said. "I show you why my hometown matters."

An hour later the three of us were standing in the courtyard of a curiously tall wood-and-stone structure that stood on a low and windy hill a mile or so out of town. The main tower was square, four storied, about sixty feet tall, and with what seemed to be an open viewing platform under the eaves. Thick brick walls surrounded the small court, and rising from two of its three corners were smaller towers, with galleries connecting them. The building was known generally as Dubovac Old Town, and it was where the Austrian border guards had kept watch over the vanguard sentries of the Ottomans-it marked the very edge of the Hapsburg Empire, and, just a few miles away, the beginning of what Alexander William Kinglake, in that most cla.s.sic of travel books, Eothen Eothen (1844), called the "land of the Osmanlees." (1844), called the "land of the Osmanlees."

The building, five hundred years old or more, is now run as a country inn. It was deserted, thanks to the war that was being fought just a few dozen miles away, and the manager was happy to give us coffee and then, after we expressed a keen interest in looking over the building, lunch as well. I climbed up through the galleries to the very top, and hoisted myself into what was indeed an old reconnaissance platform. It was from here, for three centuries or more, that the Grenzer, Grenzer, the frontier garrison chiefs of the Hapsburg armies, stood sentry duty to protect the outer reaches of their immense empire. the frontier garrison chiefs of the Hapsburg armies, stood sentry duty to protect the outer reaches of their immense empire.

Whatever Clemens von Metternich might have said about the Orient having its beginning at the Rennweg or the Ringstra.s.se or the Oststra.s.se, the undeniable truth was that the one empire ended here, and the other began here. The Old Town of Dubovac was military headquarters for that vexed artifice known as the Krajina, whose existence is the main reason that there are now, or have until recently been, so many Serbs inside the territory of Croatia.

If the underlying crust of the earth in the Balkans is cracked and s.h.i.+fting along great tectonic fault lines, so the people on the Balkan surface are affected by the faulty lines made by man-and in this region, there is no more important fault line than the Krajina. The word is Serbo-Croatian, and it means "edge," "boundary," "border," "frontier." Officially the region was known as the Vojna Krajina, the Military Frontier District, and it was basically one huge exclusion zone. Outside, to the west and north, were the Hapsburg-held provinces of Croatia and Slovenia; inside, east and south, the Turkish-held statelets of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Serbia.

The Krajina was probably not hugely different in its concept or nature from exclusion zones created by more recent Communists and Western governments, as barrier regions, or as buffer zones on one side or both of their more sensitive national borders. There used to be an infamous such zone in southern Bulgaria, for example, twelve miles wide: There could be no villages there, no people at all, in the last twelve miles before Bulgaria became Turkey. It was designed so that no Bulgar ever saw a Turk, nor was any Bulgar ever tempted to drop everything and make a dash for it. (The Turks, one suspects, would never want to anyway.) The Austrians created their Krajina in the last years of the seventeenth century as a direct response to the failed siege, since the throne had an understandable case of the jitters in case another Kara Mustafa might one day make another lunge for its city. In their making of the frontier, however, the Austrians incorporated one signal difference, one which has since made the word Krajina, Krajina, in general Balkan terms, synonymous with the very worst kinds of violence, mayhem, and ethnic purging. in general Balkan terms, synonymous with the very worst kinds of violence, mayhem, and ethnic purging.

What the Hofburg bureaucrats decided was that, rather than leave the border regions unpopulated, they would allow, and would indeed encourage, the settlement there of Slavs who were fleeing from the strictures of Ottoman rule. And not just Slavs: Serbs. Scores upon scores of thousands of Serbs.

It was the Serbs in Serbia and Bosnia, after all, who were feeling the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the Ottoman yoke. It was Serbs who were most violently opposed to anything and everything that the Turks might do. Who better, then-who more highly motivated?-than the Serbs, to ward the Turks away from Austrian territory. And so the Austrians were generous to a fault with the new settlers (especially since the land they were settling the Serbs on was not actually Austrian territory, but Croatian.) So when in the late seventeenth century the Orthodox patriarch of the Kosovan cathedral town of Pec led thirty thousand of his faithful to escape the wrath of the Turks, and brought them to sanctuary in the Hapsburg borderland, the Austrians gladly acquiesced. They gave the refugees territory, religious freedom, hope. They apportioned them land, they helped them build farms, they allowed them to reconstruct their Orthodox churches and schools and to write their language, they gave them a degree of autonomy the Croats and the Slovenes did not enjoy-and they permitted them, most significantly of all, to arm themselves, to become a territorial defense force.*

By doing so, the Viennese thought, they would spare the haughty and dignified Austrian Grenzer Grenzer the grubby business of ever battling with the Muslims. The closest they might wish to get to the sharp end of the situation was the fortress on top of the hill by Karlovac. "Let the Serbs do our fighting for us," said the smooth and powdered officials at the Hofburg. "They have suffered already, they know what it is like, and they have their dander up." the grubby business of ever battling with the Muslims. The closest they might wish to get to the sharp end of the situation was the fortress on top of the hill by Karlovac. "Let the Serbs do our fighting for us," said the smooth and powdered officials at the Hofburg. "They have suffered already, they know what it is like, and they have their dander up."

So, without the very Germanic and thus very foreign Austrians ever quite realizing what they had done, without ever quite foreseeing the implications of their strategy, they succeeded with one stroke of a courtier's pen in sowing the seeds for centuries of ethnic division.

For from the early seventeenth century onward, and fermenting quietly on the margins of what would one day become the overwhelmingly Catholic Republic of Croatia, the Austrians created a land of prosperous farmers and merchants who, rather than looking westward across the Adriatic to Venice and Rome, and rather than owing political loyalty to the House of Hapsburg and any intellectual connection to the West, were a people facing resolutely East. The people of the Krajina owed their loyalties instead to Byzantium and Athens and, indeed, to Moscow, and (to underline this point) they wrote and read in Cyrillic script, and would, in this century, become natural ultimate vehicles for the expansion of Marxism. And then again today, when Croatia wanted its independence from Yugoslavia, these, the people of the Krajina, were the people whose loyalty was not to Croatia at all but to Serbia and Belgrade-which loyalty held them back, made them rebel, made them suspect, made them fight.

For each and all of these reasons the hundreds of thousands of independent-minded, well-armed, and very different people who inhabited the long and scythe-shaped Krajina, which stretched from the Serbian border along north Bosnia and down the Dinaric Alps to where Dubrovnik stands today, were to become victims of the Croat slaughter, and, in due course, were to retaliate in kind. On what was considered sacred Croatian soil, a million miseries-and all because of what the Austrians so airily created and ran from their fortress high on a windy hill.*

Maria still had a little while before she was due to go home to baby-sit her younger sister. "Why not come into the Krajina?" she smiled. "To see what it means." And so we drove down from the hillside, and into lush springtime countryside with fields and fat cows and tall gra.s.s, and which could for all the world have been Oxfords.h.i.+re or Connecticut. The flyblown suburbs of Karlovac soon faded in the mirror. Ahead were some low hills, and beyond them, the frontier proper and Bosnia. In between, according to the map, were a couple of slow rivers and a number of villages. Indeed, there was a scattering of houses in a fold in the hills ahead-but houses that, when we first came close enough to see, were all ruined, all smashed, all burned and roofless and wrecked. It was my first sight of the wreckage of this war, and I stared, open-mouthed, at what I could barely believe.

"You get used to it," said Maria, still smiling. "Part of the landscape here. I guess you can say it's part of our history now."

This must once have been a Croat village, on the outer edge of the Krajina itself. There was a small Catholic church, ruined too. The damage must have been done, and probably back in the early nineties, by Serbs who made forays out of their own villages close to the border, just to b.l.o.o.d.y the Croats' noses, to show them who was master. On some of the walls inside the more spectacularly wrecked Catholic houses I could see the most potent of Serb symbols, a cross with four Cyrillic C Cs (signifying S S ), the two on the left facing backwards, giving the device perfect bilateral symmetry. The letters stand for ), the two on the left facing backwards, giving the device perfect bilateral symmetry. The letters stand for Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava, Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava, or "Only Unity Can Save the Serb." or "Only Unity Can Save the Serb."

In other circ.u.mstances it might have been a rather pleasing, rather elegant device-but before long, and after seeing it a thousand times on wrecked houses and torched cars and on mutilated victims, painted or carved or burned onto their stomachs or faces, it came only to represent hatred and horror, like a swastika. Ovo je Srbija Ovo je Srbija was scrawled on many houses here too, lest anyone forget: "This is Serbia." was scrawled on many houses here too, lest anyone forget: "This is Serbia."

But of course it wasn't then, and it isn't now. We were still very much in Croatia, and the ruins past which we were driving were simply the scars of a recent war. The Serbs had lost this piece of territory, had been beaten back, had been forced back into Bosnia across the frontier, or far away into Serbia itself, or into Kosovo or Montenegro. At least that's what I thought.

And then we turned left off the main road, and up a winding country lane, under a bower of apple blossoms, where a beautiful young girl stood holding a brown cow by a string through its nose. We drove into the gra.s.sy courtyard of a small farm. Two men sat at a rough oak table, smoking and talking quietly in the early spring suns.h.i.+ne. I stopped the engine, and one of the men got up and walked over to us, smiling and extending a welcoming hand. I introduced myself, Maria doing the translating.

We were in a hamlet called Cerovac, this farmer was called Duro Relja, and he was forty-seven. He had lived on this farm all his life. The girl with the cow was his only daughter, a Maria too. There was his wife-he pointed at a darkened doorway, where a shy middle-aged woman in black stood, playing idly with a large pig. His friend here was Milosan Obradovic-"come on over, Milo! Don't be so lazy. How often do you get to meet a man from England!"-and he had come up that day before from Montenegro, an eight-hour drive. Would I care for a gla.s.s of rakija, rakija, plum brandy? His wife bustled over with a bottle. "Homemade," she said in English. "I hope you like." plum brandy? His wife bustled over with a bottle. "Homemade," she said in English. "I hope you like."

We raised our gla.s.ses-Zivjeli! I was taught to say-and talked long into the warm afternoon, while the cow noisily cropped the long damp gra.s.s, the lambs bleated on the hillsides across the valley, and the blackbirds sang. His was a hard life, he said: He had a couple of dairy cows, maybe thirty sheep, he sold apples from his orchard, he had a field set to potatoes. He made only a modest living. And then-and at this point Duro Relja rose, and beckoned for me to follow him around the back of his house, the side that faced the valley-there was this. I was taught to say-and talked long into the warm afternoon, while the cow noisily cropped the long damp gra.s.s, the lambs bleated on the hillsides across the valley, and the blackbirds sang. His was a hard life, he said: He had a couple of dairy cows, maybe thirty sheep, he sold apples from his orchard, he had a field set to potatoes. He made only a modest living. And then-and at this point Duro Relja rose, and beckoned for me to follow him around the back of his house, the side that faced the valley-there was this.

The back of his farmhouse was wrecked, the walls smashed by a direct hit from a sh.e.l.l, the room inside, the bed still lying there in pieces, blackened and scarred by shrapnel. It had been in 1995, when the Croat forces had occupied the Krajina, and most of the Serbs had been forced out. He pointed to where he thought the gun emplacement had been. He thought he knew the man who had fired the shot. "Some Ustas.h.i.+ b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said.

Wait a minute. Come again?, I thought. A Croat gunner firing at a Croat? What was going on? "But you're a Croat, right? A Catholic, right?" Dura Relja and his friend and Maria laughed. "No, no!" he said. "You never asked us. We are not Croats at all. We are Serbs. We are Serbs who stayed here. They tried to get us out-but here on this side of the valley, everyone likes us. Yes, there was some b.a.s.t.a.r.d of an artilleryman who wanted to force us out. And he was only following orders from some politician in Zagreb. I think I know who the gunner was. I know him. I'd see him at the market. I think I could meet him again. But anyway, the neighbors here,"-and he pointed to another farm, which looked relatively unscarred, set on a hillside nearby-"they told us to stay on, if we could bear to. They helped us repair the house a little. They were Croats, and yet they didn't see us as the enemy.

"And of course, we're not. We're all Slavs here. You must have been told that. We're the same people. And there are some places, like this village, thank G.o.d, where people think like that still.

"But my G.o.d, it was so much easier when it was all Yugoslavia. So much easier. But anyway,"-and his wife filled the gla.s.ses again, and emptied the bottle of the colorless, fiery liquid-"let's drink to better times. Zivjeli!" Zivjeli!"

We got up to go. Overhead there was a low rumbling, and I looked up into the violet evening sky. There were four, five, six vapor trails, the thin gossamer traces of a squadron of highflying jet planes. They were close together, heading east.

"Bombers," said Duro Relja, tensely. "Off to attack Belgrade. The Americans. You English too. Off to kill some Serbs." He pounded his fist on the old oak table, angry now. "It is such a pity. Why can't everywhere be peaceful, like this village here? In Cerovac it all seems so simple. But why is the world going so mad?"

We took Maria home, to a neat house back in the Karlovac suburbs. Her father was mowing the lawn, taking care not to disturb a plastic gnome who fished patiently in a small artificial pool. We turned the car around by a wrecked bridge, one almost destroyed, said Maria, in the 1991 fighting, and which, like Mr. Relja's wrecked farm, no one had found the money to repair.

Almost outside her house we picked up three more hitchhikers, a trio of teenage girls who were going dancing. They sat crammed in the back of the car and sang the one song they knew in English. It was by Patsy Cline: "Crazy." And they sang it very well.

All that remained now was to make it through the Krajina and venture into the "land of the Osmanlees." I wondered if ours might be like Alexander Kinglake's crossing a century and a half before. He had been ferried over the very same river that we would have to cross, the Sava. And for him it was at a perilous time, too-for while beyond the Sava these days there is violence and revenge, beyond the river in 1844 the problem was the plague: When all was in order for our departure, we walked down to the precincts of the quarantine establishment, and there awaited the "compromised" officer of the Austrian government, whose duty it is to superintend the pa.s.sage of the frontier, and who for that purpose lives in a state of perpetual excommunication. The boats with their "compromised" rowers were also in readiness.After coming into contact with any creature or thing belonging to the Ottoman empire, it would be impossible for us to return to the Austrian territory without undergoing an imprisonment of fourteen days in the Lazaretto. We felt, therefore, that before we committed ourselves, it was important to take care that none of the arrangements necessary for the journey had been forgotten; and in our anxiety to avoid such a misfortune we managed the work of departure from Semlin with nearly as much solemnity as if we had been departing this life. Some obliging persons from whom we had received civilities during our short stay in the place, came down to say their farewells at the river's side; and now, as we stood with them at the distance of three or four yards from the "compromised" officer, they asked if we were perfectly certain that we had wound up all our affairs in Christendom, and whether we had no parting requests to make. We repeated the caution to our servants, and took anxious thought lest by any possibility we might be cut off from some cherished object of affection:-were they quite sure than nothing had been forgotten-that there was no fragrant dressing-case with its gold-compelling letters of credit from which we might be parting for ever? No-every one of our treasures lay safely stowed in the boat, and we-we were ready to follow. Now there we shook hands with our Semlin friends, and they immediately retreated for three or four paces, so as to leave us in the centre of a s.p.a.ce between them and the "compromised" officer; the latter then advanced, and asking once more if we had done with the civilized world, held forth his hand-I met it with mine, and there was an end to Christendom for many a day to come.

I was not entirely certain just where to cross the Sava; when I took advice it was from the strangest source. It turned out that a former Australian prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was staying in the room next to mine at the Esplanade. He told me, when we had a drink that evening, that he was trying (in vain as it turned out) to secure the release of a pair of Australian aid workers who had been arrested in Serbia and charged with spying. His mission not unnaturally fascinated Australia, and there were four journalists from Sydney and Melbourne in the hotel, covering the story. One of them turned out to be a man with whom I had shared a house in Was.h.i.+ngton a quarter of a century before, and whom I had not seen since. We spent our last evening in Christendom with him, and he a.s.sured us that the most prudent place to cross the Sava was via a half-ruined bridge a hundred miles east of Zagreb, at a place called Gradiska.

And so the next morning we drove there, and under a blazing sun crossed the iron Bailey bridge, our progress monitored by the crew of Hungarian army sappers who had helped to build it. It took half an hour of paperwork and fee paying and delay, but by lunch we were properly stamped-in Cyrillic, naturally-into what was notionally the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH for short, or the Federation.

Except not quite. We had in fact come across the border, across the Sava River, not directly into the Federation, but into that part of Bosnia that is almost wholly occupied by Serbs, rather than by the Croats or Bosnian Muslims-Slavs all, it has to be remembered-for whom the Federation is their supposed home. We were driving, and would be driving for a couple of hours more, through that half-legal ent.i.ty that was won out of the cliff-hanging negotiations at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and is known as the Republika Srpska-a place where no one, quite frankly, is very welcome. Certainly not two foreigners driving a Fiat that sported license plates showing it was registered in Croatia. It was perhaps not wholly surprising, then, that like Alexander Kinglake all those years before, we pa.s.sed under the barrels of the sentries' guns with just a frisson frisson of apprehension. of apprehension.

4.

Looking for a Sarajevo Rose

I WAS TOLD THAT WAS TOLD THAT I should see a Sarajevo rose. I had heard a lot about them-not exactly what they were, mind you, but that they were well worth seeing. I asked the Rose with whom I was traveling: She had heard of them, too, but wasn't quite sure either. I should see a Sarajevo rose. I had heard a lot about them-not exactly what they were, mind you, but that they were well worth seeing. I asked the Rose with whom I was traveling: She had heard of them, too, but wasn't quite sure either.

Rose knew a good deal about Sarajevo, and like so many who had lived in Europe during its years of siege and near destruction, had followed the downward spiral of the city's fortunes with a grim fascination. In the United States there wasn't the same degree of interest, and I was less prepared than was Rose for what lay ahead. I had heard several people say that after its five years of ruination and despair the city was now in an optimistic mood, and that it thought of itself as the fastest-changing place on earth. On the other hand, some Ca.s.sandras I had spoken to back in Vienna and Zagreb said this was fanciful nonsense, and that the city would eventually turn out to be much the same as it always was-a cauldron of all Balkan races and religions but one perpetually on the verge of boiling over. Just see a Sarajevo rose, one of them said, and then you'll have a better idea of whether or not things will ever really change.

In ordinary circ.u.mstances it should be about a three-hour drive to the Bosnian capital from the Sava River. But neither Sarajevo nor the Bosnian Republic have known ordinary circ.u.mstances for a long time now, and I supposed it would take rather longer to get there. Especially in a car registered in Croatia. (Though one of the Serb border guards who was in a friendly mood said that, since my car was registered in the Istrian seaport of Rijeka, and there was little historic animosity between the average Serb and the average Istrian, I would quite probably "get away with it.") The first few miles proved amiable enough. For maybe two or three miles, close to the frontier, there were some ruined houses, relics of the sh.e.l.ling from the Croatian guns. But when we turned into the Taxi-Bar cafe that the frontier sentries had recommended, it had been newly rebuilt and was filled with free-spending patrons, and no one, not even a group of four enormous and bare-chested Serbian men who sat at the next table, appeared unduly interested in my foreign car. I ordered beer and cevapcici, cevapcici, a dish of lamb and beef rolls, with freshly chopped chives and red-hot peppers, and which owes much to Bosnia's Turkish culinary influence. a dish of lamb and beef rolls, with freshly chopped chives and red-hot peppers, and which owes much to Bosnia's Turkish culinary influence.

We ordered coffee. "Bosnian?" asked the waitress, matter-of-factly, and when we agreed brought us what back home we always called Turkish coffee, two tiny cups on a bra.s.s stand, and poured the thick brown liquid from a dzezva, dzezva, a Turkish bra.s.s coffee jug. As we paid the bill-in German marks, the most widely accepted currency in the Balkans-one of the men from the next table came across and promptly turned the coffee cup over, dumping out the remaining coffee, claiming loudly to be able to read our futures from the grounds left behind. a Turkish bra.s.s coffee jug. As we paid the bill-in German marks, the most widely accepted currency in the Balkans-one of the men from the next table came across and promptly turned the coffee cup over, dumping out the remaining coffee, claiming loudly to be able to read our futures from the grounds left behind.

"I see, I forecast, you will have good time here," he said, in fractured English. His companions, contentedly drunk, giggled and gave the two-finger-and-thumb Serb salute-a gesture I was to see in much more threatening circ.u.mstances some weeks ahead.

We sped as fast as was legal through the ugly crossroads town of Banja Luka, forty miles from the frontier. There had once been more than a dozen mosques in the town, but so militant were the Serbs who flocked here during the war-as refugees from the Krajina in Croatia, and from those parts of Bosnia that were awarded to the Federation-that every one of them had been knocked down, including the famous Ferhadija Mosque, which was built in the sixteenth century with the ransom money paid to recover a kidnapped Austrian count. These days the town is the epicenter of nationalist Serbdom for what is called the RS-the Republika Srpska-and for those who care to demonize the Serbs, not a place in which to linger. But I got lost, and everyone I stopped to ask-each of whom glanced automatically at my license plates to guess at my persuasions-was helpful, and displayed not a trace of hostility. That was to come a good while later.

To get to Sarajevo there was a choice: either the main road due south, or a smaller country road that wound up and over a range of hills. I had an army map that is customarily given to drivers of SFOR, the thirty-thousand-strong NATO Stabilization Force that tries to keep the Bosnian peace: It marked the country lane in red, as what armies call a Theater-Controlled Route, and even gave it a code-name, albeit an unlovely one: CLOG.* And sure enough, below the main sign that said SARAJEVO was a small yellow tac-sign (a tactical sign) with CLOG in a military stencil. We swung left onto the convoy route and climbed up into the high country. And sure enough, below the main sign that said SARAJEVO was a small yellow tac-sign (a tactical sign) with CLOG in a military stencil. We swung left onto the convoy route and climbed up into the high country.

Here at last was the geology of the Balkans writ large. The hills reared and plunged like the backs of a million mustangs. Villages were tucked away in the deep and forested folds of the ranges. There were waterfalls and tiny lakes, meadows and cliffs and precipitous ridges. There were dozens of churches too, each with the cross of the Eastern Orthodox faith, the tilted crosspiece at the base reminding wors.h.i.+pers that one of the men crucified beside Christ was destined for heaven, the other not. No Catholic spires here, or minarets. We were deep inside the Serbian Republic, in a landscape that, however cruelly, had been cleansed of all alien callings, and that, like it or not, basked in the temporary peace of its newfound purity.

And then we heard a faraway deep-throated rumble, and high above us were the contrails again: a big bomber this time, an American B-52 dispatched from its forward base in East Anglia, with four fighters from a U.S. base in Italy escorting it, on the way to drop hot iron onto Serbia.

As we came ever closer to what the SFOR map defined with a thick black line and a set of warning symbols as the "inter-ent.i.ty boundary," there was ruin again-mile after mile of shattered houses, the burned-out sh.e.l.ls of what had been homes and farms and barns. The daubings once more-"Cetniki brigade"-showed who was responsible. These had been the houses of Muslims, burned out and cleared by Serbs to make this region pure. By now I was becoming inured to it, but Rose fell silent, stunned.

Whole village house rows were empty-lines upon lines of houses destroyed, not randomly but with concentrated deliberation. I think that is what dismayed us most. This was not a countryside devastated by conventional fighting, in which an army had smashed its way across an urban landscape and laid waste anything in its path. This was selective, spiteful fighting, in which soldiers and civilians with pure hatred in their hearts set about the destruction of personal enemies, the settling of old scores. This was evidence of an abscesslike welling up of years of poison, and its sudden release, with dreadful, impa.s.sioned result.

The only houses that were untouched were those once owned by Serb farmers, back in those times when villagers ignored their differences-such as they were: Everyone here was a Slav, it needs to be said again and again-and just got on with the harvesting or the sowing or the raising of barns. But even these intact houses were empty, their owners quite understandably opting not to live on in a village of ghosts. That was one difference about the desertion: The Serbian houses had their windows boarded up; the Muslim houses had no windows.

A Bailey bridge-built by Royal Engineers a couple of years before-took us across a rus.h.i.+ng gray river that formed the ent.i.ty frontier itself, the ruins of the old bridge standing like broken teeth beside it. And then a few more miles of wreckage, before we rounded a bend, pa.s.sed a Turkish army jeep and a white Land Rover, both with SFOR stenciled on their sides, and found ourselves in a settlement of modern houses, all intact. There was a cafe, and we bought two beers. The owner was a Muslim. There was a wall calendar in Arabic. "Yes, Muslim but Bosniak," he grinned. "I drink beer. Is okay."

Suddenly there came a furious barking from below the lip of a hill beside the bar, and four breathless men in army fatigues clambered up beside us. They each had a huge dog, restrained by heavy chain leashes, and each had a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. "Pigs!" one shouted, "Wild pigs!" pointing down to the bottom of the valley. "And we have a wolf. Caught him yesterday."

Rose and I slithered down the gra.s.sy bank to a hastily built barbed-wire cage. Inside, and chained by a back foot, was a gray wolf with yellow eyes and teeth an inch long. It jumped up wildly when it spied us, and began a deep growling, like far-off thunder. But when we knelt down next to its cage it fell mute, and sat gazing up at me with what seemed an expression of terrible misery, caught and pinioned like this away from its forest lair. The men who had caught it waved their guns and cheered. "Serbian wolf!" one shouted. And they laughed drunkenly, kicked their dogs up into a cage behind the car, and, waving their guns out of the windows, skidded off down the mountainside.

There was an increasing number of minarets now, as we pa.s.sed town after bustling Federation town. We stopped for a while in Travnik, a town with a cla.s.sical Balkan look-squeezed and squashed by geology and topography into an inconveniently narrow valley, hemmed in by steep hills and connected to the outside only by winding switchback roads. My princ.i.p.al Balkan hero, the n.o.bel Prize-winner Ivo Andric had been born here: He wrote the novel that I have long thought of as the most important Balkan book, The Bridge on the Drina; The Bridge on the Drina; a book that, though it appears to offer high regard for the Serb, was written by what Ivo Andric was invariably forgotten to be, a Croat. a book that, though it appears to offer high regard for the Serb, was written by what Ivo Andric was invariably forgotten to be, a Croat.* There was a museum to his memory, but as so often happens it was locked, and a bored attendant who might well have been schooled in China offered only the memorably Oriental excuse, heard without cease in the People's Republic: "The man with the key is not here." There was a museum to his memory, but as so often happens it was locked, and a bored attendant who might well have been schooled in China offered only the memorably Oriental excuse, heard without cease in the People's Republic: "The man with the key is not here."

The imam of the local mosque was more welcoming, and though almost totally deaf spoke enough German to express his relief that his and six other mosques had all escaped the wartime sh.e.l.ling. He let me wander around inside where it was cool, and I padded across the soft, thick Turkish carpets and counted two dozen sets of prayer beads and as many copies of the Koran, open at different pages. When I emerged into the light the mullah was surrounded by elderly women in headscarves, and was eating happily from a bag of fries and ketchup that one of the ladies had brought him.

Dusk was gathering when, finally, we came to the junction beside the infamous airport and the even more infamous Mount Igman and, after turning left, saw the twinkling lights and familiar ruins of the city of Sarajevo itself. Soon there were trolley tracks and then, on our right, suddenly rearing out of the earth like some devastated nuclear sarcophagus, the twisted girders and shattered curved gray cement walls and floors of what had once been the towers of the newspaper office, Oslobodenje, Oslobodenje, which more than almost any other ruin seemed to symbolize the awfulness of what had happened to this town. which more than almost any other ruin seemed to symbolize the awfulness of what had happened to this town.

That is not to say it is the most infamous ruin. The terrible damage done to the graceful and domed old Hapsburg National Library, which used to be the town hall, stands as memorial to a particularly dire moment-the summer evening when, six months after the siege began in early 1992, a torrent of sh.e.l.ls poured down on the building and set fire to it, and the ashes of a million burning books rained down on those who tried in vain to save it. The barbarity of that event remains indelibly etched in the minds of all who stayed during the war or who have since returned-along, to a greater or less degree, with the countless other moments of terror and misery that left 10,615 people dead, of whom 1,601 were children. The siege of Sarajevo went on for 1,395 days-longer than the siege of Stalingrad; longer, it is said, than any siege in modern history. And its evidence, physical, psychological, spiritual, is inescapable. It confronts you, a.s.saults you, in every view, with every conversation. It hangs in the air, a deathly mustiness, sour and rotten.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn, which had been built for the 1984 Olympics and which famously stayed open throughout the siege, and in which-since it overlooked a snipers' alley, with the ruins of the a.s.sembly building between it and the Miljacka River and the Serb front line-the costliest rooms were those that did not not have a view. The city outside was busy: Shoppers pa.s.sed back and forth, the trolleys rattled past every few moments, cars went by at normal speed. No one ran, no one scuttled. There was a small cafe close by where people sat out in the suns.h.i.+ne, without an apparent care in the world. But when, as often happened, there was a sudden sound-a screech of tires, a car backfire, a shout-everyone looked up; there was a collective wince of memory, a skittishness born of five years of hard experience. have a view. The city outside was busy: Shoppers pa.s.sed back and forth, the trolleys rattled past every few moments, cars went by at normal speed. No one ran, no one scuttled. There was a small cafe close by where people sat out in the suns.h.i.+ne, without an apparent care in the world. But when, as often happened, there was a sudden sound-a screech of tires, a car backfire, a shout-everyone looked up; there was a collective wince of memory, a skittishness born of five years of hard experience.

Outwardly there were many rea.s.suring signs that matters might be returning to normal. But then again, perhaps not. There were four houses of wors.h.i.+p within a few hundred yards of the hotel, which before the war had bustled with congregations and showed just how well the fourth faiths, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Muslim, and Jew, had managed to coexist. But now the Orthodox church seemed closed, and there appeared to be little business in the synagogue. Only the Catholic Croats and the Muslims, for whom the Bosnian Federation had been established, seemed active.

Much else was moribund as well. On my first morning I went to the railway station. There had been a time when Sarajevo was a lively railway town, the station itself the pride of the Balkans. Ten years ago you could go by rail from Sarajevo down to Ploce on the Adriatic coast, or all the way up to Zagreb, or across to Belgrade, or Budapest or Athens. The latest Cook's Continental Cook's Continental suggested there might still be some services, a fifty-minute shuttle to Visoko and Zenica-but it warned otherwise that "many long-distance services have been suspended," and even such details as were published were "from unofficial sources and therefore subject to confirmation." suggested there might still be some services, a fifty-minute shuttle to Visoko and Zenica-but it warned otherwise that "many long-distance services have been suspended," and even such details as were published were "from unofficial sources and therefore subject to confirmation."

And the station was, of course, a total wreck. The facade was normal enough, except for some old sh.e.l.l damage. Inside a few stores were working, and there was a desultory crowd waiting, as if in a Samuel Beckett play, for something-a train, a bus, a long-lost friend-that never seemed to turn up. Once under the tracks and up the stairs to the platforms, however, the sadder reality of Sarajevo station became readily apparent.

There were six tracks, and gra.s.s grew up from all of them. The station clock stood still, unwound, unpowered: It was stuck at some minutes after five, the time one of the sh.e.l.ls struck home in 1992, just when the siege began. A few carriages stood idly, their paint peeling, their windows shattered, as if they were waiting for restoration in a rail museum. In one corner a large diesel truck had been coupled with rusty steel cables to a carriage, and someone said that it might leave later that afternoon, its tires straddling the railway tracks, and make a journey to one of the city suburbs, half an hour away.

At first I thought there was no one there, that the station was quite dead. But behind a coal heap I found four miserable-looking men, all from Sri Lanka, who said they had been living on the platforms for the past six months. They spoke English, and explained that a middleman in Colombo, to whom they had each paid six thousand American dollars, had promised them he would smuggle them into Germany and find them work.

They had been brought west by cargo s.h.i.+p and by freight train to Turkey and then-of all places-to Banja Luka, which is where the middleman himself had wanted to go. They had eventually wound up here in Sarajevo, where the agent had left, had given them the slip. They had been on the platform ever since, with no money, no prospects, no work, no pa.s.sports, no friends. Except they knew a man named Bobby, one said-he was a Nigerian, a student at Sarajevo University, and he came down from time to time and brought them cigarettes. They begged for food in the station square.

I felt desperately sorry for them-though heaven knows, I suppose I should have felt sorrier for the Sarajevans themselves. I let one of them use my cell phone to call his mother in Colombo, and when the number rang and a familiar voice replied in Sinhalese, his friends crowded around him, smiling, laughing, trying to pa.s.s on messages to friends and relatives, rea.s.suring everyone back home that all was well even though it manifestly wasn't, and that all would be well even though it clearly wouldn't be. I couldn't see that they had much reason for optimism, though they seemed to cling to the memory of the promises made by the man who had brought them here, There was no work to be had in Bosnia, there was no money. Nor was there much by way of law or due process or some structure by which they could get redress and hammer their lives back into order.

I gave them a little money, and when I walked back down the steps toward the tunnel I saw that one of them, the boy who had called his mother, was weeping. "I am so homesick," was all he said, and waved and turned away.

Sarajevo is a town given over almost entirely now to "the internationals"-the aid workers and the foreign financiers and the staff of the man who essentially runs the town and who is called, with true Gilbertian flummery, the high representative. I would receive letters for some while after I left Sarajevo from functionaries who worked at the Office of the High Representative, and I imagined them to be courtiers to a man who wore spurs and a cuira.s.se and a plumed hat, and ran all Bosnia as his personal fief. In fact he was a rather modest Spaniard named Carlos Westendorp, and those who worked for him were similarly una.s.suming. They worked to rebuild the wrecked country and its capital in the businesslike way of true Eurocrats, wearing suits as they did so, keeping rigidly to an eight-hour day, being chauffered around town in long white four-wheel-drive cars, living in apartments that were no more or no less modest than those they had left behind in Brussels, London, or Rome, and taking leave at frequent intervals and traveling to do so always in business cla.s.s. There were said to be thirty thousand such "internationals" in Sarajevo-seven hundred alone in Mr. Westendorp's office. The Bosniaks who did not work for them, who remained outside the charmed circle, seemed to hate them, or at least envy them; and those who had managed to find work with the international community-as translators, drivers, functionaries-found their working habits strange, their approach irritatingly demanding.

Rose had a friend in town, a young woman named Anja, who had fled during the worst of the war and had gone to live in Paris. Now she was back, with two languages, working as an interpreter for the high representative. She was paid a handsome salary in convertible marks to translate technical doc.u.ments into and out of Bosnian, and out of and into English and French. But she didn't like her job, and nor, she said, did many of her Bosnian friends. It was simply too hard.

"I think we are a pretty lazy people," Anja told me one day, as we drank coffee in one of the tiny and impossibly crowded bars that have recently sprung up like weeds out of the ruin. "It is part of our Ottoman heritage, I guess. All I do is drink coffee, get my hair done, talk. We Balkans like to talk. We've never had a tradition of working like this. And so you see what happens here now. There's no energy to do anything real. There are just a lot of get-rich-quick schemes. Lots of sponging off the internationals. Black markets. And drugs-lots of drug smuggling. And girl smuggling. And people-workers to Germany, that sort of thing."

I told her about the four men I had found at the railway station. "Typical," she replied. "Everything in transit, nothing permanent, anything that'll make quick money. That middleman-bound to have been a Bosniak. I probably know the guy. Cute, if you like that sort of thing. We may see him tonight in Jez [a cafe, named for a local type of hedgehog, and much favored by the current Bosnian mafia]. You know, Sarajevo's not a good place. It ruins itself with fighting, and then it gets ruined again by all these foreigners. They mean well, but they don't understand. Maybe the foreign soldiers do. Maybe people with guns understand this place. But not many others. It doesn't work by normal rules. There's a sort of anarchy here. And then there's all the anger, one people against another, and those against a third.

"You have it in Ireland, yes? It goes back years, yes? But in your case it only concerns two sets of people. Here it concerns three, at least. And the foreigners too. And all the groups you'll have forgotten about long ago."

She went on to tell me about an old boyfriend, a young jeweler who had come from that strange area of Bosnia known as the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a fingerlike extension of longtime Turkish rule sandwiched between Kosovo and Bosnia. It was still largely Muslim-not because its inhabitants were Albanian (as they were in Kosovo itself), but because its people had become Islamicized after so very many years of living under Ottoman occupation. These people had a long history of being ostracized too, she said, had been caught up in the fighting because they were "different," because they were Muslim, because they were sharp traders who made money and, in her words, "behaved like Jews or Chinese."

Her own boyfriend, wearying of threats by the Bosnian Serbs and the jealousy even of the home-grown Bosnian Muslims and Croats around him, had emigrated to Istanbul. There, she said, he felt safe-others from the Sanjak had been going to Turkey for years, and there was now a more sizable Balkan community in the city than one might imagine. She urged me to go and see him; I promised that I would.

I felt at first that I didn't much care for the Sarajevo internationals. They all looked so smug and well-dressed, I thought; they took all the tables at the city's few good restaurants; their numbers drove up the prices of the best flats; and their s.h.i.+ny white Range Rovers and Land Cruisers rode just that little bit taller than all the other cars in town, lending them a hauteur which I thought they didn't much deserve. Parasites, I thought unkindly, not helpers in the real sense. These weren't the people who dirtied their hands bringing help to a benighted place, like the doctors of Medecins sans Frontieres, or the vanguard teams from the UN Refugee Commission. These were the a.s.sistance commissars, and I resented them. But then again I knew only too well that I was an international too, and I lived far better than most of the inhabitants, and that I was hardly dirtying my hands with the reality of this town or any other. So how could I talk?

The Independent Media Commission, which was set up to try to give some direction to the stripling country's fractured and fractious press and broadcasting industries,* struck me as probably offering an example of the internationals' struck me as probably offering an example of the internationals' schtick. schtick. It had been set up in 1998, the language of its establishment hinting at the bureaucracy involved, since it had been done "...under the Authority of Annexe 10 of the General Framework Agreement for peace, and Article V of the Conclusions of the Bonn Peace Implementation Conference 1997...." It had been set up in 1998, the language of its establishment hinting at the bureaucracy involved, since it had been done "...under the Authority of Annexe 10 of the General Framework Agreement for peace, and Article V of the Conclusions of the Bonn Peace Implementation Conference 1997...."

The thinking behind the commission was simple enough: The output of the various radio and television stations in what in 1998 was a three-year-old country is, not surprisingly, deeply and intensely partisan, to the point of becoming dangerously inflammatory-so let a body of neutral observers, the commission, monitor the stations' output, try to curb the excesses of the wilder members of the fraternity, and use persuasion, sanctions, and perhaps even force to oblige them all to behave. A perfectly laudable aim: The idea that a new country should have a robust but responsible press can be nothing less than the universally acceptable wish of reasonable men.

The offices are on the third floor of a half-wrecked building close to the front line, beside a threadbare riverside park. A dozen white cars were parked outside, and a chauffeur was polis.h.i.+ng the windows of the largest of them. Inside all was tidy, quietly busy. The air-conditioning hummed; secretaries, dressed as they might be in Brussels or London, stepped in and out of offices, looking serious. I was eventually shown into the office of a former sergeant in the British army parachute regiment, who laughed and shook his head when I asked if knew anything about the press or broadcasting, but whose desk was now covered with memorandums, in a Babel of tongues, giving those few back up in Brussels or Geneva or New York who might be interested news of the latest skirmishes in what he called "Bosnia's war for truth." He appeared outwardly calm but said that he was in fact perplexed, overwhelmed. He had his work cut out for him.

"Sometimes it is hard to take these broadcasts seriously," he said, waving a sheet of paper at me. "Look at this-it's a transcript of a station in the Serb Republic-TV St. George, run by Radovan Karadzic's daughter, as it happens-which claimed the other night that, listen to this, Mujaheddin fighters on the Muslim side are kidnapping Serbian children, and feeding them to the lions in the Sarajevo zoo! I ask you! This is the kind of thing we deal with all the time.