The Trigger (18 page)

‘We gave out the food. There were lines and lines of people and they took it all and that’s where it came into my head. The media like to say a Muslim like me only fights because we are some sort of crazed psychotic, but it was not like that. I went to Bosnia to bring humanitarian help and, after the aid ran out, what other humanitarian help could I give apart from protecting them? These people could not protect themselves, so that is how I could help. I would fight.

‘My mate with the van went crazy. “It’s not like it is in the films,” he said. “Are you for real? How are you going to fight? You don’t know anyone here and you don’t have any weapons.” He went on and on trying to talk me out of it, but I had made up my mind. I wrote a letter to my wife, which he took with him, and then he was off in his van and I was sat there, six o’clock in the morning, the sun still rising, next to the road in a town called Travnik.’

I knew Travnik well. It was a few miles up the road from the farmhouse in Vitez next to the British peacekeeping base, where I had been stationed as a reporter.

‘I prayed. What else could I do? And then a Nissan Patrol jeep turned up and a man stepped out, not a Bosnian, but a big foreign guy with a long beard wearing combats. He greeted me in Arabic, which is about all the Arabic I know, and we got talking in English. When I said I wanted to fight, he told me to get in the jeep, and that is how I got involved.’

He described several months of basic training alongside other foreign fighters: Arabs mostly, with only a sprinkling of European Muslims like himself. As a base they took over an old school a short distance outside Travnik and kept themselves separate from the regular Bosnian Muslim forces, an army that Shahid did not find impressive. ‘These guys were fighting for their homeland, but mostly they just sat around drinking coffee and smoking. We were different, much more willing to take the offensive. We all had to have fighting names, so they called me Abu Hamza Britaniya, as I was one of the few guys from Britain,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I used to bump into British troops from the UN. The looks on their faces were classic when I spoke to them in a Birmingham accent. “All right mate, how ya doing?”

‘Mostly it was training and training, but on a few occasions there was real fighting. I don’t want to say I was a hero or anything, but at times I took part in attacks which were really heavy. Guys on either side of me getting hit, that sort of thing.’

By the time I met Shahid he was in his late forties, his hair greying, his waistline expanding. Now living back in Britain, he was anxious to emphasise the difference between the type of fighter he had hoped to be in Bosnia and the extremist jihadists responsible for suicide terror attacks.

‘I saw myself as a traditional mujahideen. I was a fighter, sure, but I was fighting to help the oppressed, to protect them against an aggressor. It was a noble act, and one that I would do again. But these guys who take part in suicide attacks, they are not true mujahideen. They are killing innocent people, and for me it makes so sense at all, from any point of view. It makes no sense from a religious point of view, as it is not part of my religion. And it makes no sense from a military point of view, a strategic perspective. How are you going to win the hearts and minds of people if you kill people who are not involved?’

Bosnia’s role in the evolution of modern jihad has largely been overlooked, but in Shahid I had found an example of what can happen when the anger of young people is ignored. Western politicians who stood by when the worst atrocities of the Bosnian War took place – ethnic cleansing, death-camps, genocide – inadvertently provided Islamic militants with a rallying cry used to justify later acts of terrorism.

With Arnie and me continuing along the road for Sarajevo, the terrain became steadily more familiar as we reached part of the Lašva valley where I spent many months in the 1990s. The view was of lush green countryside set against a blue summer sky, but in my memory the same scenery ran black and white: burnt buildings, a dead donkey rotting on the road, houses with planks leaning against the front as sniper shields, piles of dark earth where bodies had been hurriedly buried. The road took us through rolling farmland I recognised from the 1990s, hills nosing gently down to the wandering Lašva River, the fields peppered with the red-roofed houses of peasant farmers. Most were subsistence micro-systems largely unchanged from Princip’s day: ricks of hay in the garden, stacks of wood to be burned against the winter cold and pens of livestock – a pig here, some sheep there.

The bus trundled past Ahmići, a tiny village, but a place name that became well known among prosecutors at the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. It was here one spring morning in 1993 that Bosnian Croat thugs slaughtered Bosnian Muslim civilians, their henchmen going from door to door under cover of darkness to mark the homes of Bosnian Croat villagers with a Catholic cross. At first light those who emerged from unmarked doors, no matter their age or gender, were shot down like vermin. The village was so close to Arnie’s house that his family stood on their balcony and watched in disbelief the smoke rising from the ruins of the shared community they had once believed in. A few miles later my bus passed a void left where a building had once stood. It felt appropriate that nobody had reoccupied the space. In late 1993 an A-framed villa stood here, one that I and my journalist colleagues had driven past unknowingly many times. What we were then not aware of was that it was being used by Bosnian Croat brutes as a rape-camp where Bosnian Muslim women were kept as sex slaves.

I was anxious to see what had happened to the farming family I had stayed with nearby, and from whom I bought the kilim that has followed my wanderings ever since. The feudalism that the Princip family knew at the start of the twentieth century might have ended, but the rural poverty my hosts endured at the end of the century would have been familiar to Princip. Between 1993 and 1995 my work as a reporter meant that I lived in this farmhouse more than in my flat in London, learning much about the relentless and repetitive rhythm of rural life in Bosnia.

I had found lodgings here because the house stood a few hundred yards from a school that was chosen as the main upcountry base for British troops deployed to Bosnia under the UN peacekeeping force. The school was on the outskirts of the town of Vitez, a name that translates as ‘knight’, a mixed community with large numbers of Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim inhabitants. Just as the British troops arrived over the winter of 1992–3 fighting erupted between these two former allies, quite literally right outside the base. The presence of such a large British contingent drew journalists by the dozen to this tiny, turbulent community. War meant there was no mains power or water, no fuel in local petrol stations, no shops with any stock, so we rented rooms in local houses and survived on our wits and our Deutschmarks – back then the black marketeers’ currency of choice.

Before the bus from Banja Luka delivered Arnie and me to Vitez, I pictured in my mind the sweep of the main road past the school, the house where the army press officers would brief us, the nearby bridge and the turning to the farmhouse where I lived. I thought I would recognise it all again instantly, but when we finally got there I struggled. Post-war reconstruction had been prodigious. ‘It’s all Croatian money round here,’ Arnie explained. ‘Ever since Dayton, this area is Bosnian Croat – hardcore Bosnian Croat – and since the war ended businesses from Croatia have flooded in.’

On the outskirts of Vitez I found what may be the largest supermarket I have ever seen. This area had not just been empty fields during the war, but had been an active frontline, no-man’s-land surrounded by torched houses and overlooked by a particularly persistent sniper. Today, the leviathan supermarket has parking for thousands of cars, and a restaurant and coffee shop where Bosnians who used to try to kill each other in the 1990s now talk into their mobile phones and blow the foam off cappuccinos. In the car park registration plates revealed cars from all over Europe: Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and beyond. This did not mean Vitez had suddenly become a tourist destination. It simply reflected the reach of the Bosnian diaspora, dispersed by war just as Arnie had been, coming back from time to time to reconnect with their roots.

The layout along the main road might be new, but I found the changes ran only one building deep. All was familiar once I led Arnie on foot down the lane leading to the farmhouse. Here the buildings had not been renovated; it was the same collection of modest two-storey homes, many half-built like those back in Obljaj. There was the slight kink and dip in the lane that I walked many times when heading to the British base for briefings. A bullet once cracked straight over my head here, sending me jumping over a wall for cover. And then came the small orchard of plum trees. My old landlord had been a fan of plum brandy, a great fan. In the autumn of 1993 I had been staying at the farmhouse when the local distiller came round, a tradition keenly kept across this part of the Balkans. A roving artisan would arrive in a small rural community during plum harvest with a mobile still on a trailer. He would then light a large fire and distil fermenting plums to produce a year’s supply of brandy. Before heading off to the next village he would receive payment: some of it in cash, some in bottles of hooch.

My host had been so keen on plum brandy that I had no expectation he would still be alive. Back in the early 1990s the farmer was a bewhiskered and rather befuddled old man, while his wife was already stooped and elderly. But when I turned the corner from the lane and shouted a greeting, there they both were, doing what I had left them doing all those years ago, swatting away horseflies and staring out over their barnyard. A stack of firewood stood in the same place where they had once set up a bucket shower for me so that I would wash myself amid an aroma of pine resin.

The couple invited me in, but with the same blend of suspicion and friendliness I had encountered from the Princip family back in Obljaj. The farmer, Drago Taraba, was now eighty-six and had no idea who I was. All he knew was that the arrival of a foreign visitor was reason enough to pour a round of brandy. Out came the shot glasses and down it went, my throat scrunching with the same fruity acid burn that I had got to rather like when I shivered through Christmas here in 1993. Drago then poured another, and out came the drinker’s one-liners that I remembered hearing from him before. ‘You came on two legs, so now you must have two drinks,’ justified the second round. ‘Those who drink alcohol will die, those who do not will die sooner’ led to a third round. And so on.

The Taraba family is unmistakably Bosnian Croat, a crucifix on the wall marking clearly their Catholic faith, although I don’t remember them being particularly observant. Drago’s eyes were swimming, but when I asked him about the war they seemed to sharpen momentarily. ‘They killed three members of my family right here,’ he said, pointing to the wall of the barn outside. ‘They shot them there, two of my brothers and my father. I was only sixteen at the time.’ Drago was talking about the Second World War, not the war I had witnessed here. There is more than one way to park the trauma of war. Leaving for a new life overseas is one way, but plum brandy is another.

The recollection of his wife, Marija, eighty-four years of age, was altogether different. She was quieter and her eyesight was not perfect, but when I moved in close to show her photographs I had brought from the 1990s, she recognised me and her eyes filled with tears. ‘You were the one who brought all that food, all that sugar and that oil,’ she said. ‘Your name is Tim, isn’t it? There was even chocolate for the children that Christmas because of you. Thank the Lord.’ The Bosnian war zone was then so low on supplies that I made a habit of filling my Land Rover with shopping from supermarkets in neighbouring Croatia before the long drive in. The booty would then be shared around friends trapped within the war zone. On the occasion in 1994 when I crashed on ice, I remember groggily coming round after the vehicle finally stopped rolling and being momentarily bewildered by the sight of torn sacks of sanitary towels being blown by the wind through the debris of my vehicle spread across a snowy field. For women trapped in central Bosnia such items were priceless.

‘Tell me about your family?’ Marija asked. ‘Did you marry Tamara? Such a nice girl that Tamara.’ She was referring to another wonderful translator I had worked with during the war, a language student from Croatia called Tamara Levak. Momentarily disappointed to learn we had only ever been friends, Marija then clucked over the photographs of my children that I keep in my wallet. ‘Just like you, just like Marinko,’ she said, pointing at the grinning face of my blond six-year-old son, Kit. Marinko was Marija’s youngest child, a fair-haired boy who in the 1990s had just been old enough to be pressed into service as a soldier by the Bosnian Croat forces. Back then Marija would weep whenever his name came up, mumbling tearfully that I reminded her of Marinko, who was off serving in the trenches.

‘He survived the war,’ she beamed, when I asked after him. ‘He works as a policeman now in Sarajevo. Special police. He guards the American Embassy.’

Before leaving I asked about her weaving, and reminded her of the beautiful kilim she sold me all those years ago. ‘That was a fine piece,’ she said. ‘All that wool was from our sheep. I combed it and spun it and dyed it. And then I did all the weaving. It must have taken me years.’ Bosnia’s knotted ethnic history meant there was nothing odd in a Catholic farmer’s wife meticulously creating a rug using designs and techniques from the Orient. ‘But the young ones today, they do not want to learn the old skills,’ she continued. ‘In the end I became too old, my fingers could not do the work. So I gave the loom to my sister-in-law. That’s her in the photo over there.’ As she pointed, her sleeve moved and I caught a glimpse of a blue blemish on the skin at the back of her hand. It was a tiny tattoo, something I remembered her showing to me one winter’s night in 1993, an inky echo of this land’s turbulent heritage. To deter Ottoman lords from stealing their young women, a tradition developed here among Bosnian Croats of tattooing the girls, deliberately giving them blemishes, in the hope this meant they would not be whisked away under droit de seigneur.