9 minute read

The Bosnian Catastrophe

BLACK BUTTERFLIES

PRISCILLA MORRIS

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Duckworth, May 2022, Hardback, 288 pages, 9780715654590, RRP £16.99

Check our website for discount: www.booklaunch.london

EDITOR’S NOTE

It is Spring, 1992, in Sarajevo, the capital of newly independent Bosnia. Yugoslavia is breaking up. Every night, nationalist gangs erect barricades to split a historically diverse city into separate ethnic enclaves; every morning, the residents—whether Muslim, Croat or Serb—push them aside. When violence finally spills over, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety with her daughter in England, staying behind while the city falls under siege and all they love is destroyed. Zora and her friends now need to rebuild their lives—but how?

A few days into the new month, Zora turns on the TV after breakfast. The melody of a pop song, ‘Sarajevo, My Love’, sweeps into her living room. Crowds of people are marching towards the parliament building. There’s no sound apart from the song, which appears to be playing on loop, but there must be many cameras, because sweeping shots reveal the length and depth of the protest, which fills all the main streets of Sarajevo. Giant red and green flags billow above the heads of the throng, as does the blue, white and red flag of Yugoslavia, its gold-edged red star dancing. Are those portraits of Tito that people are carrying? Banners read: ‘Say NO to Nationalism. We Want Peace’ and ‘Sex without Borders’. Fists are raised, some clutching bunches of what look like tulips. The song plays on.

Zora watches electrified, finger hovering over the on-off button on the remote. She wishes Franjo were here. This is certainly the biggest march yet. For a split second, she is torn. She sees herself gathering her things and going off to join the crowds, but her studio, her painting, are calling. Maybe later she’ll go.

On the way into her studio, she passes families, groups of teenagers and middle-aged couples going the other way to join the demonstration, smiling and calling to each other as if taking part in a carnival. Apparently, two hundred coachloads of people of all religions and nationalities have been brought in from the provinces. Last night, marchers succeeded in entering the parliament building and holding the floor. They exhorted ministers to resign and demanded a new government be formed.

She works for four or five hours in her studio. Just after three o’clock, soft explosions sound. Tremors shake the floor timbers and the canvas jumps in its easel. She goes over to the window, but all seems as normal. Still, she moves quickly, cleaning and drying her brushes, panic expanding in her chest. It’s probably nothing, she tells herself. But she has the sense that things have upended, as if somewhere a trapdoor has opened and everything is falling through.

Going back home, the streets are almost empty.

On the news, she learns that the peace march was fired on around two o’clock by gunmen shooting from the top floor of the Holiday Inn, where the Serb Democratic Party has been camping out. Six people have been killed, several more injured. The Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadžić, has fled the hotel. Mortar bombs are being launched—seemingly under his orders—at the city centre from the hills to the east.

Dropping the remote, she sinks down on the sofa, her eyes dry and staring. She prays no one she knows has been hurt. The news continues. Bosnia’s Muslim president, Alija Izetbegović, is putting out another mobilisation call. He’s asking citizens of all three nationalities—Muslim, Croat and Serb—to rise and defend the city.

And then, among all this, which Zora is struggling to make sense of, comes the announcement that the European Community’s recognition of Bosnia’s declaration of independence from the month before has come into effect. (CONTINUED AFTER THE BREAK)

READERS’ COMMENTS

Liz Nugent:

Chronicles one of the darkest times in global history. I hope will open the hearts of all those who read it to refugees.

Kevin Sullivan:

An elegy to the vibrant and inclusive society that was subjected to a murderous assault in 1992.

Sarah Burton:

Chillingly resonant with the scenes unfolding in Ukraine, a book for our time.

For the first time in over five centuries, Bosnia-Herzegovina is her own country.

Zora has the urge to walk to the Goat’s Bridge to clear her head. The phone conversation with Franjo last night was upsetting. It was as if they were both too shocked to listen to one another. What they said came out in panicky bursts, one speaking over the other, nothing adding up. One moment he was saying how much he wanted to be there at this historic moment, when things were at last moving forwards; the next, he told her he wanted her to stay indoors, it wasn’t safe.

She’d said she was fine. She felt strangely alive, exhilarated even. It felt like a confirmation to have the world’s recognition, to be free of Milošević, who was so intent on warping Yugoslavia into something ugly and hate-filled.

And yet, in the next breath, she was terrified. The city was being bombed. Six ordinary people had been killed on a march she’d nearly joined herself. People carrying candles and singing peace songs had been fired upon. It could have been any of their neighbours or friends. For a moment, it’d seemed the anti-nationalist movement was getting somewhere, but now who knew what type of a Bosnia was being born? She walks past the old town hall and continues for some time along the riverbank. Beyond the last houses on the edge of the city, the paved embankment gives way to a stony track, which leads into the mouth of a gorge. The honking of traffic is replaced by birdsong and the sound of the river coursing below. Sheer cliffs tower overhead, grassy shelves where sheep graze cutting into the rock. The trees are starting to green in the mountains. Zora breathes in deeply. Franjo will be back soon.

The route that she’s walking along used to be part of the great Imperial Road that linked central Europe to what was then called Constantinople. She and her father would walk here often when she was little, looking for the shapes of animals in the clouds and the rocks. He used to tell the story of how a young goatherd called Mehmed found a sack of gold buried under the long grasses where his flock was grazing on the riverbank. With the money, he bought himself the finest education in Constantinople and went on to become a wealthy merchant. Returning home, many years later, he ordered a bridge to be built at the exact spot he’d found the gold. The Empire’s best architect—the one who designed the eleven-arched bridge at Višegrad—was employed. Soon a white stone bridge rose above the Miljacka. Nicknamed the Goat’s Bridge, it was the place where dignitaries from Sarajevo would welcome travellers from the East, weary from weeks on the dusty caravan route. The beautiful, single-arched Ottoman bridge was the first sign of the city of gardens and fountains, encircled by mountains, and renowned as a refuge for all faiths, that lay a few kilometres ahead.

Zora loves that story. She’s looking forward to her first glimpse of the bridge.

Rounding the bluff on which the old fort sits, the sight of several men erecting a barricade some fifty metres ahead draws her up short. They’re dressed in black, some with long beards and rifles. Her mouth grows dry as she glances around for another way past, but there is none. One of the men looks up. As he approaches, she sees, to her shock, that his cockaded cap has the skull-and-crossbones insignia of the Chetniks sewn on it. A memory of her mother sewing a red five-pointed star onto her father’s cap opens up and everything— the stony path, the cliffs, the grey sky—tilts to one side as if yanked sharply downwards. The nightmarish feeling of her childhood— of waiting and waiting for her daddy to return from the war—comes rushing back.

‘No access,’ the soldier says, motioning with his gun that she’s to turn around.

He’s smooth-cheeked and pink-lipped, no more than sixteen or seventeen. His teeth are skewed. He’s a village boy. Certainly, not from Sarajevo.

‘Why not?’ she says.

He scowls and draws himself taller. ‘This is now Republika Srpska. Only Serbs here.’ ‘I’m a Serb.’

He stares at her, seemingly confused. One of the men erecting the barricade calls over and the boy points the gun at Zora again and does not drop it this time.

She turns quickly, fear closing her throat. She tries to walk away with dignity, without breaking into a trot. Sweat pricks under her arms and her cheeks burn as she glances over her shoulder once or twice, unable to believe what has just happened. Following the twists of the gorge back to the city, she thinks again of her father and wonders what these boys are doing dressed up in their grandfathers’ uniforms.

Zora’s father, a Partisan, never returned from the Second World War. He was killed, they said, by a Chetnik. A communist killed by a nationalist; a Serb killed by another Serb. His water-bloated body was found face down in a mountain stream nine days after liberation, stripped of his gun, his wallet, his shoes. Every family has stories like this.

The spring her father didn’t come back, Zora walked alone to the Goat’s Bridge and tossed a coin into the river, vowing to become an artist just like him. She was eight.

She spends the afternoon in her studio, windows shut to keep out the sound of explosions on the far edge of the city. Channelling her disquiet into her oils, she becomes absorbed by the act of building layer upon layer of buttery pigment, the Goat’s Bridge gaining solidity on the canvas. When she (CONTINUED IN THE BOOK)

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