Snapshots of Bosnia: Gutted Homes, Invisible Enemies, Everyday Stress

“Ethnic cleansing” is a candle in the attic.

Vitez, an old market town in central Bosnia-Herzegovina where Catholics and Muslims have lived side by side for a century, is charred witness to how well the candles burn.

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Bosnia is about hatred.

Today, Croats and Muslims in Bosnia are allied against the hated Serbs. But two years ago, neighbors fought each other in the streets here.

In the summer heat Monday, the shells of more than 100 roofless Vitez houses seemed to sit companionably, a tranquillity more apparent than real. There is still a large Bosnian Muslim community in the heart of the city, surrounded by Catholic Croats.

When “ethnic cleansing” stops short of actual murder, its intent is to drive people away. The key is to make their houses uninhabitable. Once a family has been chased from a home, those experienced in the “cleansing” practice move in.

Gasoline sloshed from a bottle will do in a pinch, but there are more sophisticated ways: Close all windows and open all internal doors. Light a candle in the attic. Open a bottle of propane gas on the ground floor.

Boom. The windows blow, the interior burns, the roof goes. The system is particularly effective because the shell of the house is intact--usable again, perhaps on some distant day when all the hated Others have left for good.

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Bosnia is about division.

In now-long-gone days, Yugoslavs used to celebrate the number of languages, cultures, nationalities, religions and republics in their heterogeneous nation.

Now, fashionably, they kill to affirm differences more nominal than real.

Nisha Serdaravic, a university student, regards the desolation of her country through the prism of a young Bosnian who happens to be of Muslim tradition but looks, sounds, dresses and behaves exactly like Catholic and Orthodox friends she grew up with in the city of Zenica. “This used to be Europe,” she says. “And now it is gone.”

The heart of the Catholic-Muslim town of Gornji Vakuf in central Bosnia has been savaged by desperate fighting between neighbors who killed each other from one side of Main Street to the other.

Before, everybody shared the same government health clinic and other municipal services. Now, there is a never-cross division of the town, invisible to foreigners but all too real to the 25,000 inhabitants.

“Bosnians say they’d never dream of going over to the Croat side but insist that a Croat who came over to stroll or buy something on their part of town would have no trouble. Funny thing is, the Croats say exactly the same sort of thing,” says Malcolm Turner, a foreign relief worker.

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Bosnia is about healing.

One of the most audacious and popular places in the refugee-choked city of Zenica is called Youth House: Things are normal there. About 1,700 children, ages 7 to 18, refugees and members of all the city’s ethnic communities, are regular visitors to Youth House, says Dirk van Gorp from upstate New York, country director for the United Methodist Committee on Relief, a New York-based private relief agency.

At Youth House the kids play basketball. They dance, play music, learn English, mess around with computers.

“I don’t want to think about the war anymore,” says Dzenana, a 9-year-old learning--clump, clump--to tango.

Lejla Djaferovic, a Youth House teacher, observes of her charges: “We’re talking about children who had forgotten to smile. Sometimes they come here almost empty, with blank faces and dead eyes. We let them be children.”

A tough breed, too, the children of Bosnia at war.

“They don’t cry,” says Frieda Pyles, a health volunteer from Baltimore who works for a private relief agency.

But Amir Kundalic, a young Bosnian volunteer, asks: “Over the long term, what do we tell the children? We used to tell them that it would be over soon, but now. . .”

The Methodist project is a favorite with both parents and government officials in mostly Muslim Zenica because it offers classes and skills that Bosnian schools cannot afford. “We’re not here to proselytize. Our presence and our actions speak louder than any words we could bring to the situation,” says Ken Lutgen, a Methodist minister from Kansas City who directs the church project.

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Bosnia is about stress.

Bosnians seem to endure hardships with a stoicism that astonishes foreigners. The foreigners have their own devices. On the road near the city of Tuzla is the base of a Norwegian-Swedish battalion of U.N. troops. There, in a windowless room behind sandbags and razor wire, is a PX that sells beer by the caseload--some of it American, even--to thirsty, anxious foreigners.

And everybody smokes in Bosnia, including some people who should know better.

Last weekend, a small group of American health professionals on the cutting edge of their specialties stopped for a picnic along a mountain track. A nurse had packed a lunch so it was healthy: fresh-baked bread, bananas, peanuts, fruit juices. One from each food group, she boasted. Delicious. And for dessert, the American nurse and the American doctor lay back for a well-earned instant of peace in the Bosnian woods, dragging deep on their cigarettes.