The Trigger (10 page)

Those hours we spent with Mile were a masterclass not just in route-finding, but in Herzegovina highland husbandry. He showed us how to choose safely from mushrooms the size of dinner plates that sprouted on the open hillside. After picking a few he would always break each specimen, scrutinising carefully the flesh inside before deciding whether to pop a piece into his mouth.

‘You only eat the ones that have trails from weevils inside.’ He spat out the words along with flecks of mushroom mush. ‘If they are good enough for the weevils, they are good enough for us and do not have any toxin.’ I had picked up a large, plump example, all white on the outside and pure pink within. Too pure, in Mile’s opinion, so he batted it out of my hand and instead gave me one that was darker and flatter. It squeaked faintly when he twisted off a fragment and tasted of smoke.

Arnie and he chatted as we continued steadily on our way, my dark socks yellow with pollen dusted from alpine flowers growing ankle-deep among the grasses. I gave up keeping notes and fell back on simply enjoying the view out over the plain of Pasić, trying to guess the route Princip might have taken in 1907 when he left home for the first time. After a short while I realised I would have done better keeping an eye on the ground in front of me, as I tripped spectacularly over a rock. Mile immediately sprang into action, leading us straight to a sheltered cleft on the hillside where a stand of stocky trees grew as thick as a hedge. Taking off his rucksack and unsheathing a knife from his belt, he plunged into the thicket to the sound of snapping, grunting and sawing. After a few moments he emerged holding triumphantly two pieces of hazel about the length of snooker cues. The straight one he handed to me, the one with a crook at one end to Arnie.

Chuffed to receive my own Bosnian walking stick, I immediately took out a pocket knife and began whittling away bark that was bronze and brailled with the tiniest of blisters. To give the stick a handle I ringed it about six inches from the top, taking care that my whittling strokes did not cross this top line. Within a few minutes I had what I regarded as an elegant cream-coloured hazel walking stick with a handle of original bark. Perfect, so I thought.

Mile watched my efforts and then, without fanfare, set about a more authentic, functional barking of Arnie’s new walking stick. He ringed the branch, much as I had, to preserve the bark on the handle, but instead of scraping the rest off like a carrot being prepared for the pot, he carefully dug the tip of his knife into the bark on the line where it had been ringed and then turned the branch so as to etch a single, deep cut that spiralled down its entire length. He then used the knife point to lever up the bark’s top lip and proceeded to strip it in one continuous pig’s-tail coil. I was impressed, but even more impressed by what he did next.

Rolling the strip of bark tightly into a cornet, he used a small twig to peg the wide end in place and then bent down to select a particularly succulent blade of grass. This he threaded as a reed into the narrow end, which he then put to his lips and blew. The shrill trumpet sound that emerged from his hazel-bark horn would not have shamed a huntsman summoning a pack of foxhounds in the English shires.

‘We used them sometimes in an emergency to bring help,’ Mile said, swinging his pack up onto his back. ‘You would be amazed how far the sound can travel. I learned to make these as a child, and I bet you Gavro would have learned exactly the same.’

With all three of us now using walking sticks, our pace picked up as we went over a final rise and began a slow descent in the direction of a distant farmhouse at the foot of hills massing beneath Mount Šator’s distant peak. The last hint of early-morning cloud had now been burned off by the June sun and the heat was ganging up. Mile told us the farmhouse had the last spring at which we could replenish our water bottles.

‘At this time of year the streams on the mountain are dry until you reach a large lake just below the peak,’ he explained. ‘Water has always been a problem in this part of the valley in the summer, although as children we were always told about the magic spring of Strbci – a tiny village about an hour’s walk north of here. There are sinkholes there, and we were told that once in a lifetime you would see them flood with water, creating a deep stream of pure, cool water that flowed across the valley here. I don’t think I can remember it ever actually happening in my entire childhood, and people used to talk about it like a sort of miracle.

‘Well, do you know what happened during the war in the 1990s?’ Arnie and I were now listening carefully. ‘The Strbci sinkholes began to flood every year, year after year. And the way to tell it was going to happen was when snakes – thousands and thousands of them, by the truckful – would emerge sliding out of the holes as if they knew the water was coming.’

Mention of snakes had me gripping my new walking stick tighter as Mile began to speak for the first time about his involvement in the fighting.

For a significant chunk of the 1990s this entire region had been a no-go area for outsiders, a vipers’ nest of extreme Bosnian Serb nationalism. Between the spring of 1992 and the summer of 1995 this land had been held by Bosnian Serbs, although it would be wrong to say it was captured through regular combat. A more accurate explanation is that the local Bosnian Serb community, with the support of militant Serb nationalists within the Yugoslav government based in Belgrade, had unilaterally staked the territory as exclusively Serb. Non-Serbs were no longer welcome, and were moved on with menaces.

The process did not involve fighting in terms of one army against another; it was more a process of one-sided bullying, underwritten by a very real sense of terror. Legend, myth and prejudice combined to create a matrix of cherry-picked historical truths used by the Bosnian Serb extremists to camouflage what amounted to that most base of human failings: racism. Non-Serb businesses were blown up, houses burned, women raped, men corralled in camps, innocents murdered. Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat families, whose roots are dug just as deeply in this land as those of Bosnian Serbs, were declared aliens and kicked out, a strategy that became a defining hallmark of the war in Bosnia, one that would earn itself a neologism in the lexicon of war crimes: ethnic cleansing. Although the Bosnian Serbs were the first to use this tactic, by the time the war finished the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims would also come to employ it.

In the summer of 1993 I had approached this area as closely as was possible, coming no nearer than a field about thirty miles to the south, at the bottom of the plain that we were skirting today. Under the auspices of local Red Cross officials, an event was being organised that was grandly called a ‘prisoner exchange’. I was still new to Bosnia, able to move freely enough on the Bosnian Croat side of the frontline, and I remember arriving that hot July day with an expectation of what I was about to see. Perhaps these POWs would be combatants who had been lost to the other side in fighting, or walking wounded with blood-smudged bandages and threadbare uniforms. It turned out to be somewhat different.

For several hours I waited in a field under the burning sun as buses crammed with women, children and the elderly, pale-faced in terror and uncertainty, lined up on the main road running along the valley floor. The Bosnian Serbs might have started the process of ethnic cleansing, but the Bosnian Croats had picked it up and run with it. After a final round of negotiations the buses carrying Bosnian Serb victims of ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Croat forces disappeared from view northwards and came back an hour later carrying near identical-looking passengers, this time Bosnian Croat victims of Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing. They had been driven out of towns and villages in the area that I was now standing in – the only difference separating one group of terrified civilians from the other being their ethnicity. When I called my editors that day to offer a story, they said it was too routine to justify coverage.

‘Yes, I served with the Bosnian Serb army,’ Mile said. ‘Those years were difficult and, for a Serb man in his thirties like me, there was no choice. I had to join up. But all I really wanted was to be a farmer back home. Twice I quit the army, and twice they caught me and took me back. It was a period of madness, and look how it ended.’

In the late summer of 1995, after three years under Bosnian Serb control, this area was overrun by soldiers from Croatia, a nation reborn out of the collapse of Yugoslavia on the other side of the old Habsburg–Ottoman frontier, the Catholic side. The assault that came to be known as Operation Storm was the largest military coup of the entire war. This time it was Bosnian Serb civilians who were bullied, forced to flee en masse, their homes torched, the country lanes choked with terrified women and children. After three years in which the Bosnian Serbs had acted with such cruelty, there was little international compassion for them as victims.

Operation Storm began the endgame of the Bosnian War, finally breaking the resolve of local Serb nationalism and forcing to the negotiating table the sorcerer’s apprentice politician who had unleashed it, Slobodan Milošević. An avowed communist during Yugoslavia’s red period under the dictator Tito, Milošević had switched sides as global communism waned in the late 1980s, wrapping himself instead in the flag of historic Serbia and picking at the seams of ethnic rivalry within the Yugoslav nation. It was a strategy that delivered Milošević short-term gains, but in the long term he released forces too strong for one man to control.

With Serb forces battered by Operation Storm, Milošević was forced in November 1995 to sign the Dayton Peace Accords that ended the war. Street protests in Belgrade would eventually drive Milošević from office, and he died from a heart attack in 2006 facing trial for war crimes – in many eyes, the single politician most responsible for releasing the nationalist extremism that pulled Yugoslavia apart. The tragedy was that tens of thousands of lives were to be lost in his opportunistic and, ultimately, failed attempt to retain power.

‘It has been seventeen years now since the Croat army came here, and the Bosnian Croats still have power as the local authorities. To be honest, under these circumstances only a few Bosnian Serb families like ours have dared to come back,’ Mile said. ‘The ones who return are mostly the old, and for years now it has only felt safe enough for me to visit here from time to time, coming to see my old dad, Miljkan. I live over in an area that is still controlled by the Bosnian Serb government as recognised by the Dayton treaty, but all I want to do is come back here permanently and farm. A flock of sheep is all I need, and we could try to go back to life as it was.’

As we walked, my mind turned back to when I had reported on Operation Storm. It had been an intensely turbulent time, when frontlines set for so many years had shifted dramatically; when Bosnian Serb military dominance was blown away, the international community being willing to use NATO firepower for the first time on a large scale. The moment when frontlines change is the most dangerous time for a war reporter, and I recall hearing the news when a colleague from the BBC was killed by Croat soldiers a short distance to the north. Now I was walking across one of the mountain valleys stormed by Croat forces, with a reluctant Bosnian Serb soldier from those times who liked to be called Gavrilo Mile Princip, and who put greater value on sheep-farming than on nationalism.

The farmhouse with the freshwater spring was still some way in the distance when we passed a ruined building down in the valley. The second floor was missing and the plastered walls at ground level still bore graffiti left by Croatian soldiers back in the summer of 1995. Mile saw that I had spotted it and gave the slightest of shoulder shrugs, as if to say, ‘See what I mean.’ His next words were about a more immediate threat.

‘Don’t move,’ he said, raising his walking stick as if he were preparing a bayonet charge, his eyes fixed on something moving fast in the middle distance. Mile had spotted an animal running towards us and he looked worried. ‘Do not run, do not run.’ He was now shouting, his anxiety cross-pollinating instantly to both Arnie and me. We all stood our ground, raising our walking sticks like pikemen, as the largest, most aggressive-looking dog I have ever seen rushed at us. I was secretly glad Arnie and Mile were both slightly in front of me. In the distance I could see the farmer’s squat-looking wife running as fast as her short legs could carry her in our direction, screaming at us not to move.

I did what I was told – just.

‘Get away, get away,’ shouted Mile. I tried to sound fierce by making a growling sound and thrusting out my hazel stick, struggling with that most ancient of human inner conflicts: flight or fight. Just at the point when the dog was upon us, it stopped running and changed direction, circling us instead at walking pace, its mask menacing, eyes furious.

‘Mile, Mile. What do you think you are doing?’ panted the woman as she finally reached us. ‘You know how aggressive Alba is. She is the best guard dog, but you know you should tell us when you come and visit.’ Mile smiled unconvincingly and did not take his eyes off the animal, a magnificent female specimen of the tornjak breed, a local type of mountain sheepdog, which now shepherded our little group with throaty growls that I swear should have registered on the Richter scale. Alba followed us noisily all the way to the farmhouse before taking up a vigilant position under a nearby plum tree.

Arnie and I shook hands with Sonja Aćamović, who turned out to be related by marriage to the Princip clan, as she welcomed us to her home, dragging some plastic chairs onto the shaded front lawn. She then disappeared inside the house, coming out moments later with a tray of cups brimming with coffee and a bottle of cordial made from a local berry called drenjak. After serving us she sat herself down on a thick, heavy disc of tree trunk, carried nonchalantly in her meaty arms from a pile of firewood nearby, and caught up with Mile’s news. Her children watched silently from overhead, peering at us through the metal grille of a first-floor balcony. It was not just in Obljaj that visitors were a rarity.