A War, A Choice, A Tragedy: My Trip to Bosnia

A journey through Dante's inferno. That's what I thought as the bus that I took from Zagreb to Dubrovnik passed through destroyed villages in the midst of utter darkness, punctuated by patches of burning wood. To my surprise, however, I also entered into a land of hope. In Dubrovnik, the destruction of the city is starkly contrasted with the warmth of its inhabitants, who proudly recollect how they withstood the siege of their homes by the Chetniks (Serbian irregulars), with the active support of Serbia and Montenegro. As I toured the surroundings, once idyllic places bathed by the Mediterranean, I could only find the skeletal remains of houses, ghosts of a past now erased. On each house, scribbled in black, is the symbol of the Chetniks and beside it, the name of the hero who engineered the destruction. As I entered the village of Cilipi, a few kilometers south of Dubrovnik, something caught my eye -- an old woman struggling to clear her ravaged field where vineyards had once stood. With bent back and rugged hands she slowly performed a task which would exhaust the last years of her life. The majority of the inhabitants have not returned to Cilipi. They are crammed into hotels, one family to each room. They number close to 10,000. These are the fortunate ones, the survivors, for during the siege the hotels were preferred targets of Serbian artillery. Among these was the "Belvedere," the most luxurious of all, its huge glass front having once faced the Adriatic. It was precisely through these windows that Serbian warships were able to watch as fleeing families crowded together for safety. They shelled the hotel, causing its upper floors to collapse onto the refugees below. I met Dr. Daugherty, the director of a San Diego based relief organization, on the train from Budapest to Zagreb. Once in Dubrovnik he offered me the chance to accompany him to Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We travelled by car to the border between Croatia and Bosnia where we were met by Bosnian relief workers. The journey revealed to our weary eyes a scene of desolation and destruction, the likes of which I had never contemplated. When we arrived in Mostar we found the old town nearly empty and only its stone bridge, built by the Turks more than 500 years ago, remained standing. Unlike Dubrovnik, there was not a trace of hope to be found. A young woman, carrying a beautiful child at her side, told me about her husband, a Serb, who was forced to flee to Norway for fear of his life after having been interned in a Croatian and Muslim-run concentration camp. He had refused to go to Serbia, whose tyrannic government he so hated. She was to join him in a few days' time. For a moment I stood thinking how lucky she was. Suddenly I realized she would have to turn her back on twenty-four years of her life, leaving behind all, family, friends, her homeland. She, like everyone else, was merely seeking understanding and someone to listen to her. Over the past months the news coverage of the tragedy in Yugoslavia has made the refugee drama a cliche, but the suffering is painfully real. When we departed the next day, the silence inside the car was only broken by the continuous roar of the running engine. We were leaving while they were staying behind. The bridge in Mostar is not standing anymore. The streets of the old town are not empty, but filled with Muslim refugees, driven by the fighting between Muslims and Croats which erupted a month after I had left. Duba, a Serb I had met earlier in Bratislava, told me not to blame the entire Serb nation for the atrocities committed by its government. Similarly, we must not blame the whole of the Croatian people when we hear accounts of the destruction of Muslims in central Bosnia, where I spent two days of my life. As the conductor Lorin Maazel said during the past New Years' concert in Vienna, it is the duty of an artist to abandon his ivory tower and try to help at a time when extremism and racism seem to be surfacing everywhere. And so it goes for us, students and faculty alike. Or we can do what Simone de Beauvoir did; have drinks in the Parisian cafes while children were being herded into trains and driven off as cattle to be slaughtered. I leave the choice to the reader. Among her criticisms was that I had not stressed clearly enough that Muslims are also committing atrocities. This is true. I also feared being termed a 'salon socialist' so I will add a few words to the end of my conclusion above. The word help should not be read with a capital 'H.' Instances of help abound. These include actively contributing to the effort of humanitarian organizations, and pressuring the Western governments, including the U.S. government, to accept refugees. Many of them will be killed if this does not happen. Yes, some refugees are being accepted, but their numbers are so ridiculously small as to not deserve to be mentioned. The choice is the reader's. But do not ask yourself how you could help, until you've made the decision that you want to help. And whatever you do, do not be driven by fame. Alfonso Daniels is a senior International Relations major from Barcelona, Spain.