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WORK IN PROGRESS: Blasted nearly into oblivion by Serb guns in 1991, Vukovar, Croatia is slowly rebuilding
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Montenegrins, proud of living in a challenging place, say that when God was distributing mountains, he dropped the bag on Montenegro. As beautiful as the mountains are, I hadn't intended to enjoy them both on the way to the line that divides Montenegro from Serbia and on the way back. But the October revolution in Serbia hadn't yet reached the remote police post on the highway north of the Montenegrin town of Bijelo Polje, where the Serb police turned me back. If they let me in without a visa, I could get arrested and thrown into jail for days. That would make them feel terrible.
And so it was that the only border I couldn't cross on a 3,000-km journey from Podgorica to Prague and on to Berlin and Brussels was one that ran between the two states of federal Yugoslavia — a fitting reminder of the fickleness of frontiers in Central Europe. These borders have been reshuffled and recast dozens of times in recent centuries, rarely more intensely than during the last decade. The continual erasures and re-inkings have lent the region much of its current color, and laden it with too much of its bloody history. The borders often run askew of the cultures they are intended to delineate. Yet already, before the European Union makes good on its promise of still broader enlargement, a flow of cultures makes the idea of hard borders seem a pointless anachronism.
Or even faintly ridiculous. Instead of heading into Serbia, I took the dismal road from Montenegro into Bosnia — or rather into the Serb Republic, the so-called Serb entity of Bosnia that stands as the tragic and pitiful reminder of Milosevic's push for a Greater Serbia — where a bent and battered pole blocked my path until a sleepy-looking guard emerged from a shipping container on the side of the road, checked my passport and let me pass. The road gutters and bucks its way toward the town of Foca on the Drina River, but the signs don't say so. The Serbs have renamed the town Srbinje in a laughable attempt to expunge — or perhaps, perversely, to honor — the memory of the war-time atrocities they committed there. My destination was the next town down the river, Gorazde, the only so-called eastern enclave to remain in the hands of the Bosnian government throughout the war.
I was last in Gorazde in February 1993 as one of a group of 10 journalists who shuffled in silently at night as part of a civilian resupply line over the snowy mountains and through Serb lines. We lived for 10 days near the bridge over the Drina in a derelict shell of a building with nothing in it but a voracious wood-burning stove. At least it had a roof; Serb shelling had left most buildings in the town without one. Now it is a Viennese-style café, and it was bustling on this Sunday afternoon. I knew the owner, Abdusalam Sijercic, in 1993 under his nom de guerre, Pelam. Then a dashing figure dressed in black with a pirate-style kerchief on his head, he commanded the defense of Gorazde against the Serbs, sputtering all the while about the inadequate help he was getting from the beleaguered Sarajevo government.
Today he looks like a middle-aged jeweler, but he's still fighting on two fronts: against what he sees as the governing party's push for Islamization and against a serious economic malaise in Gorazde itself. His bitterness is deep. "We fulfilled our goal of defending our homes and families, but it cost us too much," he says. "If I had known what a gutted place we'd end up with, I would have given up immediately."
Anyone who questions the value of a functioning state should spend some time in Bosnia. Start outside the town of Brcko at the black-market bazaar known as the Arizona Market, an undrained swamp of war-time economy in a period of formal peace. The police have no laws to curtail the trade in fake merchandise there, nor the flow of illegal immigrants — from points as far east as China — smuggled through via Serbia and Sarajevo and on into the European Union. Pro forma residence permits have been blithely issued to dozens of young girls from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania working the brothels. Many of them are bound by extortionate indentures, but some of them figure this is the best opportunity they will ever get.
At Arizona Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks trade without any apparent rancor. But in many places the level of distrust is still high, the sense of wrong unrighted. In Sarengrad, Croatia, for instance, a village across the Danube River from Serbia, the object of contention is in plain view along the opposite river bank: Sarengradska Ada, an 1,800-hectare island between two courses of the mighty river.
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