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| A cello player in the partially destroyed National Library, Sarajevo, during the war in 1992. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Photo from a Serbian position in the mountains overlooking Sarajevo (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Nele circa 1980 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| The government building in the centre of Sarajevo burns after being hit by tank fire during the siege in 1992 Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I have just watched for the second time a sad, almost
haunting AlJazeera programme got up by a former BBC reporter, Jackie Rowland,
which bears on the tragedy of the Yugoslav war. Ms Rowland was a reporter
covering Yugoslavia after the war, and she has vivid memories of seeing tapes
of a show by a three-man comedy group called Toplista
Nadrealista (or the Surrealist Hit Parade), whose mapcap comedy
routines made life more bearable in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, before the outbreak of the war, and later in the
besieged city of Sarajevo during the almost four years the city was under
attack by the Serbs.
All three, though of different
racial and religious origins, were born in Sarajevo, which, famously, was a
city totally integrated as between races and nationalities until that sense of
perfect harmony was destroyed by the brutal war in which the country broke up
into numerous self-contained,
neighbour-hating entities.
Ms. Rowland was in Yugoslavia
as a member of the staff of the BBC School of Broadcast Journalism in 1997. In
one class she had a pupil called Zenit
Djozic, whom she first regarded as a rather disruptive element, but with whom
she later became friendly. He had been a member of this comedy group, and he
showed her tapes of their shows, “rather Pythonesque”, as she describes them in
her programme notes, which she greatly
enjoyed. She never met the other major member of the group, by the name of Nele
Karajlic, who had already left the city and was heard broadcasting some rather
tendentious commentaries about the war from Belgrade. He was a Serb, and Ms. Rowland
says on the AlJazeera web site that the remaining members of the troupe in
Sarajevo were tending to regard him as a kind of villain. She says that in 1997
she sent Zenit to Belgrade on a mission of some kind, and while there he had
met his old friend Nele, but the meeting had not gone well, and he didn’t say
much about it afterwards.
Returning to the former
Yugoslavia more than a decade later, Ms.
Rowland was harbouring what she thought was the terrific idea that with a bit
of feminine persuasion, she could persuade the three principals of the old show
to get together and even to perform together again.
She set out by meeting first her old friend Zenit, who turned out to be still
a delightful, well-balanced, amusing clown of a guy, who said he was willing to
meet his former friend Nele and looked forward to having such a meeting,
However, he had already visited Nele once in Belgrade, he said. But In fact,
although he had always regarded Nele as his best friend, on that occasion he had
discovered a new Nele, one who believed differently from him on questions
arising from the war, such as who started it.
“I lost my friend,” he said.
So off went the aggressive Ms Rowland
--- to my mind she played rather too hard at being accepted as “one of the
boys”, as it were, while carefully disguising the fact she had met only one of
the three performers before --- to
Belgrade to contact Nele himself, who was on a tour to plug a successful book.
When she told him Zenit was ready to meet again, he said, “Well, he has my
phone number, he knows where I am, what is the problem?” Asked why he left Sarajevo,
Nele said he was forced out, along with 200,000 Serbs who had also been forced
out. He said, ”I would be happy to go
back to live in Sarajevo, but only when the other 199,999 who had been forced
out were welcome to do the same.” But that, he added, will never happen. In Sarajevo, no one now mentions that 200,000
Serbs had been forced out of the city, he said. In his mind Sarajevo was a city
in which Serbs should be living. Sarajevo had been a utopian idea, but “we
failed.”
On the subject of Zenit’s
failed visit to Nele in Belgrade he said Zenit had “come too soon. He came when
I was hot, angry, on the subject.” But he shook his head vehemently when the
reporter put it to him that Zenit had said he had found “a different Nele,” he
had not found his old friend. Ms.
Rowland discussed with him different places where it might be possible for the
former partners to meet, but without getting any firm commitment. On this
subject, the stereotypes of nationalist suspicions in former Yugoslavia were
exhibited. Nele thought if Zenit wanted
to meet him, it should be in Belfgrade; Zenit said he had already visited Belgrade,
so it was not his turn to do so again.
Back in Sarajevo, Ms.Rowland, summarizing her discussions with Nele, said
she was struck by his assertion that he
was right, and everyone else was wrong, an assertion that would have come as no
surprise to anyone who has studied this issue even superficially.
And so, on her quest, on to
Ljubljana, where the third member of the trio, Banko “Djuro” Djuric, has
been working successfully for the last
20 years, in films and other media. Asked if he would be ready to work again with
the TopLista group, he shook his head sadly and said, “Unfortunately there are
political problems.” TopLista, although
it had been a beautiful experience, was just one of many projects on which he
had worked. The three principals had not
seen each other for more than 20 years, and they were no longer friends, he
said.
Djuro said his mother was a
Moslem, his father Serb. “I am therefore, in-between. I don’t accept these
labels,” he said. He referred to his late grandfather who died during the siege
of Sarajevo, but who, before his death, had asked forlornly who was bombing
them? Djuro had said it was just….
someone. “Someone told me it was the Serbs,” said granddad, to which Djuro
nodded his assent. “Who are ours?” the old man asked.
A good question, indicated
Djuro.
At the end of this fruitless
search for grounds for accommodation, Ms. Rowland asked Zenit to enact a
contemporary version of a famous sketch done by the three which had forecast
the war by having the proponents hurl insults across a wall. In its contemporary version, two garbage
collectors engaged in a fruitless discussion, ending with their going off, each
into his fastness.
Oddly, Ms. Rowland, anxious to the end not to report a complete failure,
recited a line of pious commentary hoping that Bosnians would eventually
realize there was more that united them than divided them.
A faint hope, given that the
war was stopped by the American-imposed Dayton Accords which divided Bosnia
into the Bosnian republic, and a so-called Serpska Republic, which officially is
part of the Bosnian republic. The theory
of the decision-makers was that these two entities would gradually accommodate
to each other. But, as in the rest of Yugoslavia, this has not happened, but in
fact the Serpska Republic seems more and more to have dug in its heels, and to
have made not a single gesture towards reconciliation.
Earlier this year I was in the
former Yugoslavia and had the experience
of moving across the original republic, now divided into a panoply of borders
that have to be crossed as one moves back and forth. Often they did not even
bother to look at the passports, and it was sometimes difficult to tell which of
the new republics one was leaving and which entering. The thought that struck me forcibly at the
time was that these meaningless borders seem to be about the only thing these
new republics have obtained from the brutal war, a war fought to solidify these
borders, just as, further north in Europe, borders we moved across on a bus
tour up to Prague seem literally to have disappeared, since whenever I asked
the driver which country we were in now, he usually didn’t know.
Ms. Rowland’s programme, far
from contributing to greater understanding, seems merely to fortify the deep
levels of conflict that have survived even this most unnecessary and terrible
of wars.
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