Bosnia-Herzegovina

what I learned at the ICTY – and what it means to me.

/ kw1385 / 1 Comment

I’ve been searching for a way to somehow encapsulate the meaning of my experience this summer at the ICTY. Tonight, my general post-Europe melancholy led me to rent, finally, “In the Land of Blood and Honey” – the film about the Bosnian war written and directed by Angelina Jolie.

I’ve heard mixed reviews of the film and am not here to claim that it’s a phenomenal piece of cinema. But here’s why everyone should see it: every single horrible thing that happens in the movie happened in real life.

  • Muslims were forced from their homes, by the thousands.
  • Those who could stay had little or no electricity, running water, food, or medicine.
  • Muslims were taken to detention facilities not unlike Nazi concentration camps except for smaller in size and without the gas chambers. Women in these camps were often beaten and raped. Men, the primary prisoners, wasted away in horrible conditions on starvation rations while receiving regular beatings. Prisoners were forced into various types of labor, sometimes including standing in front of Serbs as human shields during armed conflict with Muslim soldiers.
  • Random firing squad executions occurred all over the Muslim municipalities of Bosnia.
  • Sniping became a fact of daily life in Sarajevo and other towns. The Serbs occupied territory overlooking Sarajevo and shot people standing in line for water, on their way to school or work, coming home from the market, or running for cover just trying to get from one side of the street to another.

It’s easy, hearing about things like this, as I did all summer, to forget that each of the three groups – Croats, Muslims, and Serbs – did horrible things. And there’s plenty of remaining physical evidence of that today. Driving through the Balkan countryside is beautiful yet quietly tragic; I’ve seen the shells of hundreds of buildings and homes still waiting to be rebuilt by families who haven’t returned.

I read many accounts this summer of seemingly idyllic Bosnian life prior to 1992. Children of all three groups attended the same school, sat in the same classrooms, and even celebrated each other’s religious holidays. Aside from religion, the only differentiating factor among the three ethnicities seems to have been their names – some were clearly Muslim, Serbian, or Croatian. Like the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, you can’t tell these people apart just by looking at them. And today, if you travel across Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Serbia, you’ll find common staple foods and drinks – aside from religious structures and the remaining amount of destruction (Croatia and Serbia look a lot better than Bosnia), you can’t tell the countries apart as you travel through them.

Which just goes to show how mindlessly, needlessly bloody the breakup of Yugoslavia was in the 1990’s. In Bosnia over a matter of months, neighbors turned on each other – local elementary school teachers became guards at detention facilities where they watched men they’d known all their lives suffer from crippling beatings and starvation. Entire villages, containing only defenseless civilians, fell in a day after shelling and shooting as part of a campaign to eliminate Muslim-majority municipalities along the Serbian border. Women, children, and the elderly became refugees; men became prisoners or the victims of cold-blooded murder.

It’s hard to tell where things stand now. I’ve seen promising evidence both in the region and in the Hague of progress, reconciliation, and a desire to keep moving forward without reference to the past. But I’ve also seen lingering resentment and delusions about ethnic superiority or inferiority, and I’ve heard that many Bosnian children go to school now only with others from their own ethnic group, each with its own history textbook and version of events. Here, once again, is evidence that education plays a crucial role in the future.

The Tribunal may be closing in 2014, and it may be years before I next travel to the Balkans, but this is not the end of my involvement. In addition to following the Mladić trial closely, I plan to dedicate a significant portion of my free time to learning BCS (finally), reading as many studies of the war and the history of the region as I can, and familiarizing myself with other ICTY cases so that I know more about what happened, and because of whom, in each country. For me, the people of the Balkans are real – whether they’re friends from the Tribunal or the endlessly special children with whom I worked through World at Play last summer. I owe it to them – as a Croatian, an American, a future lawyer, and a human being – to learn as much as I can about this conflict and its lingering repercussions so that I can do what I can not only to continue healing those visible and invisible wounds but also to ensure that epic tragedies like this remain in the past, not the future.

the journey from Bosnia to Kosovo

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Greetings from Kosovo! This is the first time I’ve ever been to a country that no one else in my acquaintance has been to, so I’ll do my best to write frequently and lengthily about our experiences here.

Our journey from Livno to Prištine was long and adventurous. Part of the length comes from political rather than geographic reasons – since Serbia doesn’t recognize Kosovo, and because Serbia is our next destination, we had to drive into Serbia first in order to get our passports stamped. If you try to enter Serbia from Kosovo and don’t already have a Serbian stamp, the Serbs consider you to have entered the country illegally. So, in order to avoid that hassle, we drove east through Bosnia into Serbia and then down into Kosovo rather than just south through Bosnia.

We were up at 5 a.m. for a scheduled departure of 5:30. A few last-minute errands and forgotten items delayed us until 5:55, but soon enough we were coasting through the ever-beautiful Bosnian countryside en route to Sarajevo.

I would estimate that approximately four hours of our trip yesterday were spent on winding roads through mountains/large hills. I had no idea that this part of the world was so hilly, but that seems to be most of Bosnia and the part of Serbia that I’ve seen! This made for some more demanding driving on Scott’s part and some lovely scenery for those of us who were awake and keen to take pictures. It was also misty and rainy all day, so we saw lots of mountaintops covered in fog that lent an even more ethereal feel to the area.

We spent about five minutes within the limits of Sarajevo; I didn’t see enough to make any judgments about the city. I can say that the area around Sarajevo looked pretty war-torn; it seemed like there was one gutted, abandoned, or half-finished house for every two that were inhabited. It’s very strange to see so many buildings like that. Many of them, and also a good number of the ones in which people do actually live, seem to be made of cinderblock with no outer layer. It must get very cold living in those in the winter.

Once we were past Sarajevo, we started to see more and more signs in Cyrillic as well as some Serbian flags. We had seen a few signs in Roman and Cyrillic around Mostar, but as we got closer to the Serbian border, we encountered whole villages where the signs were only in Cyrillic. I plan to dedicate some time today to learning that alphabet – it’s SO hard to remember it and to rewire my brain to think of a different sound for the letters that look the same.

Around 11:30 we experienced what I have now dubbed, and what has been collectively adopted, as The Sheep Incident.

We were driving through a small village just past Foča when we came around a bend and saw some sheep about 40 meters away standing right on the edge of the road. Now, it’s useful to understand that we are driving in a British van, so the driver’s seat is on the right side of the van. I was sitting right behind Scott, also on the right side and on the same side as the sheep.

A series of things happened very quickly, as is often the case with these things. A couple of seconds after the sheep came into view, Hannah (sitting up front next to Scott) said “watch out for the sheep.” At almost that exact moment, the sheep chose, for whatever reason, to come into the road. There was absolutely no time to do anything. We weren’t going TOO fast, but we were going fast enough that slamming on the brakes or swerving wasn’t an option. There were maybe two seconds in between when the sheep moved and when we got to that part of the road. There was a sickening, loud series of bumps, Martha and I screamed, and moments later Scott had pulled over. He hopped out immediately with Danijel; the rest of us sat stunned for a bit. Dani and Lib had been sleeping and didn’t know what had happened; those of us who had seen it were trying to figure out whether we could stand to look or not.

To make a long story short, we stayed on the side of the road for about an hour. Two sheep died, and a third was injured enough that the owners included it in the casualties. After some debate, we decided not to call the police and instead to negotiate an amount to pay and move on. We had to backtrack to Foča because the radiator had been punctured in the impact and was leaking fluid. “Betty” the van suffered a few other cosmetic injuries but in general came out relatively unscathed. We were all fine too, which is impressive. Scott did a tremendous job of leading and staying cool in a very challenging situation.

Fortunately, the men at the repair shop were able to drop what they were doing to help us. We got underway again in about two hours. I think Saint Christopher helped us out!

The remaining drive through Bosnia grew increasingly rural and Serb-populated. At one point we passed a giant memorial to Tito, complete with a statue and 10-meter long letters spelling out his name. We finally arrived at the tiny border with Serbia around 5.

Every border experience is interesting, and this was no exception. First we laughed at one of the guardrails, which was wrapped in duct tape – clearly someone had driven through it at one point. Next, since we were in the middle of nowhere with no idea where there might next be a place to stop, a few of us ladies got out to find a toilet. Squatters exist in this rural part of the Balkans, and the one at the border officially qualifies as the worst I’ve used… I’ll leave it at that.

Passports freshly stamped, we continued into Serbia and went through another set of winding roads through mountains and extremely small, impoverished towns. There seemed to be no one around for miles, but we saw lots of livestock (including sheep) roaming the hills and fields. We eventually stopped at a gas station for some dinner (salami, bread, and cheese – the official World at Play sandwich) and another squat toilet experience, then we continued on to a larger, crazy town called Novo Pizaro, which we renamed Novo Bizarro. The main road through town was very narrow, filled with people, and went in the most crooked path imaginable. Some in the van commented that it reminded them of Southeast Asia.

Night fell while we were unscrambling our way through Novo Bizzaro. We passed some lakes that I’m sure are quite beautiful in the daytime. Houses started to dwindle as we approached the border with Kosovo, so it was very dark, and we encountered two trucks that had just stopped in our lane, so it was once again not the most relaxing of drives for Scott. (At this point we’d been on the road for about 14 hours.)

There is a curious bit of no-man’s land between where Serbia ends and Kosovo begins. The border out of Serbia is m favorite so far; the guard was a hot young guy around all of our ages who was hilarious and teased us about running a stop sign (true) and then made us open the back, at which point he jokingly asked if we had any drugs (no). Anyway, we got through with no problems and with another round of squats, this time in a field (I did not participate). Ten minutes later we reached the border into Kosovo. They took the time to enter our passports into a computer, so we had time to look around at a gas tank left by the UN and a truck full of cows that pulled up next to us.

Upon entering Kosovo, we passed a large sign reminding UN and NATO workers that this was the border and not to cross. This is also my first time being in a place with an active international peacekeeping presence; I am curious to see what else we’ll encounter.

We continued driving through sparse countryside for about half an hour, then suddenly there were stores, giant wedding receptions (that looked SO FUN), and huge produce stands lining the road. One of our partners met us about 40 minutes outside Prištine, so we had an escort the rest of the way.

Prištine is MUCH larger than we had imagined, and it’s also more posh – we haven’t driven through much, but the area where we’re staying has lots of upscale shops that I never expected in a place that so immediately evokes an image of war. I am looking forward to driving through more of the city today.

That’s all for now – time for our first session!

Last post from Bosnia-Herzegovina

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Hi everyone,

Today is our last day in Bosnia – we are finally leaving for Kosovo tomorrow after two weeks here. It’s a quiet Sunday in Livno. The sun has come out, but we had some rain showers earlier that made for the kind of sleepy Sunday that people across the world can enjoy from time to time. This worked out well for us since we had a pretty late night taking advantage of Livno’s surprisingly vibrant nightlife scene.

Although Livno is a small town by any standards, its relative proximity to Croatia and incredibly low prices on alcohol make it a destination for the tall, well-dressed, and almost universally attractive twenty-somethings within a pretty wide radius. Croatians apparently come here to drink because the prices are so low. For instance, drinks for five people cost 12 Bosnian marks, which is about 6€ – also known as how much I would pay for one or two drinks in the US.

Martha had spent the day fighting off a stomach virus, so Sion stayed to continue taking care of her in the evening. The rest of us – Scott, Will, Danijel (Big D), Hannah, Libby, Dani, and I headed into town in search of some fun. We started off at the internet cafe where I am now, and I was literally walking out the down when the entire town lost power. We headed back to a bar we had passed that was already full of beautiful people pulsating to techno beats and found that lack of electricity is no reason to stop serving alcohol or to press pause on the fun button. The bartenders were happy to hook us up with some beer, and the crowd was making their own music to continue dancing. We headed outside, where the emergency lighting in a few nearby buildings made for a more visible hangout space. Fortunately, the power came back on in about 20 minutes, and the energy level ramped up accordingly.

Around 12:30 we joined the throng of people heading towards Club Lennox, a huge club a couple of blocks away. We immediately hit the dance floor and spent another hour and a half dancing to the sounds of Croatian/Bosnian techno. Although it would have been nice to hear one or two familiar songs, I quite enjoyed the break from American music. I am always frustrated when I travel abroad by how inescapable American cultural products are, particularly music. I was glad to have the opportunity to hear some native sounds, and I’m going to try to track down the names of some of them so I can make a playlist.

We’re leaving tomorrow morning at 5:30 for the ~12 hour drive to Pristina, the capital of Kosovo. On a trip that includes almost all of the former Yugoslavia, I think we are all most interested in seeing Kosovo. It’s obviously the one that has been in the news most recently, and I anticipate many challenges there. Hopefully, we’ll be able to access Internet frequently enough that I can write some lengthy posts about our experiences.

Until then!

World at Play in Livno, Bosnia

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Greetings from a smoky internet cafe in Livno, Bosnia! Warning: in Bosnia, the y and z keys are reversed… if there is a z where there should be a y, please forgive the error. 

If you’ve never heard of Livno, don’t feel bad. It’s not significant enough town to merit mention in my Lonely Planet guide or for the weather app on my phone to give me the forecast. Despite the generally negative reviews we had heard (mainly just that it is a small and boring place), Livno is turning out to be a very charming place to spend a week – I love it here!

The drive here from Mostar was by far the shortest journey between host cities that we will make on this trip – it was just over two hours door to door. I settled into a corner in the back of the World at Play van and drifted in and out of sleep, stirring periodically to see the beautiful, diverse landscape we passed along the way. I am not sure how I had pictured Bosnia in my head, but I guess I was not expecting such a war-torn country to be so lovely. It’s quite mountainous, and there are fields, rivers, streams, and lakes aplenty as you move through the countryside. In this still predominantly-Croat area of the country, it is not uncommon to see Croatian flags, signs for Split’s Hajduk football team, or umbrellas advertising the Croatian beers Karlovaško and Ožujkso. As we got farther from Mostar, we started seeing less of the ruined or abandoned houses that cover much of the area in and around that city and the area around Zagreb. The houses around here are newer and don’t suggest a bloody past.

In fact, Livno is about as different from Mostar as it is possible to be. For one thing, its higher elevation makes it a hell of a lot cooler – we are actually spending time in our World at Play hoodies snuggling under sleeping bags! It’s surreal after a week of 110-degree weather in Mostar. Livno reminds me a bit of Cadiz, where I spent a summer in Spain – it is a pretty typical European town, with a main drag along which all members of the populace stroll, drink, and play at night. There’s a large plaza (where, again, the Croatian flag is flying) fringed by bars and outdoor eateries (one is called the Moulin Rouge, and another hosted a foam party last night – so much for claims that there is nothing interesting to do in Livno!).

We have our own cottage just outside of town. It’s a charming, whitewashed structure with three main rooms plus a bathroom and storage area. There are no actual beds, so we are rotating through the various pull-out couches and – literally – inflatable pool rafts. It’s a bit cramped, but it is also really nice to have a place entirely to ourselves and to get back into a routine of cooking for each other. We also have a little yard where we can have meetings, a well with fresh water, a cat that sometimes comes to visit, and possibly a ghost. During our first night, Martha and I woke up at different times and thought we saw one of our other teammates, Will, in our room – she thought he was standing near the kitchen sink (the kitchen is also our room) for an hour; I thought he was in bed with me instead of Martha. Our other teammate Dani also came through our room in the night and thought that Will was sleeping there too. Will slept soundly in a different room, so none of us are able to account for these strange experiences…

We have a more relaxed schedule here – after a three-hour session in the morning, we are free. We are planning to spend some of the extra time doing “skill sharing” sessions, which means we will take turns teaching each other about things that we each do well. I am running sessions on public speaking and social media (blogging!). Since we only have one session to plan, we can get planning done quickly and spend time doing things like leisurely drinking beer at one of the local bars (last night) and people-watching in the square.

Our role here is slightly different in that the majority of our time will not involve playing with disadvantaged children. We are working now with kids from the main elementary school as just a supplementary summer activity. We had about 60 of them this morning and had a blast. We are also mixing up our approaches to session planning, so I got to plan the entire session by myself, which was really awesome. I think this morning’s session is the best I’ve had as an instructor the entire trip. I’m working with the 11 and 12-year-olds, and they are great.

I have been inhaling smoke from the guy next to me for about 30 minutes now, so I am going to cut this short – more later, hopefully!

Halfway Point, and Bosnia So Far

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I’m writing this on my phone at a cafe in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. (technically, just Herzegovina. They are distinct principalities that act as one country.) it’s relatively cool in the shade, but we’re facing another day of 90+ degree heat (which, considering that most of this week it was between 105 and 110, is actually welcome relief).

We’ve been in Mostar for a week now, and we had two more days to go before we move on to Livno, which is northwest of here and in the Bosnia section of BiH. Mostar is a charming town with much to see. The 2.5k walk from the orphanage where we stayed until yesterday included a huge Muslim cemetery, many buildings riddled with bullet and shell holes, a number of once beautiful stone buildings that were gutted during the war, and an Ottoman-style market that makes it clear we’re no longer in Western Europe. Across the Old Bridge (which stood for centuries before being bombed dring the war) and a bit further on, there’s a different scene: Catholic churches, the occasional Croatian flag, fewer signs of destruction, and a generally more western, privileged feel. Mostar is known for being a divided city, and it’s very visible.

We’ve spent this week working with two groups: the kids at the Egyptian Village (an orphanage once financed by Mubarak) and Sunce Mostar, an organization for physically or mentally disabled children and adults. It’s been a major change from our week in Croatia, where we ran three two-hour sessions per day at an orphanage and two homes for mentally disabled adults. In Croatia we worked with about 70 people per day; here, it’s more like 25.

The Egyptian Village is one of the strangest places I’ve been. Most of the kids are either home for the summer (something I don’t understand at all) or with relatives in Italy (again, no idea). The ones remaining range from ages 3 to 22 and are almost 100% unsupervised. We saw an occasional social worker during the day, but after living there 7 days, we still have no idea if there were any adults in charge and/or permanently present. It broke my heart to spend time with two brothers who are three and five and have zero parental figures. I held and cuddled with the three-year-old for about two hours total over the last two days, and he was clearly desperate for that kind of contact. He threw his little arms around my neck and snuggled into my chest like I’d always been his mom. Saying good-bye to them yesterday was terrible – who knows what will become of these children without structure and guidance. This is not a country in which there’s much potential for starting from scratch and making your own way.

We’ve worked with only six people (five adults and one adorable, inexhaustibly enthusiastic and cheerful little boy with malformed legs) from Sunce Mostar. We integrated them with the orphans, which was generally a success. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and although the kids misbehaved a good amount to us, they treated the Sunce folks perfectly well despite their obvious differences. We have finished working with the orphans but have one more session with Sunce tomorrow morning.

Outside of our sessions, the World at Play team and I have a total blast with each other. Our evenings always include games of some sort combined with the occasional cold beer, dance party, or Scrabble tournament. We’ve had significantly more down time here, so we’ve also gone out to dinner, walked around the old town, visited Medugorje (site of a Vatican-unconfirmed Virgin apparition), and swam in a lake surrounded by waterfalls. Bosnia has a lot to offer, and I hope tourism will increase and begin to boost the economy and recovery process.

I can’t believe we’re nearly halfway through the trip. Training in Wales and Austria seems forever ago, and I feel like I’ve known everyone my whole life. (Spending 24/7 with the same 8 people tends to do that.) I’m so grateful for this opportunity.

hi from Mostar, Bosnia!

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Dear Readers,

The busy nature of our schedule combined with the infrequent access to internet (particularly to computers) is making it mostly impossible for me to blog. Please find me on Facebook to see small updates periodically. I will post all our adventures from World at Play here when I return to the States!