EXCERPT
from The Key To My Neighbor’s
House
In
July, 1999, summer enveloped the town of Celebici, the arid, unrelenting
heat of Bosnia’s south. Each rise in degree was signaled by the
growing buzz of the cicadas. The air was languid at this bend of the
Neretva River, where young couples lay on a muddy beach tossed up
by the swift-running river just outside the town. Bosnia’s war
seemed eons ago.
Mention the recent guilty verdicts in the Celebici war crimes trial,
however, and the Bosnian Muslim town angrily awoke from its lethargy.
"There were no killings in this area," snapped Ibro Makam,
deputy head of Celebici’s municipal office, holding court at
the local bar. "Most of the people here have no idea about this
supposed camp… It’s all lies. The Serbs are responsible
for what happened." Makam rocked on his heels, a Bosnian version
of a country sheriff with a cigarette dangling from the corner of
his mouth. The Serbs’ lies, he said, had cost the town humanitarian
aid, jobs, and a promising future. "Now that is genocide,"
he added, irately.
It had been just a year since I was last in Bosnia — and four
since the fighting had ended — and amazingly, some corners of
the country looked as if war had never occurred. Along the main streets
of many cities, like Sarajevo, gleaming new gas stations and shiny
office buildings rose up, as well as billboards advertising everything
from Seimens electronics to Slovenian shampoo. Out in the countryside,
new red roofs shone amidst the cornfields.
But drive off the main routes and the rebuilding ceased. Bosnia, disappointingly,
proved something of a Potemkin village, a country where change remained
superficial and where the transition towards peace, justice, and democracy
looked better than it was. Rebuilding was massive -- but still largely
cosmetic -- and the same could be said for people’s attitudes,
despite efforts to do away with ethnic propaganda. NATO soldiers,
for example, had seized radio and television transmitters held by
hard-line nationalist Serbs the year before, opening the way to long
overdue media reform in Serb-held Bosnia. No longer did official Bosnian
Serb telecasts refer to events in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia
as "foreign news" and even-handed broadcasts, not propaganda,
had been appearing on the nightly news.
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