Bosnia’s Boundaries Confound Villagers

It is only due to the thickness of the map maker’s pen, according to a bitter local joke, that this tiny farm village is now inhabited solely by Serbs.

Had the pen been a tad thinner when the Bosnian map was drawn to reflect the Dayton peace accord, the town would have been assigned to the Croats and Muslims, who used to live in most of the 600 houses here--all bombed out or raked by gunfire.

But only 20 homes are now inhabited--all by Serbs--in this war-ravaged village, an eerie ghost town in the Posavina Corridor in northeastern Bosnia, two-thirds of a mile from what had been the front line.

A few days ago, American soldiers took over a checkpoint just a short walk away, but residents don’t stroll over to see them--they fear getting shot, they say, by Muslims living on the other side of the U.S. forces. And they feel particularly vulnerable since Serbian forces pulled back several days ago.

These people in this no man’s land between the Serbian and Muslim front lines where they once lived side by side with Muslims and Croats, believe that the same swipe of a pen that gave them the town could just as easily take it away.

The result of that fear has been some foolish choices: One farmer, believing that he might be forced to relinquish his land, cut scores of valuable oak trees, only to find he could not sell the wood and he was not being forced to leave.

It is one of the ironies of the Dayton peace agreement, U.S. Army officials say, that some of the people most affected have the least understanding of how events will unfold.

Part of the problem, they explain, is that local officials lack accurate maps. As several versions of the new boundaries circulate, confusion and anxiety abound.

“We just wait now for freedom; we just wait to see whether we will really stay,” said Danko Ostojic, 72, a farmer who has lived here all his life. “We are not 100% sure whether the line will move a few hundred meters this way or that way.”

For Ostojic, his wife, Leposava, 75, and the few other families who live here, nothing is certain after nearly four years of war.

“If they tell me to leave, I will just take a rope and hang myself,” Leposava Ostojic said.

Three years ago, the couple, along with other Serbian residents, fled as the war intensified, stumbling across fields, clutching some clothing hastily tossed into a plastic bag. The Ostojics’ Croatian neighbors fed their chickens, pigs and cows until the tide of the war turned again, and it was the neighbors’ turn to flee.

“They were our good friends,” Leposava Ostojic said. “We took care of one another.”

Today, it is lonely for the Ostojics, who returned to the village after six months.

Friends who once stopped by for coffee are gone. There are no stores, no restaurants. They are surrounded by the skeletons of homes. They grow only what they can eat, since there is no market where they could sell the surplus. They have no car, so they never leave.

Their Croatian neighbors are still gone, and their two-story home was all but destroyed in the war. Half their roof was torn off by a bomb, windows were broken and salvageable parts--such as doors and their frames--had been stripped away. Not one house in the village was untouched. Graffiti on a nearby structure still reads: “Death to the Serb army.”

It was the thought of one day returning to her home that fueled Leposava Ostojic during her months as a refugee, when she slept on cold concrete. She had comforted herself by pulling out a snapshot of the house.

So it was a brutal slap when she first saw the shell where her home once stood.

“I stood here and I looked around. I thought I had completely lost my mind,” she recalled, crying. “What kind of street is this? It was all covered in rubble.”

Slowly, the couple set about fixing their house, which had been used as a command post by Muslim and Croatian forces.

Today, though the house is pockmarked from gunfire, the roof is fixed, windows have been installed and lace curtains are hung. The furnishings are a jumble of whatever the couple could find, crammed into the unheated rooms.

In the kitchen, a separate, small building behind the house, Leposava Ostojic bakes bread with flour the Red Cross gives her and cooks sarma, a traditional dish of cabbage, rice and meat.

Leposava Ostojic’s favorite place to talk is at the small table close to the wood-burning stove. She will not whitewash the kitchen, she said, until she is certain she and her husband are staying.

Hearing a thud outside, Leposava Ostojic jumped.

“We have all lost our nerves,” she said apologetically. “Whenever we hear a sound, we think it’s a shell.”

Still, since the Americans’ arrival, Leposava Ostojic has felt relaxed enough to sleep without pills.

“I’m very glad that I dare to go out, that I am not afraid anymore,” she said.

Many others here believe, as she does, that the American presence is the only chance for peace.

Said Milos Ostojic, 53, a Serbian fighter whose commanders have told him not to bring his weapon into the village anymore: “It cannot be worse than it was.”

Others have had no time to ponder the American presence. They are scrambling to deal with more dire matters.

Anka Kuzmanovic is putting an orange tile roof on a bombed-out home.

Kuzmanovic, 46, once owned two houses, and her husband farmed 25 fertile acres of land.

On Tuesday, Kuzmanovic and her family moved into their fourth house in as many years. This one has no electricity and no roof, and the floor has rotted out in one room. Two other rooms are buried in rubble.

Kuzmanovic, her husband and her son are crammed into the one tiny room that, at least so far, does not leak.

“Who would ever think,” she asked, “we would end up like this?”