Passage of Time Breaking Down Barriers in Bosnia

Semsa Cerovic’s commute from her village home to her city office should be a breeze. It’s just 12 miles each way on a modern highway through scenic mountain terrain.

But the 51-year-old land surveyor, who lives in Serb-run Pale and works in Muslim-run Sarajevo, must cross a boundary of ethnic hostility and fear. A legacy of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the line is invisible but real enough to make the trip an ordeal.

Her husband drives her in the morning in their car with Serbian license plates, but he drops her outside the city to avoid rock-throwing Muslims. The United Nations bus she rides home has had its windshield broken and its tires slashed by Serbs. Serbian authorities once tried to ban the U.N. service.

In recent months, however, the boundary between the nation’s rival entities--the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic--has become less forbidding for Cerovic and the growing number of others who venture across.

Without formal acknowledgment, police and mobs on each side of the 666-mile inter-entity boundary line have eased their harassment of travelers from the other side, according to commuters and Western officials monitoring the 2-year-old peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Like most other points of the peace accords, which aim to unite Bosnia as a multiethnic state, freedom of movement is nowhere near complete, and even the tentative advances have been forced on ethnic separatist leaders by NATO-led troops.

Still, the relaxation has helped thousands of people overcome half a decade of isolation, making it easier for them to revisit hometowns they were forced to flee, reunite with friends and relatives, go back to old jobs and trade across Bosnia’s former battle lines.

‘Things Are Finally Getting Better’

“As time passes, I forget how frightened I was crossing that line,” said Cerovic, a trim, graying woman with a melancholy smile, recalling the early commutes to her job in April after a five-year leave caused by the war.

“I walked that highway alone. Just over the line were people who knew where I came from. . . . They would yell ugly things. I was always afraid they would attack. I kept thinking, ‘We can’t keep fighting this war forever.’ . . . Now things are finally getting better.”

Cerovic, Pale’s only Muslim resident, and her Serbian husband, Nikola, are unusually sensitive to the boundary. They can count out its slow erosion since last spring--in meters, the common measurement here.

Until June, Sarajevo’s Muslim police halted Serb-registered cars, so Nikola dropped her on the Serbian side of the boundary to walk the last 3,000 meters--nearly two miles--to the tram stop at the end of the Sarajevo line.

Between June and September, after police withdrew their checkpoint, Nikola crept across the boundary to within 1,000 meters of the tram stop before letting her out. Since September, she walks only the last 500 meters--about 550 yards--and rarely hears an insult.

‘Wartime Mentality Still Very Strong’

The couple’s tiptoe advance is painful for Nikola Cerovic. A retired construction boss, he built this highway 20 years ago with a multiethnic crew.

“The police tell us it’s safe to drive all the way into Sarajevo now, but we are not ready to take that risk,” he said. “The wartime mentality is still very strong.”

His wife’s evening commute home is also getting easier. U.N. buses run between Sarajevo and Pale without incident these days. They were last halted by threats of violence in July, U.N. officials said.

It is still deemed unsafe to park a U.N. bus in Pale overnight, and that limits service to this ski resort village. Semsa Cerovic would rather take the bus both ways, but the morning run leaves Pale too late. The U.N. runs the only bus to Sarajevo.

In fact, the big white U.N. buses are the only means of public transit anywhere across Bosnia’s ethnic divide. Their growing popularity is one measure of the country’s freer movement.

Launched by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in June 1996, the free service was plagued at first by sabotage, Serbian police barriers, harassment of passengers and drivers.

It survived on NATO muscle. In a pivotal showdown last year, British soldiers summoned an armored personnel carrier to tow a Serbian police car from the path of a U.N. bus. The police officers drove away on their own, dropping the idea of arresting the bus driver.

“The resistance has faded away,” said Kris Janowski, a U.N. spokesman in Sarajevo. “We’ve pretty much established that these buses do run.”

The service shuttles about 2,000 people a day among 35 cities and towns--16 in the Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska, and 19 in the Muslim-Croat Federation, he said. Buses run packed, with riders standing in the aisles; it’s best to book a seat a week in advance.

Riders Never Talk Politics

From the doorway of the bus Cerovic rides home, Ivana Mutavdzic, a 21-year-old U.N.-employed Serb, called out the family names on her reservations list. First names are a better clue of ethnic origin; Mutavdzic omits them to ease any tension between Muslim and Serbian riders. She said there’s never any trouble on her bus.

Commuters are allowed one piece of luggage. The bulging bags are evidence of brisk trading in cigarettes, compact discs and other goods that are scarcer on one side of the boundary or the other. One rider boarded with several carpets rolled up together.

As the bus climbed toward Pale, Mutavdzic blared Croatian rock music over the speakers, lighted the Muslim driver’s cigarette and wiped the fogging windshield with a towel. Passengers chatted across the aisle, exchanging news about common acquaintances.

They never talk politics, she said, and rarely mention what they’ve been doing in Sarajevo. The official ideology in Pale, power base of Serbian isolationist leader Radovan Karadzic, holds that traveling to the strongholds of Muslims or Croats is dangerous and that any dealing with them is subversive. If a Serb returning from Sarajevo enjoyed the visit, he won’t admit it.

“They come home and say they’re disappointed, that Sarajevo isn’t the same as it was before the war,” Mutavdzic said. “Then they go back to Sarajevo again and again and again.”

Private vehicle traffic across the line also is growing as Croatian, Muslim and Serbian police put up fewer checkpoints for license plates issued outside their bailiwick. Complaints by travelers of harassment near the boundary have dwindled to “the single digits per week,” a U.N. official said.

A breakthrough came last month when Muslim and Croatian entrepreneurs drove unchallenged to Serb-held Banja Luka to stage a three-day trade fair sponsored by two Serbian newspapers.

Another milestone is expected soon. Western officials overseeing the peace accords have threatened to ban all vehicles with Serbian and Muslim-Croat license plates from traveling outside Bosnia unless the two entities agree on a common plate that does not identify the ethnic turf on which a vehicle is registered.

The increasing traffic is a setback for the ultranationalist view on both sides that the 1995 peace accords, which codified the boundary, can be a tool for Bosnia’s partition. The flow has become heavier since last summer, when Western officials began acting more forcefully against these nationalists--in particular, helping the more cooperative Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic in her power struggle against Karadzic.

“Two years ago, everyone assumed the inter-entity boundary line would be an impenetrable barrier, but in fact it is becoming less relevant,” said Duncan Bulevant, spokesman for the Office of the High Representative, the chief international enforcer in Bosnia. “This may be a result of politics, but there’s also a lessening of war psychosis. Time has passed, and people are saying let’s get on with a more normal life.”

Still, Bosnia is a far cry from the multiethnic society demanded by the peace accords. Its national government, in which Serbs, Croats and Muslims theoretically share power, barely functions. Local authorities on all sides block refugees from returning to live in towns from which they were expelled in the war’s brutal “ethnic cleansings.”

But recent events in Drvar are a sign that the freer movement is loosening things up.

Drvar is a former Serbian town emptied by Bosnian Croat troops late in the war. Forty-seven Serbian families were escorted back to live there this autumn under a deal hammered out between local Croatian leaders and U.N. officials, who agreed to a limit on the returns.

Upset by the limit, an additional 200 Serbian heads of household seized the initiative: Boarding U.N. commuter buses, they rode across the boundary into Drvar several at a time and occupied empty houses on the edge of their native town, international monitors said.

The boundary’s steady erosion is prompting some Westerners to question their governments’ strategy of setting deadlines and quotas, imposing multiethnic institutions and pushing group repatriation. Instead, they argue, why not focus more on protecting free movement, allowing Bosnians to overcome their prejudices and reknit their society at their own pace?

“The simple common-sense ideas like buses are more promising than a frontal assault,” said Randolph Ryan of the Washington-based International Crisis Group, an independent watchdog here. But such an indirect approach would require a long NATO commitment.

Budget Constraints Threaten Buses

However long it stays engaged in Bosnia, the Western force faces the problem of how to keep the buses running.

U.N. officials are under budgetary pressure to drop the bus service, which has so far cost $2 million. Commercial carriers are ready to take up the slack but only if they get explicit approval from Serbian officials, who are unwilling to give it.