My father joined Tito’s partisan army in 1942, when he was twenty, and this was one of the very few occasions he ever mentioned the War. He was not of the kind to tell anecdotes slightly changing them each time to make him look the hero. Years later when I had grown up and asked him about this strange silence, a blind spot in his biography, he told me that war was the most horrible thing a human being can experience and that we, his children, didn’t need to know what it looked like. It wouldn’t happen again. He fought so it wouldn’t happen ever again. If it wasn’t for his Beretta and a couple of photographs showing a tall blond man in a shabby partisan uniform, I wouldn’t have known he’d ever been in the war. But he did say that the War changed the entire course of his future. He had wanted to become a sailor, a sea captain perhaps. To travel, to see the world. I used to imagine him in a white uniform standing on the ship’s bridge, and thought that he would have made a handsome young captain. The brutal disruption of the tender fabric of his life, this is what he regretted deeply, the way a war snaps your life in half yet you have to go on living as if you are still a whole person. But, as I learned from his example, you are not – and never will be – a whole person again.
I hesitate to use the word war, which has recently become tamed and domesticated in our vocabulary like a domestic animal, almost a pet. It reminds me of typical Yugoslav movies from the fifties and sixties, war movies about Tito’s partisans like ‘Kozara’ or ‘Sutjeska’ where the most famous battles against the Germans were fought. Our post war generation was raised on this sort of movie, on the cliche of blond, cold-eyed cruel German Gestapo officers or soldiers (a role usually played by the same actor in most of the films), of bloodthirsty troops from the Serbian ex-royal army, the Chetniks, or of savage Croat Nazis, the Ustashe. On the other side were the brave, intelligent, humane partisans, always victorious, shouting ‘Hurrah, comrades!’ in the mass battle scenes. Soon we discovered, more by intuition than by comparison – because at that time, in the early sixties, there were few foreign movies to compare ours to – that this scheme things was pathetically simple. So we began to assume an ironic attitude towards the War, to the partisans and the communist revolution – to our history as represented in such caricature. We believed that it all belonged to the past. However, despite our irony, one idea lingered in our subconscious, the idea of a war for freedom, the idea of defending your homeland. In other words, even for the post-war generation in Yugoslavia, the War was not a futile and senseless blood-letting but on the contrary a heroic and meaningful experience that was worth more than its one million victims. This idea was hard to challenge because our whole education – lessons, textbooks, speeches, newspapers – was impregnated with it as if our history prior to 1941 barely existed. And it stays with us still.
But war is not a single act, it is a state of facts and minds, a head-spinning spiral of events and a gradual process of realization. And even if my father had attempted to explain, it wouldn’t have been any help to me now because it seems that everyone has to learn this truth alone, step by step, from the events of his or her own life. War is a process: we, in Yugoslavia, are now witnessing this. That is why it is hard to say when it started, who started it and who exactly is the enemy. It hasn’t been declared yet, there is no formal beginning such as one country handing another a note. On the one hand, it is clear that the beginning is rooted in political plans and concepts that preceded the war, as well as in the readiness of people to accept measures that would give rise to nationalist tensions – for example, the treatment of the Serbian minority by the new Croatian government before they started causing real problems. On the other hand I may be wrong in saying this, in blaming people at large. After forty-five years under communist rule, no matter how different or more lenient it was than in other Eastern bloc countries, one has no right to claim that people should have been aware of the consequences that nationalism – the tendency to form nation-states – would bring. They had simply had no chance to become mature political beings, real citizens ready to participate, to build a democratic society. When people in Croatia held the first free multiparty elections in 1990, as in most of the rest of East Europe they voted primarily against the communists. Despite that, the new governments were all too ready to proclaim themselves the sole bearers of democracy, as if it were a fruit or a gift there for the taking. If there is any reason at all behind the historical animosities dividing the Yugoslav nations, it is that this society never had a proper chance to become a society not of oppressed peoples, but of citizens, of self-aware individuals with developed democratic institutions within which to work out differences, conflicts and changes and instead of by war. Continuing to live with the same kind of totalitarian governments, ideology and yet untransformed minds, it seems the people were unable to shoulder the responsibility for what was coming – or to stop it. War therefore came upon us like some sort of natural calamity, like the plague or a flood, inevitable, our destiny.
The beginning of war lies not only in political events, not only in the build-up of hatred, but in the way the first images of death stick in your mind and stay there forever tinged with the deep crimson hue of gore. It was in late April, right after Easter when I saw a black and white photo of a man lying on his back, hands stretched above his head with his jacket yanked up because someone had been dragging him by the feet, his body leaving a long dark trace in snow that hadn’t melted. His dead eyes were wide open, reflecting a little spot of pale sky above him – the last thing he saw. This was the first front-page picture of a dead man in what would soon become known as the ‘first Croato-Serbian war’. His name was printed on the cover too: Rajko Vukadinovic. Less than three months later, I saw another photograph, almost identical, but this time the dead man had no name, he had become just a corpse. With a hundred dead in Slavonia, Banija and Krajina, nobody’s name matters any more – even if printed it will soon be forgotten.
Yet another photo frames the transitional period in which everything changed – not merely because of the growing numbers of dead or wounded, but because of Slovenia. That is where the war was first announced: by the Federal Army against its own people, by Serbs against the rest of the Yugoslav republics, by Croat extremists, by illegal militia from Krajina. This war doesn’t have only two warring sides. It is many-sided, nasty and complex – a dangerous civil war that threatens to change the face of Europe. There is yet another photo that I can’t get out of my mind, of a young soldier shot in an army truck, his head dangling out of a side window, a stream of dried blood dribbling out of his ear. He’s no more than nineteen. As I think of him, I am afraid that this is the picture of our future.
When I look around me. I see that the war is happening to my dentist, who is afraid to let his children go to his summer house on the islands because he can’t be sure they won’t be stopped, robbed or taken hostage. ‘I hate it,’ he says, ‘the Serbs have turned me into a fierce Croat nationalist, a thing I was sure would never happen to me.’ My friend Andreja is leaving for a village and is planning to sow potatoes, cabbages, and so on. She is a young university professor who should be working on her doctorate this summer; but she can’t write or read any more, all she can do is listen. Then Mira calls. The other day, when she was travelling by train from Subotica to Belgrade, there were a dozen young Serbs on board. ‘The lady is reading a book in the Roman alphabet?’ they sneered spotting the book in her hands. ‘Surely the lady must be Croat. How about a nice fuck, you bloody bitch? Or you would prefer this?’ one asked, sliding the edge of his palm across her neck, as if he was holding a knife. ‘I could be his mother,’ she told me, her voice cracking. When I last visited my Serbian friend Zarana in Belgrade a month ago, I jokingly said that I was reserving her cellar as a hiding place. ‘I will be your Jew,’ I said. But she was serious. ‘Don’t make such cruel jokes. You know, I really feel like a white communist in South Africa, I am a traitor here.’ Another friend in Zagreb decided to give up listening to the radio, watching TV or reading newspapers. He cut himself off from all information, all news. At first I thought it was mere escapism to decide to ignore the war, as if it had nothing to do with his own life. But now I see it was his last, desperate attempt at staying normal, because the war had already poisoned his existence, and there was nothing he could do about it. Rada is a Croat living half in Zagreb, half in Belgrade, married to a Moslem: she is thus a Yugoslav, a rare bird indeed in this time of nationalist divisions. She tells me that she has heard from a very reliable source that the war will last six days. A six-day war, and someone already knows this? Then someone else is telling me that it will start in Croatia on 28 July. Now, the date is known in advance? But I know that this – as well as anything else – is possible, because here rationality simply doesn’t exist any longer. Why do I stay here, I keep wondering, as if there is an easy answer to that question. Or as if I have somewhere else to go.