Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Read Free Book Online

only civilian car on the road, besides the UN jeeps and lorries heading out from Zagreb to the checkpoints along the route. I have a superb four-lane motorway all to myself. I stop, get out, cross both lanes and back again. No one. Then I get into the car, take it up to 115 miles an hour, feeling fullof adolescent elation. I roar up to a tollbooth, only to discover that its windows are smashed and the booths are empty, though the hazard lights continue to blink on and off. I back up and take the tollbooth at full speed.
    I have no company except for hawks, who circle above the deserted highway looking for field mice, and feral cats who prowl along the grassy uncut verges. But from time to time, I can just make out the flash of sunlight on the binoculars of Croatian spotter teams dug into the motorway exit ramps. They must be wondering what a civilian car is doing using this deserted stretch of motorway as a drag strip.
    I have Austrian plates on the car. With Croatian or Serbian plates, I couldn’t proceed beyond any of the checkpoints ahead. I am also equipped with a UNPROFOR pass, the essential passport for the UN protection zones I am about to enter. In the boot of the car are some canisters of extra petrol, to get me through the Serbian zones, which are under a fuel embargo. Besides the canisters, there is a flak jacket. I put it on once, and took it off immediately. It is ludicrously cumbersome and in practice useless. All you think about when you are wearing one is the parts of your body that remain exposed. Besides, the canisters have already leaked onto the flak jacket, ensuring that if I do get hit while wearing it, I will burst into flames.
    About seventy kilometers east of Zagreb, I spot the first signs of war: the guardrails on the central median strip have been chewed up and strewn about one of the lanes. Then I begin to feel the track marks left behind in the road surface by the passage of tanks and armored personnel carriers. Farther on, the road is pocked and pitted with mortar blasts. On one of the motorway bridges, I spot my first sign of the cross with four Cyrillic “C’s” in each quadrant, standing forthe Serbian motto: “Only Unity can Save the Serbs.” On the next motorway bridge, I see the “U” for Ustashe, together with the checkered flag, theÅ ahovnica. On my left a rusted and burned-out bus, lying on its side by an exit ramp, its roof sheared away by some form of incoming fire. I have reached the edge of the war zone.
    JASENOVAC
    At the Jordanian headquarters at Novska, seventy kilometers east of Zagreb, a UN jeep meets me and leads my car down a shell-pocked feeder road, over a pontoon bridge, and past the Serb and Croat checkpoints, and drops me off at a blasted and wrecked shell of a building that used to house the Jasenovac museum and memorial center.
    Between 1941 and 1945, trains drew up at the railhead ramp on the other side of a vast, low, marshy field that slopes down to the Sava River. Jews and Serbs, Gypsies and Croatian Communists were herded out of the sealed wagons and pushed down the ramp to the rows of barracks behind the barbed wire. They were put to work in the brick factory, and when they were used up they were burned in the brick ovens or shot in the back of the head and then dumped in the Sava River.
    No one knows exactly how many people died in the bare field behind the museum where the barracks and barbed wire once stood. Serbs and Croats cannot even reach agreement about this. Serbs maintain the figure is 700,000. There isn’t a Serb village in central Croatia that didn’t lose someone in this place. Croats insist that the number is no more than 40,000. Independent researchers have put the total number of people exterminated at Jasenovac in the region of 250,000, but no one can be sure.
    It seems nearly as difficult to come to terms with what happened only two years ago, when the war of 1991 reached Jasenovac. For I am walking into a