A Mighty Purpose (34 page)

The bullet that had punched into the dirt inches from Court’s foot was an armor-piercing round. That was news to Court, but even more surprising was where the bullet had come from: the roof of the Bosnian presidential palace. It was a Bosnian Muslim sniper that had targeted him, not a Serb. He later told Grant that he had been shot at and shelled by everybody—Serbs, Croats, and Muslims—and, as a result, he was “violently neutral.”

After their meeting with the Bosnian president—in the very building from which Court’s would-be killer had fired his shot—Grant went to the UN’s main base in the city center. He had a lunch date with a French general who led the peacekeeping operation. During the meeting, he was treated to yet another artillery show. A series of thundering booms punctuated the afternoon, and Grant again identified the sounds: mortars.

Like before, he learned, the volleys were outgoing, sent to attract Serbian fire—and to impress him.

When they saw that he was not impressed, says Court, the mortars stopped.

For the trip back to the post office, Court borrowed an unarmored UN Land Cruiser to transport himself, Grant, and two members of a film crew—a “stupid” decision, as he would soon realize.

To get back, they had to drive down Sarajevo’s “Sniper Alley,” an exposed, bullet-raked, bloodstained boulevard, where snipers routinely shot at cars and pedestrians. Court had never been fired upon while in a vehicle with the UNICEF insignia. But this one was a generic UN truck.

He drove fast. Then the bullets came, striking the car. Court doesn’t think they were directly shot at—the bullets may have ricocheted off nearby cars, walls, or lampposts. Nonetheless, he wrenched the car left, then right, zigzagging down the street, trying not to be an easy target. Sitting in the back, the two filmmakers were terrified. They “were pissing themselves,” says Court. “It was scary.”

But Grant, in the front passenger seat, was perfectly calm. He even cracked a joke. As Court gripped the wheel and stomped on the gas, and as the car lurched left and right, bullets glancing off it, Grant looked over at him.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” Grant quipped.

Keeping his eyes on the road, Court didn’t reply at first.

Then Grant added: “It is exciting.”

Finally, Court barked at him: “Shut
up
, Jim!”

Grant just laughed.

Grant wanted to meet the Serbs, which meant that Court would have to negotiate a brief ceasefire to allow the delegation to travel to Pale, the Serb mountain stronghold. On their first night at the post office in Sarajevo—while most everyone else slept in their clothes on top of desks, on the floor, or in chairs—Court shuttled back and forth between the Serbian and Muslim liaisons. Both sides had offices in the vast building. He made several visits to each and drank several helpings of fruit alcohol that was offered to him. “They didn’t have plants that you could throw the alcohol into,” he recalls. “It did require several visits to the loo.”

At around one in the morning, he ran into Grant. His boss was wandering the halls after a trip to the bathroom.

“Alan, how’s it going?”

“Slowly,” he said. “I’m doing more damage to my liver than to Bosnia.”

“Ah!” Grant guffawed. “You’ll do fine … You think we’ll come to an agreement?”

“I think so, but I don’t know when.”

“Ah, you’ll do it,” Grant said. “Don’t worry.”

Then he added: “I’m going back to sleep.”

At four a.m., Court had his agreement. The ceasefire would take place between 9:00 and 9:30 that morning. It was a narrow window. He didn’t bother going to sleep. At 6:00 a.m., he saw Grant again. The UNICEF head was awake and buoyant. Court told him they needed to be ready to move in three hours.

“All right,” Grant said. “We have three hours to kill. It’d be nice to go and see Kosevo Hospital.”

Sarajevo’s main hospital stood on a hill over a cemetery, where bodies from its busy morgue were hastily buried. Nearby, on the city’s southern edge, rose Mount Trebević, a hulking, menacing presence. From that mountain, the Serbs shelled the hospital mercilessly. Grant and his delegation arrived to a find a whole exterior wall of windows riddled with giant jagged holes, like an outsized and overused shooting range target.

Inside, it was far worse. There was no electricity or running water. The medical staff was scant—many doctors and nurses had fled. The flow of badly wounded patients arriving each day was unceasing. And the hospital itself wasn’t safe. Children who had come to be treated for other injuries had been killed and injured anew by the shelling. One shell had landed in
a children’s ward. Those who had survived were transferred to another ward, a big austere room with no lights. They lay there listlessly, some with heads and arms bandaged, some with legs in traction. Some had lost limbs. They were quiet, recalls Jon Rohde. They did not cry. “They were in bad shape,” he says.

Grant went to several bedsides to speak with children. He wanted to assure them they would be safe—but how could he?

He didn’t voice it, but Rohde could tell his friend was angry, could tell from the stern aura he radiated. A deep frown etched Grant’s face as he moved through the dim, dreary halls. Says Rohde: “I got the sense that he felt,
I can do something about this … I’m the spokesperson for children in the world, and I’m going to stop this
.”

In one room they saw a little girl with trichinosis. Maybe two years old, she sat by herself in a metal crib, wailing and hiding her face with a blanket. She wore pink tights and, for some reason, was tethered to the side of the crib. A nurse told them that the hospital didn’t have enough drugs for cases like hers. Trichinosis can normally be treated, but if it is not, it can be fatal.

In the oncology ward, they met a small, frail, bald boy who had leukemia. He was drinking out of a tin cup. Hospital staff explained that without electricity, the boy could no longer receive treatment and that his life was in immediate danger. Grant stood there listening, his eyes blinking rapidly, as the boy’s condition was described.

The group was led to a small lobby area where young orphans were camped out on chairs surrounding a small, low, round table, eating a breakfast of jam and bread. They were in
their pajamas, smiling and giggling—like kids anywhere. One girl wore a pink bathrobe. One little boy had on a purple sleeper. A doting, smiling nurse sat and chatted with them. Despite their jovial appearance, these children were deeply traumatized, the group learned. Their parents were gone. They cried themselves to sleep every night.

Outside, returning to the armored personnel carrier, an unsmiling Grant was handed a flak jacket. He hoisted it on with a grunt. Then he said, “I’m looking forward to the day when we no longer need these.”

Their next stop was a meeting with the people who were causing the misery they had just witnessed.

The man most responsible for the atrocities in Sarajevo—the bushy-maned, double-chinned psychiatrist turned rabid Serbian nationalist, Radovan Karadžić—was not available to meet Grant. But Grant could, he was told, have an audience with Karadžić’s deputy, a woman known as Serbia’s Iron Lady. Biljana Plavšić was a biologist and former professor at Sarajevo University. She also happened to be an enthusiastic supporter of “ethnic cleansing” and reportedly harbored views so extreme as to even unsettle Milošević. After the Dayton peace accords in 1995, Plavšić would become president of the Bosnian Serb Republic and would later plead guilty to crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court in The Hague (she would receive an outrageously light sentence of eleven years, probably less than the punishment for stealing a bike in some countries).

They sat on a patio in an elaborate alpine resort that had helped play host to the 1984 Olympic Winter Games a mere eight years before. It was a bright, crisp, cold morning in Pale, the Serbs’ mountain headquarters. The view was dramatic and tranquil—green, snowless ski slopes meandered amid rows of tall, serrated evergreen trees. If not for the circumstances, it would have been a moment of respite in the rejuvenating mountain air.

Turkish coffee was served in small white cups with red stripes. They gathered around a skinny wooden table that was barely wide enough to hold the cups and saucers. Rohde, Court, and most others, including two of Plavšić’s aides, sat on a long bench. The haughty military leader sat with her guest, Jim Grant, on pillows on the edge of a stone wall opposite the bench. On the other side of the wall was a drop of maybe six feet.

Wearing red lipstick, a voluminous whorl of hair, and big sunglasses, Plavšić looked like a fussy, wealthy, high-maintenance eccentric—she did not look like a genocidal killer. Grant, who wore his trademark blue suit and a tie with little hearts on it, made an apparent attempt at small talk. He told her he had recently visited Somalia (another placed gripped by gruesome violence and famine). Her demeanor was cordial. She spoke English fluently and did not need an interpreter.

Then, says Court, ensued “a ninety-minute discussion between Plavšić and Grant, and I have never seen the like.” Grant leaned forward and focused so intently on his host, “it was like Jon and I weren’t there,” Court adds.

When Plavšić began spewing bigoted bile, she spoke calmly. She did not yell or rant. She sipped coffee all the while.

She started telling Grant how dreadful the Muslims were, how they were completely undermining the Serbian way of life.

“They are like vermin,” she announced. “And they need to be exterminated.”

As if any UN official would ever agree with such a disgusting statement. She may not have been seeking his agreement; she may have been trying to rile him up, goad him into a confrontation. She went on verbally savaging Muslims, but Grant didn’t bite—he knew that wouldn’t achieve anything. It would do no good to tell her that she was a repellent troll. He just listened.

His objective was threefold: get her to stop shelling the hospital (she was the one directing fire into Sarajevo), persuade her to restore electricity and water in Sarajevo, and win her support for his proposed week of tranquillity.

Rohde recalls that Grant did gently jab her, telling her that whatever policy the Serbs were following—whatever was happening down there in Sarajevo—there was simply no excuse for targeting children. He likely smiled as he said this, making sure that he sounded friendly, that his voice had no edge.

Grant also made a quick reference to Plavšić’s boss, Radovan Karadžić, according to Rohde. Karadžić was a psychiatrist, which means he was a medical doctor. Grant told Plavšić that he didn’t see how a doctor—how someone bound by the Hippocratic oath—could ever put children in harm’s way.

None of these statements seemed to sway a woman who, says Rohde, “could have bit nails and chewed them and spit them out.”

What did sway her, says Court, was a question repeatedly posed by Grant:
What would it take?

What would it take for you to stop shelling the hospital? What would it take for you to stop shooting the linemen repairing electrical lines? What would it take for you to restore gas and electricity?

In answer to the first version of the question, she said that the Muslims should stop using the hospital grounds for firing mortars at the Serbs (the mortar bombs may have been coming from a schoolyard next to the hospital). Based on that complaint, says Court, a rough deal was sketched out. The back-and-forth went something like this:

“They need to take those mortars away,” she said emphatically. “Can you make sure those mortars leave?”

Grant pressed her: “Will that stop you shelling the hospital?”

“Yes.”

Grant swiveled to Court. “You’ll take care of this when you get back to Sarajevo, won’t you, Alan?”

Court said he would.

Then he pivoted back toward Plavšić. “And then you’ll stop immediately?”

“Yes.”

“So you won’t fire on the hospital, unless you’re fired at from the hospital?”

“Yes.”

They went through the same process of affirmation and reaffirmation on the other issues, with Grant carefully extracting yeses. He also secured her support for the week of tranquillity.

Reflecting on the exchange now, Court still marvels at how Grant toppled her obstinacy. “It was amazing,” he says. “It was a master class in how you take somebody whose position is diametrically opposed to yours and find common ground … it was really finding the quid pro quo, the tit for tat.”

Within a week, Court persuaded the Bosnian forces to stop shooting mortars from the hospital vicinity. And in turn, he says, the Serbs stopped shelling the hospital. But the resulting peace would not last long. The hospital would eventually again come under fire.

“A real dour son of a bitch.”

That’s how Alan Court describes Slobodan Milošević. After traveling to the Serbian capital, Belgrade, Grant and his delegation met the president in a large, ornate, ostensibly ancient room. Twenty people arrayed themselves around a massive table. At the head of it, like a statue—like a part of the room itself—brooded a man who had brought death to scores of innocents. He was stiff, blank-faced. Completely unreadable. What Rohde recalls most vividly was “the huge head this guy had.”

The dynamics of the meeting were not favorable to Grant. He liked one-on-ones. He liked being able to lean toward a person, reel them in with his eyes, feel out their weak points. But Milošević was too far away. And he was surrounded by his stone-faced sentries.

“The whole meeting was tense in a way I don’t know how to describe,” says Court. “You came out of that meeting glad you were out of it.”

They communicated through interpreters. Milošević said that Yugoslavia must remain united. It is a shame, he said, what is happening. For too long, he lamented, the Serbs have been under the yoke of the Croats. He said that Marshal Tito, the Communist founder of post–World War II Yugoslavia, was a Croat (Tito’s father was from Croatia, but his mother was from Slovenia). Now, Milošević added, it is time to assert our national identity.

But the Serbian president wasn’t speaking to Grant. It didn’t seem to matter who sat across from him. “Milošević was talking to the air,” says Court. “Talking to an audience.”