Post-War Identification. Torsten Kolind
were driven to eat grass during the war when there was nothing to eat. One day his mother was picking some grass in a garden when the owner (who was also a Muslim) came and kicked her out. He needed the grass for his cow. And another time when she went to a place where a little food could be bought, the owner told her that she did not have enough money to buy anything, but then he saw her ring and said she could have one kilo of food in exchange for it.
You don’t kill children, do you?
Several people expressed feelings like Nijaz: “I cannot understand how one can kill children; one thing is if a soldier meets another soldier and it’s a matter of life or death, but to kill a child, or like in Visegrad to throw them out from the bridge…old and children.”
You teach your children to be good, don’t you?
Senad’s mother’s experiences made her question the moral education of the Croats. On the day she and her family were driven from their home:
…one of the Croat soldiers had a knife in the one hand and a hammer in the other, then another came and opened the door, it was a young guy the same age as my Senad [her son], and I thought about what I had taught my children and how they [the Croats] raise their children. And I thought, how could they hurt an elderly woman? I was forty-eight at that time. Then a couple of them came in and beat me and my maternal uncle’s wife. My mother-in-law stayed in the house, and she begged for somebody to stay with her in the house, but they said that everybody had to go away from the house and then they burned the house with her in it. The worst is that we do not know where her bones are.
Normal people react to injustice, don’t they?
Anvere: I lived with the children here in Stolac. Nihad was in prison camp. One day one of the kids found a little piece of paper, something from the UN. It told us things I did not even know. And when you watched TV there was nothing [no information about what was happening to the Muslims in Herzegovina]. They knew out in the world what was going on, but they didn’t do anything and they didn’t inform us either. We were an experiment, a political experiment.
You trust friends and neighbours, don’t you?
The last example relates to the central value of inter-ethnic coexistence, condensed in the idea of neighbourliness (komšiluk). For many their betrayal by friends, neighbours and fellow citizens, with whom they had lived peacefully for many years (often their whole lives), was the most incomprehensible of many disillusionments. Here I will describe three examples, showing how such feelings of betrayal were expressed to me.
I
Nermin: I should never have thought that my friend, who lived together with me, would take the rifle and shoot at me. My best friend sang and drank together with the other Ustashes [term of abuse for violent Croat extremists], while I was locked up on the lower floor. He was my best friend from Stolac.
II
Ljubica: The people we had been drinking coffee and loza [grape brandy] with, it was they who picked up Nihad [her husband], and stole my jewellery. It was they who came and stole our things, they knew where they were.
III
Senad’s father: The worst is that up until yesterday we were neighbours and we lived well together, but suddenly they looked upon us as wild animals who should be slaughtered. It is totally inexplicable that some people can behave like that.
Lamira’s story
I will end this section with an excerpt from an interview with Lamira, a woman in her late 20s. The first time I met her was at her work. I introduced myself and told her about my study. We then went down to the canteen, where she started talking. We had coffee, but she did not touch hers for a whole hour, she just talked. She said that it had been a long time since she had last talked about the war, and that there was so much to tell. Sometimes, she said, she really wanted to talk and other times she did not even want to think about it. The excerpt consists of several small anecdotes about deceit and evil, which reveal how the world has been unmade. But there are also elements of pride and hope. Like Nusret at the beginning of this section, she said: “Often I feel like a bystander to it all. As if it is not I who have experienced it. It’s like I’m standing outside looking in at myself.”
I don’t know where to begin. There is so much to tell. There are so many stories. In Stolac there is a hospital for skin diseases. We have such good air here. So before the war a lot of people came to Stolac to get treatment, and there were a lot of disabled staying there permanently. When the Croats expelled us they turned this hospital into a barrack and all patients were removed. The Croat patients were driven to Čapljina, the Serbians to the Serb Republic and the Muslims were put in cars, and several of them could not walk, they used wheelchairs. They drove them to a place at Buna, near Blagaj. They abandoned them there, so that they were outside Croat territory, some of them died. We had to transport them in sheets or pieces of cloth and put them up in houses in Blagaj, but there were no wheelchairs, and none of the treatment they had been getting, so a lot of them died.
One day we were told to leave our house and leave the key in the door. It was the third of August, and all the women and children were expelled (proteran). My father, my cousins, and all the other men in town had been driven to concentration camps a month earlier. We women and children were taken to Željezara [a factory in Stolac], There we were locked up in a room and robbed of everything, money and gold. […]
I remember those women who came dragging big bags. Not real baggage, but for instance the kind of sacks you store potatoes in, they were dragging all these things, and they begged the soldiers to be allowed to bring them with them, they were weak women. And then there were the women who only carried a handbag with family photos. They were very aristocratic, and they didn’t deign to look at the soldiers. They were proud, and ‘If you want the bag, so take it.’ They didn’t want to beg for anything.
Afterwards we were put on trucks. Many of the trucks were stolen from Bosniaks, and many of them had previously been used for transporting animals. We were then driven to Buna, where we had to walk to Blagaj. It was terrible. It was a no-mans-land.
TK: Many people tell me that this walk of eight or nine kilometres was very terrible, why was it like that?
Lamira: There were dead bodies along the road, people died on that walk. I always thought that when you die, then you turn cold and stiff. But we were expelled in August, and it was very hot, and the dead bodies were totally swollen. And when we walked, the soldiers constantly told us to keep walking. And the people living in Blagaj said they didn’t have room, so we had to keep on walking, walking…and we didn’t have water or food. The disabled and sick we carried in blankets, and we kept thinking ‘Is there room here for us?’ At last we found an abandoned house, or what was left of it. Four families were staying in one room. There were thirty-five people in the house. There was one outdoor toilet, where you should see to everything. There was only very little water, water from the gutters saved in tanks. We had to live in the basement because they were shelling us. Next morning….We lived here for eighteen months. We had no food. We were starving and lost a lot of weight. It is hard to imagine, but try not eating for seven days, then you can imagine a little. And then there was the constant shelling.
In December 1993 – or was it January 1994? – We received aid from the air for the first time. It was American planes that were dropping relief supplies. I remember the night when they dumped those relief supplies; it was one of the worst nights in my life. We ran to the field. It was at night, but there were snipers. We ran to the packets that had landed in no-man’s-land. You have to imagine the Croats one the one side and the Serbs on the other, and then we were in the middle in a hole [Blagaj is situated in a kind of valley], and they shot at us and shelled us. But the packets weighed about 500 kilos each, so we couldn’t carry them back, we could just try to wrench something loose from the packets and then hurry back. People were scared, and some got wounded. I lost a friend that night. Snipers