Peter Maass' Love Thy Neighbor (New York: Knopf, 1996), pp. 8-15, offers another account of the "cleansing" of Visegrad. Maass asks the questions we all wish to understand. How can a human being do these things to another human being? And more puzzling yet, how can a human being suddenly turn against someone who has been his friend, neighbor, work colleague and torture, rape, and murder that person, with no threat on the victim's part, and how can this phenomenon become a mass phenomenon, with many people engaging in similar activities?
Maass begins with a particularly haunting view of the "cleansed" Visegrad:
"Visegrad had been cleansed, not of garbage, of which there was a neglected mess on its streets and alleys, but of people. It felt like a ghost town in a western movie, minus the tumbleweeds rolling down Main Street. Shutters clanged open and shut with every breeze, while dogs roamed around, snarling and licking open sores on their haunches. They made good target practice for bored soldeirs wandering about. Front doors were ajar, left that way by looters and soldiers, and you would walk into any Muslim home in Visegrad, and what you saw changed little from one to another. The floorboards were ripped up by intruders searching for jewelry or German marks, the preferred reserve currency in Yugoslavia. Mattresses were knifed open like pigs for slaughter, draws were emptied onto the ground, and copies of the Koran were urinated on. Dried blood might be splattered on one of the walls or several. Everything of any value, including lightbulbs, had vanished."
Maass then recounts the scenes familiar from other "cleansed" Muslim towns in territory occupied by Croat or Serb nationalists. The mayor (in this case Mojmilo Markovic) claiming all the Muslims left of their own free will and he even supplied them with buses. There was no "cleansing" he said and he didn't even know what it meant.
Markovic then explained why the mosque was destroyed. The same story told over throughout the Republika Srpska. Sniper in the minaret. Those minaret snipers again. But there were no bullets around the mosque or evidence of them, and the mayor found himself caught in an open and easily exposed lie. The mosque had clearly been dynamited away from the scene of any armed conflict, as has been the case in most of the destroyed mosques throughout Croat and Serb army occupied Bosnia.
Maass dutifully recounts the tortures and slaughters on the bridge, and the gang rape of two girls, one of whom was never seen again. He then returns to his question, how could people do such things.
He begins by invoking Andric's impalement scene (see my posting above, in the "Saddest Eyes Ever Seen" two posts). He claims Andric can give us wisdom beyond that of warlords and diplomats.
He then comes to the crucial point. He cites a Serb, Vladimir Radjen:
"We all lived in Visegrad like a big vamily, the Muslims and Serbs. Everyone had mixed marriages. We didn't look for differences. You know, it wasn't the people who wanted to fight. It was the politicians who prepared this stew, and now we can never go back."
How could one of these groups turn to savagely against the other, with whom they were intertwined and intermarried? Maass confesses that at first he shared the Eagleburger hypothesis that peoples of the Balkans are just that way, age old haters locked into an infinite cycle of mass murder:
"This is the Balkans, it's ethnic rivalry, tribal warfare, the people are uncivilized, they've been doing it for centuries. It was a comforting explanation because it defined the violence as an antimodern and anti-Western phoenomenon--an exception. These people are different from the rest of us, I said to myself, they are like animals in a strange zoo."
After seeming to free himself from these ethnic stereotypes used by the Eagleburgers and Christophers to justify their refusal to take a stand against genocide, Maass then falls back into it, in the Andric mode:
"The Muslims of Visegrad had been mistaken to think that everything was okay and that barbarism was behind them because they had university diplomas and poetry readings and skiing vacations in the Alps. The forgot Andric's warning, that when the call of the wild comes, the bonds of civilization turn out to be surprisingly weak, professors turn into nutcases, and everything that a generation built up can be destroyed in a day or two, often by the generation that built it. It proved itself a patient survivor, waiting in the long grass of history for the right moment to pounce."
There is no doubt that Andric's descriptions are compelling and his command of local scene strong. But Maass has gone from saying we cannot explain this genocide by appealing to Balkan age-old antagonisms to appealing instead to some kind of literary beast stalking the grass, and seeming to blame the Muslims for "forgetting" the warning of Andric.
As discussed in my earlier posts, Andric believed in religious essences of races. The Slavic race was Christian by essence. Any conversion out of Christianity to Islam was race-treason. Andric presents this view not as his own, but as the view of "the people." Andric's narrator voice is disingenuous. It presents some Muslims as human beings and even seems empathetic with them, but ultimately they are always, as a first principle of Andric's belief, the "other" and not part of the people. Indeed, both Njegos and Andric present empathetic portrayals of Slavic Muslims only to endorse their ultimate dehumanization as Turkifiers and race-traitors.
If Njegos and Andric had simply presented Muslims as savages, they would not have been taken seriously by their Serb readers. But the sympathetic qualities of the Muslims in Njegos and Andric and similar to the sympathetic qualities many Serbs saw in their Muslim neighbors and friends. Thus the underlying religious mythology, that could justify exterminating even the sympathetic "Turk" was made plausible by that very sympathy.
It may be true that Muslims were not alert enough to what was being taught their Serb Orthodox friends and neighbors. Many Muslims have told me of having to read in school the Mountain Wreath (Njegos's glorification of the extermination of Slavic Muslims as the sacred act that allows the resurrection of the Serb nation), but not thinking their friends, lovers, spouses, and co-workers would ever act it out.
But is that a failing? If we always expect the worst from our neighbor, what will we get? At some point an element of trust is necessary.
Evil may never be explained fully. Indeed, if we claim a full explanation, we simply explain it away. There is something unfathomable about true evil.
But simply invoking Andric and chalking it up to a mythical beast is not adequate. Maass might have looked for a deeper wisdom in the words of Vladimir Radjen, who said it wasn't the people who wanted war, but the politicians. It wasn't a mythical beast that stoked the fire of genocide in Bosnia. It was a particular group of intellectuals and politicians. To understand how these men took antagonisms that were there (as they are everywhere in the world and as Andric so clearly reveals them in Bosnia) and turned them into an exterminationist ideology, we must turn to the next chapter in the evolution of Serbian religious nationalism, to Kosovo, the "Serb Jerusalem."
The developing religious mythology could not act on its own. It was explosive but it needed someone to light the fuse. In Kosovo, from 1986-1989, the fuse was lit, with a combination of intellectual, religious, and political leadership involved, even as the explosive ideology itself was fortified with another powerful set of symbols.
The next posting on this issue will concern the claims of genocide against Serbs in the Serb province of Kosovo in the late 1980's and the manipulation of those claims.
Michael Sells