Travel with Indigo

Unless you studied a map of this small but eventful country, up close and in large scale, you would not know that it has a coastline, but it does. Just 15 miles long, it cuts a small slice out of Croatia’s southern Dalmatian coast. The border crossing there is perfunctory, though, so for the tourist it is of little consequence. I drove south from Split along the coast, passed over this border into Bosnia and made my way east up a two-lane highway through Metkovic, Mostar and Jablonica to my destination, Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital.

As the road rises from the coastal plains into the low piedmont and finally into the mountains where ski resorts abound, the signs of war damage grow as the miles pass. Lone farm buildings shattered by mortars and commercial buildings pockmarked by small arms fire become commonplace. As the damage grows more apparent, it comes to you, dimly at first, that an army passed through here not all that long ago meaning to destroy the area and anyone in it.

Upon arriving at the outskirts of Sarajevo, you begin to see freshly painted buildings and think for a time the war never reached here. Then you learn that no, it reached here all right and in horrific fashion. The fresh buildings are among the few on which the disfigurements of war have been slathered over with stucco and paint. Nearly all the rest still bear the scars of deadly battle, deep, lasting, ugly scars, much like those left on the minds of the Bosnians who survived it all.

Topography is the key to grasping the suffering the people of Sarajevo endured during the four years they were under siege, 1991-1995. The city of 525,000 (before the war) predominately Muslim citizens, sits at the bottom of a bowl almost completely encircled by low-forested hills. The only relief in the encirclement, and the only substantial stretch of flat land, is a gap in the far western suburb on which sits the only airport, a topographic anomaly that was to have deadly consequences.

When the Serbian army of 18,000 arrived on the scene, it took up positions along the crests of those encircling hills on which they mounted more than 200 batteries of artillery, tanks, heavy mortars, heavy machine guns, multiple rocket launchers and nests of snipers with long-range scopes. Those in the bowl below them were at first poorly armed and mostly civilians whose only wish was to be left in peace. Instead, they became targets. Over the course of the siege, the longest in modern warfare, an average of 329 shells per day hit the city and on one day, July 22, 1993, 3,777 shells rained down.

Serbians living in Sarajevo had long lived and worked quietly among the Bosnians, even marrying into Bosnian families and living in Bosnian neighborhoods. But when the Serb army arrived, many abandoned their families and friends and joined the invaders. It was, and remains, an apostasy of breathtaking, inexplicable dimension. Still more appallingly, after the war these Serbs returned to the city and their families and (former) friends, and today live and work alongside those who only a few months before they had sought to annihilate.

When I arrived in the city and checked into my hotel in the center of its old town, I hired a guide, and together we toured the war-ravaged city. Hardly any building was without damage, some only bare skeletons remaining after artillery or mortar rounds pierced their roofs. Enormous apartment blocks bore gaping holes, and the garishly painted Holiday Inn and its surroundings bore the telltale marks of battle.

From a hilltop, the guide pointed to a patch of starkly white grave markers where once there was a soccer field. As I surveyed the cityscape from that hill, I began to see these patches of white markers, both great and small, splotched across the landscape on nearly all of what had once been vacant land. Parks, sports fields, even gardens are now cemeteries. The death toll in Sarajevo from four years of siege was an estimated 10,000 killed or missing, including over 1,500 children. Another 56,000 were wounded, 15,000 of these children.

The only possible way to get food and water to starving families required a near suicidal 1,000-yard dash across the open airport runways to Bosnian held land and back. Ostensibly controlled by UN peacekeeping forces, the airport was in fact a killing field. Of those who tried, snipers killed some 1,500.

One day the guide took me to a very special rudimentary museum. From inside a small, battered house in a neighborhood alongside the airport, a tunnel extends under the runways to emerge 3,150 feet away in the Bosnian held safe territory. Dug by hand by volunteers working round the clock, it is just 3 feet wide and 4.9 feet high. On its floor is a rude set of rails made from lengths of angle iron welded together on which a wooden trolley ran back and forth carrying food, water, medicine, even diapers and, most importantly, soldiers and weaponry to the desperate people of Sarajevo and the most vulnerable of its besieged citizens out of the city. During its operation, 20 million tons of food passed into the city and a million people passed both into and out of it.

In the museum, I sat in a tiny room and there watched a brief film of live scenes from the siege. In one extraordinary segment, tank rounds repeatedly slammed into some of the enormous apartment buildings I had passed by on my way into the city. It was upon seeing the film that I became convinced that Serb regular and paramilitary forces had in mind the extermination of Bosnians, military and civilian alike, including women and children. There was no other conceivable reason for directing fire into the defenseless homes of civilians. [For more information on the siege, visit Wikipedia on The Siege of Sarajevo.]

In the city’s old town are numerous square blocks of pedestrian laneways lined with shops of every description, museums, restaurants and the ubiquitous coffee bar. Here and there are modest mosques with attendant schools and handsomely renovated hotels and shopping arcades. In the evenings, these streets crowd with locals and a few tourists promenading along, dipping into shops here, stopping for coffee there. It had a pleasing, restful air about it and the people seemed affable enough. In the four days I was there, I came to like the place and its people and I am glad I went. That said, after wandering around in the old town and learning firsthand about the siege, and perhaps viewing the bridge where Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination kicked off The Great War, there is not much to keep a tourists’ attention.

On my drive back to Split, Bosnian police stopped me for passing through a miniature village a touch quickly, doing 50mph in a zone limited to 18mph. There were two officers, smartly attired, driving a modern compact car and one spoke English. After scolding me for my flagrant violation of the law, he said that because I was a foreigner, I would have to go to jail and stay there until a judge heard my case. The fine, he said, would be 200 Euros. I then suggested to him that in the interest of efficiency, I could just give him the money to pay the fine and he could deliver it to the judge, saving everybody a lot of paperwork and me a few hours in the slammer waiting for the judge. He right off thought this was a fine idea and happily agreed. Bosnian police are so eagerly accommodating, going out of their way for tourists.

Because Bosnia is nearly the last predominately Muslim country I would visit on this long voyage, this seems to be a good point at which to record my impressions of the Islamic public I came to know. These countries include Indonesia, Malaysia, the Maldive Islands, all seven of the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Djibouti, Egypt, Turkey, Bosnia and Morocco.

With the lone exception of the UAE, I sensed neither animosity to nor resentment of an obviously American visitor, but was at all times regarded in a cheerful manner fully in keeping with the nature of the encounter, some of which were extensive. Those in Oman and Turkey, in particular, evolved into real and I hope lasting friendships.

What most impressed me about the people of all these countries (again excluding the UAE) was a quality best described as wholesome. Walking their streets, I never felt unsafe at any hour or at any location. I never saw public drunkenness or rowdiness (by the locals), even in those liberal minded countries where consuming alcohol is a commonplace. There was a nearly complete absence of licentiousness, drug use on a disruptive scale, publicly troublesome teenagers, slovenly personal appearance, and most of the other social pathologies that plague and coarsen the Western world. If present, as they likely are, they are there to such an innocuous degree as to be undetectable to the visitor. Published statistical profiles of these countries bear this out.

While wandering about in their various public arenas, I could never quite shake from my mind that I was in the midst of an obviously and pleasingly decent community of likeminded citizens. It seemed like a stage set for Father Knows Best (which, in Islam, he does) or Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet. Families are close-knit, children are well behaved and scrubbed, and attire is sensible, largely unfashionable and worn neatly without being salacious. People are extraordinarily polite to one another, always exchanging the traditional greetings of friendship. Men openly embrace each other with real affection and hold hands in public unselfconsciously (although, oddly, in the UAE, men do not hold hands in public with their wives). The insistent bass and driving rhythms of rap, hip-hop and techno are almost entirely absent. Ostentation is discouraged (the UAE again not included). Everyone I encountered was invariably polite to me and helpful.

It is worth noting that for the people I met the Western notion of multi-culturalism, of compromising their way of life to blend smoothly with another, is unthinkable. The people I encountered were about as homogeneous as it is possible to be and wished fervently to keep it that way. The corruption of their culture, the debasement of the moral choices they have made for themselves and their families by the powerful lure of Western modernism was a fear foremost in their minds, expressed to me often. That is why, even though they may choose to emigrate to London or Paris or New York, they are unlikely to assimilate fully for at least a generation or two, if ever. If you think about it, you have to ask why would they want to?

As you can tell, I very much liked my peregrinations among the people of these countries. They brought to mind something of the civility that many of us experienced in our youth and that all of us wish was more common in our lives today. For all of these salutary features, I give full credit to Islam, although achieved at a price of regimented conformity few of us would be willing to pay today. We did pay the price once, before the cataclysms of the sixties revolution, and as we look back on it now, through the murky lens of hindsight, we are wistful, hoping those days might come again, almost begging to pay the price of renewed conformity. [See, Harvard Professor (deceased) Samuel P. Huntington’s, “Who Are We?]

I have not touched on the many problems these countries and their people and religion face, Egypt, Djibouti and Morocco in particular. My remarks are limited to personal experiences and observations and so fail to take account of these larger issues, which most certainly are there and powerfully disruptive.

From Bosnia, my next stop was Vienna and the pastoral beauty of Carinthia, happily with son Grant along, subjects of the next blog.