TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/091492/09149925.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 9.7 KB | 201 lines

                                                                                BOSNIA, Page 44

"Cleansed" Wound


In a perilous trip through the countryside, a TIME correspondent
discovers that Serbs have swept vast areas clean of Muslims
and Croats, but their victory is a hollow one

By LARA MARLOWE/KOZARAC


      Six Serb militiamen from Bosnia lounged on deck chairs
and sofas on the unkempt lawn of what was a Muslim home in
Kozarac. The former owners had been swept out at the end of May.
Now, rifles at their feet, the fighters smoked cigarettes as
they leafed through comics and pornographic magazines. Dragan
Zamaklaar, 22, in jeans and cowboy boots, dragged heavily on a
Marlboro. Then he began to cry.

     "I feel nothing for the Muslims who lived in the house we
have taken," he said, weeping for his own family. "Muslims
moved into our old home in Kladusa. They killed my uncle last
spring. How would you feel if you saw Muslims slit your uncle's
throat, if you saw them throw Serb women and old people out of
windows?"

     This kind of talk is commonplace in the wide swath of land
Serb gunmen have seized in Bosnia by dispossessing local
Muslims and Croats. Far from hiding the results of large-scale
"ethnic cleansing," the Serbs seem to feel fully justified in
taking over what is left behind. Like so many former Yugoslavs,
Zamaklaar learned hatred -- not compassion -- from the past. Yet
his flight from his family home in northwestern Bosnia, where
Muslims have so far managed to hold a small pocket of territory,
to the "cleansed" town of Kozarac has brought him no happiness.

     "The house we built in Kladusa had 10 rooms and a
basement," he said. "But now six of us live in a Muslim's house
with only four rooms. How would I know what happened to the
Muslims who lived in it? Their name was Fazlic. That's all I
know. They left some furniture, and we found a few of their
family snapshots. I didn't even bother to look at them."

     In the northwest Bosnian village of Kozarac, 50 miles from
their hometown, life is hard for Zamaklaar's mother, father,
grandmother, sister and brother. They have no income, and local
Serbian dinar notes, one of three currencies circulating in
Bosnia, are all but worthless. "They don't know anybody here.
They just sit in the house all day and think about what happened
to them," said Zamaklaar.

     The "purification" of Muslims from these towns and
villages in northwestern Bosnia has proved a hollow victory for
the Serbs, destroying prosperity as well as security. All
supplies must be trucked in from Belgrade, along a corridor
often under fire from Croatian artillery. Residents complain of
food shortages. There is no gasoline; most travel by bicycle and
horse-drawn cart. People do not know how they will heat their
homes as winter approaches.

     Before the Bosnian war, Prijedor, a town of 30,000 six
miles from Kozarac, was a busy industrial center. Now its rail
yards are silent. The lumber mills, food-processing plants and
iron mines have shut down. Schools will not open this fall. The
Serbian militia provides almost the only employment.

     When darkness falls, the remaining residents, mostly
Serbs, retreat into their homes, respecting the 10 p.m. to 5
a.m. curfew. Distant artillery fire rumbles through the night.
And the militiamen drink. Humanitarian groups receive frequent
reports of inebriated Serbs searching out and murdering any
remaining Muslims they can find.

     The Serbs around Kozarac express little remorse for the
countless Muslim homes they have destroyed and tens of thousands
of lives they have shattered in "cleansing" northwestern Bosnia.
Their main interest now is in improving their own living
conditions in the territory they have taken. Serbian officials
told a visiting Western delegation last week that if the Muslim
government in Sarajevo wanted peace, it would first have to
reopen the roads, railroads and air space and restore the
telephone and electricity lines it has cut off. "If we don't
have electricity, if we don't have fuel," said Milan Covacevic,
a social-planning official in Prijedor, "not only will we
continue fighting, but we will all become cannibals."

     In the green meadows and pine forests around Kozarac and
Prijedor, stands of poplars, apple and plum orchards, haystacks
and fields of unharvested corn and sunflowers evoke a peaceful
pastoral dream. But along the road to Prijedor, a burned-out
house suddenly appears around a bend. Then more follow, and
more, maybe a thousand in all, relics of two-story, white-washed
villas with broken red tile roofs. Windows are smashed, walls
blackened by smoke. There are no shrapnel and bullet holes
recording some battle here; this is what "ethnic cleansing"
looks like a day or even an hour later. Laundry still hangs on
clotheslines, a sign of how quickly disaster fell upon the
inhabitants. Only one house remains intact, the home of a Serb
couple who sit drinking their morning coffee on the balcony,
their mattresses airing in the sunshine.

     "Cleansing" was even more thorough in Kozarac, once a
prosperous Muslim community of 22,000. In Bosnia the Serbs
farmed the countryside and the Muslims earned higher wages
working in the town factories. Many of the Muslims of Kozarac
had gone as guest workers to Germany and come home years later
to build well-furnished villas that provoked the envy of their
Serb neighbors. Muslim survivors tell how the Serbian militia
came with trucks to round up women and children last May; their
location is still unknown. The next day the Serbs returned to
loot the Muslims' tractors, cows, cars and furniture. Survivors
say more than 5,000 men were beaten to death or shot when they
tried to defend their homes. The Serbs dynamited the houses, so
no Muslims could ever return. They even ordered the Muslims to
fly white flags from their windows, so militiamen would know
which houses to destroy.

     Some of the Muslim men trucked out of Kozarac still live
in famished misery less than a mile away in makeshift tents at
the Trnopolje camp, supposedly under the "protection" of
Serbian irregulars. They can see the minaret of the Kozarac
mosque down the road and are sometimes allowed to pick fruit
from the gardens of their destroyed homes. When they venture
out, they see Serb newcomers from Muslim-held areas watching
them from the windows and doorways of the few Muslim dwellings
still standing.

     "Kozarac is not a safe place yet," admitted Milomir
Stakic, the new Serbian mayor of Prijedor. He took the place of
his democratically elected Muslim predecessor when Serbian
forces began brutally "cleansing" the area last spring. His
statements were the first confirmation that Muslim guerrillas
are operating in the area. "Last night two Serbs were killed and
their bodies were burned in Kozarac," he acknowledged. "Groups
of Muslim extremists have withdrawn to the Kozara mountains.
They could hide there for another six months, even a year."

     During World War II, 100,000 German troops were unable to
dislodge Serb fighters from the local mountains. Yet Stakic,
like other Serbian officials, failed to see the irony of this
role reversal, or of the Serbs' use of the Nazi term ethnic
cleansing. He insisted the Serbs were only uprooting Muslim
"extremists" when they ravaged Kozarac. Look at Cela, he said,
a nearby village of 1,200 Muslims and 500 Serbs where both are
living in model harmony.

     But Muslim villagers in Cela tell a different story, not
of harmony but of terror. First a lamb was stolen during
weapons searches. Then 15 men were taken away for
"interrogation"; only 14 returned. Another man was sent to the
Serb-run mountain prison camp at Manjaca. Drunken militiamen set
fire to the mosque, killed an old Muslim man and dumped his body
down a well.

     Cowed by the intimidation, the Cela Muslims tried
appeasement. "We made a deal with the Serbian authorities," said
a village leader. "We fly white flags on our houses as a sign
of our loyalty. We will not oppose them, and they will not harm
us. So far, they have kept their word, but we don't know about
the future." Meantime, they try to lead normal lives, harvesting
their plums to sell to Serb neighbors for making slivovitz.
Though most are afraid to leave the village, a few brave souls
carry food each day to the men at the Trnopolje camp.

     There is not even that semblance of normality in the
village of Celinac, some miles farther south. The hamlet is
officially off-limits to all outsiders. A decree issued by the
Celinac municipality gives the Muslim population a "special
status" similar to that of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. All
Muslims must observe a 4 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew. Muslims are "not
allowed to stay in the street, in restaurants and other public
places." Muslims are forbidden to swim in the rivers, to fish
or hunt, to use or drive motor vehicles, to be in groups of more
than three, to use telecommunications facilities except for a
post-office telephone, to sell real estate or exchange
apartments without a special authorization. The order includes
a list of 34 Muslim citizens of Celinac who are not allowed to
talk to their neighbors or leave their houses.

     Back in the garden at Kozarac, the fighters with Dragan
Zamaklaar shrugged off the plunder and dispossession. "Of course
there are robberies -- this is war," explained one. The Serbs
may chafe at the isolation brought on by a war of their own
making, but they are not about to reverse the evil of "ethnic
cleansing." There is little chance that the Muslims of Kozarac
or Prijedor or two-thirds of Bosnia will ever go home, and the
consequences of their dispossession will haunt Europe for years
to come.