one year ago i sat at a timber table in an elaborate dining lodge outside Bijeljina, Bosnia in the district of Republic of Srpska and listened to my new friends Sergio and Tony talk about their world that is so different from mine. Here it was only days after a Thanksgiving holiday I totally missed and weeks in front of a Christmas holiday I would not see. All the talk was politics… politics and blood… things my friends have always known, things they have grown up with, their mothers and fathers have grown up with, things they study in university, things I have only known from reports from across a sea…
From my journal: 30 Nov 2008: Bosnia-Herzegovina, Republic of Srpska
“My friend Sergio volunteered his version of the history of the Balkans tonight. I had been hearing lots of different versions. Muslim Bosnians tell me a version, Croats another. Sergio considers himself a Serb by nationality and he wanted me to understand his country as he understands it. No Romany Gypsies have volunteered their histories to me yet.
“Under the rule of the Romans, then the Turks, then Hungary, then the oppression of the first world war, then the second–with two wars in between, Sergio said… Did you know that, he asked? Did you know we had two other wars in our country between the two world wars?–the people of the Balkans maintained an identity of sorts and finally had a united country… Yugoslavia.
“Sergio went on about the united Yugoslavia and how under the dictator Tito the various diverse peoples lived together and worked together–the Croats (which here means Catholics), The Bosnians (Muslims), and the Serbs (which to him means Eastern Orthodox Christians)–and how it was mostly peace and productivity.
“He expressed pride in telling how basically no one wanted for anything. Anything I wanted, my father could get me, he said. He clarified that he did not mean frivolous things, but needs and some wants. He talked about Yugoslavia’s military might. A productive society, he said.
“I thought he was headed toward a similar conclusion as my friend Mirza, a young Muslim atheist who believes in the possibility of peace again in a unified Yugoslavian nation. Thinking this was where Sergio was headed, I brought up the idea of a reunified Yugoslavia. He smiled and asked me if I remembered that English writer… what was his name? Thomas Moore? What was his book, he asked me? Utopia, I said. Yes, your idea, that’s a utopian idea, he said and laughed.
“Then he said for better or worse the divisions that exist now are better actually and there is no going back because there is too much blood.
“Too much blood. I cringed inside to think of what this phrase really means here, in this place where busloads disappeared a little more than a decade ago and turned up later in mass graves, women and children included. Too much blood.
“Tony spoke up, lifting his large beer. He scoffed at the current borders and titles given to his homeland as ridiculous symbols imposed upon them. We don’t know the national anthem, he said, because it isn’t real. It was made up. Just like these borders were made up. These aren’t real countries. One day they made up a flag and said, this is your flag, we are going to call this country Bosnia-Herzegovina. That’s not our flag. It is no one’s flag, not ours, not the Croats and not the Bosnians. It was made up in a boardroom in Dayton, Ohio.”
“These guys and so many I talk to simply do not recognize their individual districts (of which their are three that make up the current borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina) as being in a real federation under the banner of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In one of the popular daily newspapers here in the Republic of Srpska the weather map includes neighboring countries Serbia and autonomous Kosovo along with the Republic of Srpska, but omits the Bosnia district of Bosnia-Herzegovina, even though the Rep. of Srpska drapes both sides of Bosnia like a tattered scarf. So even the weather map here is an ideological statement.”
Blood and politics and lands without Christmas decorations. That’s what I think of today when I remember Bosnia. But I don’t remember it like a soldier remembers a battlefield. I remember it as a place where human brothers and sisters are not given the same daydreams as me because the history of their families and countries look nothing like mine. I have no blood feuds in my history. And though some individual people surely do have blood flowing out of the veins of their lives in the most painful ways in murder and tragedy, still our land is a land of security, a land where a flag means so much more than a military agreement.
Today I remember the rest of the world fighting for a flag and a family they can trust in and i bow my head in silence and pray for a peace i know will never fully come.
Uploaded by: flip holsinger on 30th November, 2009.