Muslim Journalist Ruffles the Serbian Lion in Its Den

Sadik Pazarac, a Bosnian Muslim known by a decidedly Serbian nickname, Sasa, filed a final newspaper dispatch in March 1992. War was descending on his hometown. Serbian paramilitaries scoured the neighborhoods. Muslims were being rounded up and shot.

Instead of covering the mayhem, the part-time reporter and veteran schoolteacher put all his energies into just surviving.

“I no longer dared to go out in the street, much less to write openly and publicly,” Pazarac said.

Most of Bijeljina’s 30,000 Muslims were killed or expelled. Pazarac lost his job and apartment--he was ousted by swaggering gunmen who weeks earlier had been his students. But thanks in part to his wife’s work as a seamstress for many of the town’s leading Serbs, he and his family were allowed to remain in Bijeljina.

Crammed into a single back room in the home of his elderly mother, Pazarac, his wife, Sabira, and their two children kept a low profile through 3 1/2 years of war and repression. He rarely ventured out; she continued to sew suits and finery for the wives of the Serbs running the city.

That took courage enough. But after the war ended, and with Bosnian Serb hard-liners still firmly in control, Pazarac became all the more determined to continue living in Bijeljina, to show his defiance. His daily life now is a barometer of whether nationalist extremism can be tamed and ethnic groups reconciled--goals that form the cornerstone of Western peacemaking policy in fragile Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Article Exposed Rights Violations

Five years after what he thought was his last news story, Pazarac returned to the pages of Bosnia’s best-known newspaper. Writing for the daily Oslobodjenje, based in the Muslim-dominated capital, Sarajevo, he offered a two-part expose of human rights violations in Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb half of the country, where he makes his home.

From within the lion’s den, he has chosen to write about the lion’s sins: government corruption, police abuse and, on occasion, the ugly and often ignored past. For a Muslim to do this in what was one of the Bosnian Serbs’ most hard-line cities is remarkable.

Pazarac, 50, feels unshackled by the slow, yet noticeable pace of change in Bosnia nearly three years after the war formally ended and a NATO-enforced peace began to take hold.

Despite frequent setbacks, U.S.-backed politicians willing to cooperate with the West have begun to supplant hard-line radical nationalists in parts of Republika Srpska. Amid the ongoing power struggle, improvements are largely superficial, but they have made enough of a difference to encourage a few hardy souls such as Pazarac.

His Bijeljina shows the two contradictory faces of change in Bosnia.

Muslims Feel Safer, but Fear Lingers

Today, he feels safe to walk about--a sharp reversal from just a few months ago, when dissidents still received death threats. U.S. government officials lounge in cafes in this city once so dangerous and tense that it was off limits.

At the same time, however, a fervently nationalist Serbian Orthodox priest is busy building a huge church on land that was stolen from 10 Muslim families. In addition, Muslims elected last year to the City Council, largely because absent refugees were allowed to vote, remain too frightened to return to the city. And a national election last month restored several radicals to office.

Meanwhile, Pazarac continues to live in his mother’s back room.

“Things are changing, and tensions are decreasing,” Pazarac said. “There are big steps forward. Before, Muslims were like animals and it was open season--anyone could come into your home and beat you up without facing a single consequence. Today, there are no overt attacks. But there remains a certain dosage of fear . . . and discrimination.

“The changes,” he concluded, “are gradual and incomplete.”

Most mornings, Pazarac bikes to his wife’s boutique to check on her, then to his own work space at the offices of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Republika Srpska. Working there affords him some protection, while he in turn does reports on human rights violations for the committee on the side.

The Bosnian Serb newspapers he surveys are as split as the local politics. One paper on this particular morning carries a front-page cartoon that shows moderate Bosnian Serb officials, enticed by the carrots dangled by the U.S., leading their people over a cliff.

Many of the Bosnian Serbs who seized his apartment, terrorized his relatives and even accused him of being a sniper as a way to discredit him remain in Bijeljina, some in positions of power, and Pazarac runs into them routinely. It is a further paradox of these times that he ends up writing sympathetic stories about some of the very people who abused him.

In one such article last year, Pazarac told the story of Djordje Krsmanovic, a municipal official who had thrown his lot in with moderate, pro-Western forces. Nationalists loyal to former Bosnian Serb strongman and accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic were still in charge in Bijeljina, and they fired Krsmanovic as punishment, Pazarac wrote.

“I portray him as a victim,” Pazarac said of his story, chuckling quietly.

In 1992, it was Krsmanovic who signed the order to expel Pazarac and his family from their apartment.

“I go to his press conferences. I have coffee with him. He says hello, shakes my hand. It’s always in the back of my mind, what he did to me.

“Whether he thinks about it, I don’t know.”

Pazarac also chronicled the violent attempts by Karadzic’s Serbian Democratic Party, or SDS, to retain power in the face of the moderates’ challenge.

“The SDS has finally broken up, and only those who are frightened, blackmailed or mixed up in crime and other dishonorable activities remain in the party,” he wrote in Oslobodjenje last year, when the hard-liners were still very powerful.

Pazarac has been singled out for criticism in the extremist Bosnian Serb press and confronted while on the job by Bosnian Serb police.

“Writing is therapeutic,” he said. “It kind of frees me of all that was piling in me. And it’s a kind of obligation--to say it all, to say the things that are not known.”

Pazarac, soft-spoken and gentle, with a round face and wavy hair that is just starting to turn gray, admits that there were moments during the war when he was tempted to join the Muslim flight. It was because of his wife that he never gave in.

Sabira Pazarac did not believe things could get as bad as they did. Both she and her husband had widowed mothers to think about. She figured, incorrectly, that her family, one of the oldest and most prominent Muslim names in Bijeljina, might escape punishment.

Besides, said Pazarac: “There was an element of spite, to prove we could stay. Leaving is defeat, surrender.”

Chilling Account of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’

This year, to mark the sixth anniversary of the start of the war in Bijeljina, Pazarac published in Oslobodjenje a chilling account of the initial days.

Serb-led Yugoslavia, just five miles from Bijeljina, was mobilizing to put down Bosnia’s political drive for independence. After a minor gun battle between Bosnian Serbs and Muslims at Bijeljina cafes, the town was occupied by Serbian paramilitaries under the command of the notorious warlord known as Arkan. The “ethnic cleansing” that ensued was quick and efficient.

In his article, Pazarac recalls the sight of masked gunmen rounding up non-Serbs from factories and their homes, then marching them through the city, hands raised. Many were taken to camps. Some were killed on the spot.

Muslim intellectuals and the well-to-do were targeted. House-to-house searches were conducted, ostensibly for weapons. Entire families were expelled.

“They start to question us and empty our pockets,” Pazarac wrote, using a first-person narration to tell the story of friends arrested by the paramilitary forces. “The torture starts. With my hands up, I’m standing in the door frame. The baseball bat leaves marks from shoulder to foot.”

He used a pseudonym to sign this story. Some memories are still too raw.

In fact, it is still too early to talk about many things. Pazarac will not yet reveal the names of several Serbs who he knows helped to save his family. Not only might there be reprisals, but the issue raises uncomfortable questions for those who helped: Why did you act this time, to save this person, and allow so many others to die or be forced into exile?

During the years of terrifying repression that gripped this and other Bosnian Serb-held cities, there were no rules about who might be spared. Luck, unique endurance, nerves of steel and, critically, old friendships all played a part. Pazarac, who worked as a schoolteacher for 23 years until the Serbs fired him, ran into former students in almost every military patrol he encountered. Any one could have arrested him but did not.

On several occasions, his name appeared near the top of the lists of people Bosnian Serb authorities wanted banished from the city. Friends among the authorities spoke up and crossed him off the lists.

Cashing In Chits to Rescue Women

His largest chits were called in on an April dawn in 1995, three years after the war began and eight months before it was to end.

Armed Bosnian Serb thugs burst into the cottage-style home belonging to Sabira Pazarac’s mother and two sisters. The women were dragged screaming from their beds. The intruders beat Sabira’s mother, Sefka Salihbegovic, who was 77 at the time and who recognized one of her attackers.

The women were taken away, placed in a camp for prisoners and were most likely destined for a treacherous walk across the front lines, or worse. Pazarac and his wife learned what happened and sent word to numerous old friends. The three women were retrieved and returned home by sundown, a near-miraculous rescue.

Salihbegovic, a religious Muslim who dresses in traditional clothing and--unlike the rest of the family--attended mosque regularly before the war, remains so traumatized by the ordeal that to this day she will not venture farther than her garden.

One recent day, the petunias were in bloom and the elephant ears were sprouting behind the high fence that surrounds the house where the Salihbegovic family has lived since the turn of the century. The mailbox was turned inward to hide the name. Bosnian Serbs who threw out the Muslim family next door sat in their front yard taking in the sun. A traveling amusement park with a Ferris wheel had set up across the road, on the site of one of Bijeljina’s five mosques, all of which were destroyed by the Serbs. None has been rebuilt.

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A Nation Still Divided

Nationalism and ethnic prejudice were used to stoke 3 1/2 years of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. Millions of lives were ruined. Long after the shooting stopped under a Western-imposed peace settlement, much of Bosnia remains separated along ethnic lines. But a small number of Bosnians fights the system and resists the status quo in uphill battles to make a difference and give Bosnia hope for genuine change. This series introduces a few of these men and women:

* SUNDAY: A Serb mayor’s quest to go back to a hometown now controlled by Croats reveals the complexities of refugee returns, the single greatest problem in postwar Bosnia.

* TODAY: A Muslim reporter who remained in Serb-held territory grapples with how to live alongside the very men who abused him for his faith.

* TUESDAY: A Muslim judge endures threats and condemnation from fellow Muslims for standing up for what he feels is just, even if it runs counter to nationalist wishes.

* WEDNESDAY: A Serb woman in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia ignores ethnic prejudices to help women assert their rights and rebuild their lives.

* THURSDAY: A Croat priest working in a Muslim city challenges hard-liners from both groups to preserve a Catholic community in unfriendly territory.