The Wolf of Sarajevo by Matthew Palmer Read Free Book Online

credit that life in a place this beautiful could be anythingbut peaceful and comfortable. Settlements were spaced out along the road almost at regular intervals like mile markers.
    Half an hour outside Banja Luka, they had to stop as a column of ten tanks crossed the highway, a mix of Yugoslav-era M-84s and Soviet surplus T-55s. In a field to one side, regular army troops were digging in, building firing positions for towed artillery that was pointed south toward Sarajevo. It was just an exercise, Eric knew, but there was a sense of urgency to the scene as though the soldiers involved expected to be doing this again for real at some point soon.
    â€œTake a look at the flags,” Eric said. The lead tank was flying a tricolor flag with horizontal stripes of red, blue, and white. Similar flags were flying from the antennae of the self-propelled guns digging in for whatever exercise was under way.
    â€œWhat is that? Serbian?”
    â€œThat’s the flag of Republika Srpska.”
    â€œI thought Bosnia had a unified army now. Wasn’t that the one major accomplishment of post-Dayton integration?”
    â€œIt was,” Eric agreed. “But that deal has broken down and the army has splintered. Most of the heavy weapons belong to the RS now.”
    â€œIs Dimitrović right, Eric?” Annika asked sadly, after they had navigated their way past the army encampment. They were driving through a small town of crumbling timber-and-wattle homes. It had been a mixed village before the war, with most of the villagers identifying themselves as Yugoslavs to the census takers. Now, the village was almost entirely Serb and it had something of the air of a ghost town. The High Representative’s mood seemed to match that of the town, tired and forlorn.
    â€œRight about what?”
    â€œThis,” she said, gesturing out the window. “That the people here can’t live together, that they won’t live together, that they’re better off apart.”
    â€œThe old ancient hatreds argument?”
    â€œYes. What if it’s true? What does that mean for Bosnia’s future and what we’re trying to do?”
    â€œI don’t think it is true,” Eric said, trying to project conviction, knowing how easy it was for peacemakers in the Balkans to slip into a kind of fatalistic despair about a region that seemed to work so hard at resisting accommodation and compromise. “Or rather, I don’t think it’s necessarily true. The reality is that the ethnic groups in this part of the world have lived together in relative peace for longer than they’ve been killing one another. Mixed marriages were common here before the war.”
    â€œAnd what about Srebrenica? Or Jasenovac?” During the Second World War, the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The most notorious death camp, Jasenovac, was a cultural touchstone for the Serb side every bit as powerful as Srebrenica was for the Bosniaks or as Vukovar, the object of a vicious three-month siege at the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, was for the Croats. Bosnia did not have a single history. It had three self-contained narratives.
    â€œThis isn’t Disneyland,” Eric said. “History here offers up plenty of violence, shocking violence. And it’s often organized along ethnic lines. But history is not destiny. When Tito died, the Communist Party held Yugoslavia together with Scotch Tape and glue for ten years. But in the end, it couldn’t survive the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nationalist feelings had been suppressed under the communists, not eliminated. Ethnicnationalism was there right under the surface. It offered people a sense of identity, of belonging. The violence didn’t have to be a part of that picture. A few leaders—MiloÅ¡ević on the Serb side, Tuđman in Zagreb, and even Izetbegović in