A BalkanTale

I was then working as a military observer in Sarajevo, and visiting Zagreb for some official purpose. Jean Marc, one of my French colleagues wanted me to do a favour to a Serb woman. Her name was Tania, an interpreter in the UN Headquarters. Initially, I was reluctant as rules disallowed peacekeepers from acting as a carrier of any warring parties. But Jean Marc seemed to have developed a strangely innocuous feeling for her as one develops for his or her loved ones in inscrutable pain. But on hindsight, it was more than his insistence that convinced me not to fail in my duty to another human being merely on grounds of institutional absolutism.

"Will you carry for me this letter to my friend Samir?" she asked and handed over a brown envelope strung with a silk red ribbon whose ends were cut in the shape of neat triangles with a missing base, and the middle was designed into a floral pattern evoking 'the symbol of love.' Samir was her fiancé and both of them had studied together at the same university, but the Balkan War came as a fateful violator to their happy life. Samir was a Muslim, and had to leave Zagreb for fear of being arrested and prosecuted. His religion became a logo of striking manifestation of his "otherness" in a country which for forty years under the iron-lid of Marshal Tito's communist rule prospered as a single state. I often wondered aghast at the telling of a Serb 'that the Muslims had no place in Yugoslavia, that they were brigands who murdered and pillaged their country under six hundred years of Ottoman rule, and that they should find their place outside the soil of Europe.' God's greatest gift to man is 'Reason.' If reason fails to make man understand the universality of his individual soul, philosophy painfully retreats into a terribly miserable experience.

"What is inside the envelope?" I asked Tania. "Just words," came the reply. I noted that Tania had applied some perfume on the envelope that gave some hint to its passionate spirit. 

The route from Zagreb to Sarajevo was winding and tortuous with splendid spectacle of mountains running down to the plains where villages stood out at respectable distances from each other, the red tiles of brown brick houses on roof shone in the scintillating glow of a brilliant sun. My vehicle was wearing a UN flag and fortunately had a free pass through numerous barricades. But all the time, an eerie apprehension was gnawing at my heart; if a local gunman at these check points forcibly wanted to inspect my briefcase, he would have located the envelope by its peerless fragrance, and that could be the end of my story. Many peacekeepers faced deaths for seemingly sympathizing with one of the weaklings that belonged to the other group. I could recall a similar situation in 1971 when the Pakistani military and their turncoats unleashed the behemoth of vengeance on our soil ----- killing, rape, hatred, destruction --- is no story telling but a living nightmare. Despite all those ideas affecting my spirit during that long meditative journey, I reached Sarajevo with the hope of redeeming the separation of two young couple through the help of an envelope.

In Sarajevo, I took the help of my interpreter Radia to find Samir. Tania had given me the address of his house. But to my utter consternation, when Radia told me the story of Samir, I was completely disarmed. He had joined the Bosnian army, and was killed by the Serbs in one of the skirmishes at Mount Igman. In the course of the Balkan conflict (1991-1995), Mount Igman became an area of major strategic importance. Serbs had executed a siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995 with Mount Igman encircling as perimeter. Strategically, Sarajevo is a defender's nightmare, and attacker's paradise, if the control of the mountain is lost. The siege of Sarajevo (1425 days) is the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare.  The blockade of Sarajevo has become a part of the UN tragedy that took the lives of US diplomats when their UN Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) rolled down some 400 meters into a ditch while carrying the UN Peace Mission headed by Richard Holbrooke; because of the blockade, the Mission had no choice but to take narrow route through Igman to reach Sarajevo. 

Next day, Radia took me to Samir's house; I had not disclosed anything about the letter to her. It was a two-storied house which needed repair at places where frays had come off the wall. Samir was survived by his old Bosnian mother and a young sister. His father was a Serb, a mechanic who had joined the enemy Serbian army during the conflict, and was killed in the front-line by Bosnian bullets at Mount Igman. Beginning of the conflict, he had left his family to perform a moral act of uniting with Serbian nationhood. 

After introductory notes, the first thing Samir's mother asked me was, "How is Tania?" "She is fine," I replied. For a moment, there surged an indestructible anger in her eyes. She exploded, "She is Serb; she is our enemy; my son's greatest sin was to fall in love with an enemy. Imagine how peaceful his soul would have been if he had a Muslim wife to visit his grave." Suddenly, my head started to spin and I felt giddy. She forgot that her own husband was a Serb whom she as a Muslim had married in an act of pure love.

Next day, I decided to visit the war cemetery to bury the letter in Samir's grave so that its words could reach his departed soul. Radia accompanied me but had no idea of my resolve. The Muslim cemetery dedicated to the victims of Bosnian War is one awe-inspiring sight of sepulchral gloom penetrating the forbidding rocks of the distant hills that shielded Sarajevo. Each grave had an epitaph suggesting the irony of a senseless conflict where both men and women, young or old, could be sacrificed in the name of crazy xenophobic ideals. On our walk to the graveyard, I told Tania the story of my country which gained independence at the cost of million lives. Both of our countries shared a common destiny whose remarkable feature for someone was to be true to one's own land.

I placed a few stray flower stalks on the grave that I had bought earlier from a local floral shop, and stood before the grave of this young man whom I had never known or seen. My vague relation with him was through Tania who wanted me to hand over a letter to him. I asked Radia to leave me for some time alone at the grave. She was a bit startled, and then realizing that the solemnity of the evening had overwhelmed me, she started towards the gate with her back towards me. As I was out of her sight, I gently stooped over the grave and dug out some earth with my fingers. After laying the envelope which still smelled of the sweet fragrance, I overlaid the torn surface with the gentle and sad caress of my palm. The letter was now in the safe custody of a dead man.

At night as I lay on my bed, I saw through the window the blue sky with stars looking down upon Mount Igman re-creating retrospectively the battle hymns of young soldiers ready to die at the call of a nation.

Few years later, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia became independent states through international intervention. I never met Tania again, and do not know if she ever came to know the truth of Mount Igman and Samir's death.  

Mahmud Hussain is retired Air Vice Marshal and former High Commissioner to Brunei.