by Emir SULJAGIC
Dusina, a village near Zenica, whose Croat inhabitants were massacred in January 1993, is conspiratorially quiet. Even though it is summer, field work at its peak, almost no one can be seen in the fields. There are no local alcoholics on duty in front of the only village store, and life, one guesses, goes on behind closed gates and doors. “Why don’t you move on!” an old man says as soon as we mention 1993. And there is nowhere to go to. At the end of the path there are about ten ruins, with bare walls, the only remaining trace of Croat households and a reminder of the crime; the Muslim cemetery, created during the war, covers the meadow across the path from the ruins.
The path between the ruins and the cemetery ends next to the last one in the series of ruins. However, this house, hasn’t been burned. This applies to all of the other ruins as well. All of them were thoroughly looted. Every cable was pulled out of the walls, every pipe yanked out and carried away, every roof tile and every roof beam carted away. Plaster has fallen off the cracked walls on the floor and lies there in big piles. At few spots, from the ground, because there is hardly any floor left, grass grows in the middle of the house. Between piles of refuse, a few ceramic tiles with blue palms left behind, one can find a pair of rotting trousers, and next to them a knitted woolen sock. On the walls, there are no usual messages, graffiti, Islamic crescents, incoherent signatures of some soldier drunk with victory; there is no evidence of the chaotic violence that must have engulfed this village; these houses were slowly, patiently destroyed; day by day, new pieces of furniture were carted away, roofs were taken apart, bricks pulled out of the walls. And the loot most likely ended up in the village, with neighbors, friends, colleagues from work. Today, in Dusina there are no Croats or Serbs. “One of them comes once in a while, to work,” our collocutor says. And “one” is not a neighbor or an acquaintance, but an enemy.
The view from the top of the hill towards the seemingly idyllic valley is magnificent. The beauty of the landscape is not disturbed by anything. Destroyed houses are behind our backs. It is as if the war hadn’t been waged at all. Corn is growing, beans are being dried, hay is in the haystacks, grass has been mowed. But it is quiet. Damn, it’s way too quiet!
…knew or had a reason to know…: Unlike in Dusina, the residents returned to Buhine Kuce, a village right next to Vitez, after the massacre in January 1994. Life seemingly goes on. Bosniaks and Croats live in newly constructed houses, next to each other, but at a huge distance from each other. People do not talk to each other over the fence; nothing that would remind one of daily village life takes place; all that remains is a heavy stench of apartheid, new and unnatural.
“We were not here,” two women reply. They cannot be older than 40 but are obviously aged by hard peasant life. “Go to the Vidovics, they had trouble”. The houses of the Vidovic family, Ante and his daughter-in-law Ankica, who also survived, are on the edge of the village, next to each other. A big yard, hens, ducks, stables, a large and recently rebuilt house, next to a busy main road.
A white-haired and rather slow-moving man opens the door of a shady house. “Eh, I don’t know what to say to you,” he says lowering his gaze towards the floor. Then, nevertheless, he puts on his shoes and comes out to the yard and heads for the bench in the shade of an apple tree.
“They attacked us at 4am. They shouted ‘Ustashe [derogatory term for Croats], surrender!’ My sons ran out of the house, the daughter-in-law carried children. She was screaming ‘don’t shoot, they are children!’ They shot. Two of them were killed right here (points at a spot in the yard, two meters away from the bench), and my daughter-in-law fell there. She was pregnant. Eight month,” Ante says, recalling as much as his advanced age permits. His eldest grandson was also killed, and the other two (the youngest Bruno was seven at the time) were wounded. According to Ante, the villagers escaped across the road, towards the then UPROFOR camp, but the UN troops refused to shelter them. From there, they continued towards Vitez.
that forces under their control…: “Look, here, that’s where the bullet left the body,” he pulls his shirt down and shows a scar on the neck that marks the wound inflicted during the escape. “It came in here, on the side”. “They were young, good looking men, well trained, from Sarajevo or Zenica. They were not our locals. Neighbors, when they did sentry duty, would tell us to go to the fields in the morning, because a different shift would come in the afternoon. And those men, what are you going to do, they brought them from somewhere and for them all of us were Ustashe! And I fought with the Sixteenth Muslim Brigade in WWII!”
“There were some men from Travnik nearby. They were some sort of a sentry, and got caught asleep. It was horrible what they did to them. They did not look like human beings at the end of it! But no one expected that. There were no weapons or soldiers here! They killed Frano Safardin and his wife. She was bedridden and he decided to stay with her. He was a wonderful man!”
After receiving medical treatment for several months in Split, Ante returned to Buhine Kuce in the summer of 1994, and today lives in the village with his wife. “She’s not here now. She’s visiting grandchildren in Vitez!” What about neighbors? “Look, here, across the road, they are refugees. My Huso is there, he complains that he has no food. I sometimes give him oil or sugar over the fence. But only at night, so that no one sees. The others get mad, they don’t want any links.”
He speaks slowly, taking frequent brakes, forgetting what he was talking about and changing subject in the middle of the sentence. “My kids are gone; it would be best if war were war; everyone should talk; in WWII there were all sorts of armies, but no one shot at women and children. And these, they shot at their own people,” he says. For a moment, I had the impression he was talking more for his own than for our sake, in some sort of an internal dialog, stoically resigned to the world and his own tragic past; a horrifying resignation. There was no hate, not even righteous rage and anger. Ante, the way he is, seemed like the most easy going and nicest man in the world. His eyes were teary, but they hid nothing besides that horribly deep calm.
commit crimes or had already committed crimes…: Just like Buhine Kuce, the village of Maline leads two parallel lives. The village is clearly divided into the Muslim and Catholic [Croat] part. The meeting point is the building of the shared, four-grade primary school. We encounter several men in front of the village bar, with the pool table that leans to one side. “Do you work for the prosecution or the defense?” one of them asks. We spot a golden watch with the Croat coat of arms on his wrist. “Why don’t you ask your brigadier where the victims were massacred,” another one interjects.
“Forget about them, none of them were here,” Ante Pranjes, one of few survivors of the June 8, 1993 attack, who has returned to the village and lives there with his wife and grandchild says. “To be honest, I thought that our guys were goofing around and shouting ‘Allahu-ekber’, because that was totally unexpected. A few days earlier the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the HVO had played a soccer game,” says Ante. His whole family was captured.
“About a week before the attack, I picked up two members of the 17th Krajina Brigade (of the Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina) in my truck and took them to Mehurici. When we arrived, I gave $50 to one of them, just in case. When they captured us and took us to Mehurici, he approached me and asked: ‘Do you remember me?’ I did, naturally. And when Arabs started taking people outside, he approached them and said: ‘These people over here are out of bounds. They were captured by the Army of BH!’” However, Ante says, one of the Arabs aimed a gun at the soldier, while the other two were pulling men from the line, including Ante’s son Dragan.
A few hours later, Dragan was lying on a pile of corpses on Bikosi, a hill between Maline and the Bosniak village of Mehurici. He had two wounds, one in his chest and the other one in the leg. “They took them, and then one of the youngsters got a seizure and started shouting. They thought that someone else was hiding in the forest and started shooting at the captives. My son fell under another man. Afterwards they shot at them some more, at the pile of bodies, but Dragan was not hit”. Dragan managed to reach Serb lines on the Vlasic mountain with another survivor, 16-years-old Stjepan Volic. From there they were taken to Hercegovina where they recovered.
…and did not prevent them or punish the culprits…: The following 16 days Ante and the rest of his family spent with more than 300 other prisoners in the gym of the school in Mehurici. “They did not beat us; there was food; it wasn’t enough, but they did feed us. A man died, but not from a beating. He was sick. Although it is true that they would get drunk from time to time and start shooting around the school!” Pranjes is a merry and lively old man, whose whole life experience belies what happened to him in June, 1993. “No one can bring back the dead, but I regret that trust was shattered! It’s easy to kill, only heroes can save things!”. On the top of the Bikosi hill, where the monument to killed Croats now stands, one can only feel regret.
We encounter four men at a table in the village store that doubles as a bar and a farming cooperative. The oldest one of them wears a full beard, while his red Mercedes is parked across the street. The youngest one is the trader who intermittently gets up to serve the customers looking for tools. The other two join the conversation from time to time, only to confirm what the Beard says. Obviously he is the local boss. “They were here. We fed them like pets. We did not touch them, and even had to carry them food,” the Skinny says. The Pleasantly Plump Gentleman nods his head, while the Beard concludes: “We have nothing to hide. If we are hiding anything, that is good, not evil!” The trader explains that “commander Fazlic ordered not to touch civilians,” and the Beard adds that “that attack came after Ahmici”.
Half an hour later, when all of them split, as if following someone’s command, all of them were still sticking to their story. “There are no civilians on the front line,” the Skinny concluded. Then the Trader came up with an explanation: “They wore uniforms that looked like plain clothes one side and like uniforms on the other side!” Indeed, just like Franjo Jokic. Born in 1924, killed on June 8, 1993.