Wee-Cheng travels to the Serb Republic expecting to find some battle-hardened figures but finds instead a gentle people with their own story to tell.
#35: Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska):
A Gentle People at Odds with the World, Part I
9 July 2002
I left Serbia behind as the bus crossed the bridge across the River Sava. A billboard greeted the bus, “The Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina“, the country commonly abbreviated as BiH (“i” is “and” in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, whatever you call that language spoken by the former Yugoslav nations). Three meters behind, a much larger sign said, “Welcome to the Repblic of Srpska“. Srpska, commonly known as Republika Srpska, Serb Republic, or simply RS. This is one of the two “entities” making up the BiH, as a result of the Dayton Agreement which ended the war in BiH from 1992 to 1995. RS has 49% of the territory of BiH and is primarily Serb. The other entity is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (“FbiH”) which accounts for 51% of the territory and is basically a federation of Bosnian Muslims (now known as Bosniak) and Croats. Let’s take a step back and have a look at what all these are all about.
Bosnia, the crossroads of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, was settled by Slavic tribes after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Its history has always been subject to debate by its three constituent peoples, the Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, who account for 43%, 31% and 17% of its population respectively. To the Bosniaks, they have always been the main inhabitants of this ancient land. Caught in the conflicting demands of the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire, the Bosnian people set up their own Bosnian Church, which some say are intertwined with the Bogomils, a dualist aesthetic sect considered heretical by others and related to the Cathars in southern France.
Under the Bosnian king, Tvrtko Kotromanic, the Bosnian state extended into huge territories in what is today Croatia and Serbia, but his empire didn’t last for long. The existence of a rival sect infuriated the Pope, who raised a crusade against the Bosnians. Rivalries among the feudal lords tore the country apart. The Ottoman Turks came soon after and took over this land torn by strife. The locals welcomed the Turks as liberators and converted to Islam en masse. This included the elite, who were anxious to avoid paying excessive taxes from land ownership. For a long time, the Muslims of BiH have had a confused identity, some calling themselves Muslim Serbs and others Muslim Croats. Tito, leader of communist Yugoslavia, however, recognized them as a separate nation in the 1960s, and since the end of the Bosnian War they have renamed themselves Bosniaks, i.e., people of Bosnia.
Listen to a Serb and you will get this story: BiH has always been a Serbian land. Tvrtko Kotromanic was actually king of the Western Serbs. The Roman Catholic Church converted some of the Serbs who then called themselves Croats, and the Turks forcibly converted others who then called themselves Bosniaks. But all these were once Serbian lands and should always be. And it was Tito who messed things up by giving them recognition as a separate people. To a Croat, naturally, this was Croat land too, and Tvrtko Kotromanic – no prizes for correct guesses – was actually a Croatian duke who broke away from the Croatian state. So, which version do you believe in? All sides have scholars and tonnes of works to prove their theories.
The Yugoslav Federation began to fall apart when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June 1991. By late 1991, the Bosnian Croats had convinced the Bosniaks that independence was the way to go. This terrified the Serbs, who suffered massacres by Croatian and Muslim Fascists known as Utashas during WWII, particularly, in the notorious concentration camp Jasenovac. Firm on remaining in the same state as fellow Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs declared their own republic, RS, in April 1992. War broke out immediately, and the Serbs laid siege on Sarajevo. The whole country burned as atrocities and massive destruction occurred everywhere. Ethnic cleansing, i.e., massive expulsion and elimination of a specific ethnic group, became the famous by-product of this war.
The Serbs were the most well-armed and were initially successfully in capturing over 70% of BiH. Lots of atrocities were committed, most of them by the Serbs, but war crimes committed by the Bosnian and Croat armies had occurred too. Rivalries between the Bosnians and Croats led to hostilities between the two supposed allies. 250,000 died in this war, most of whom were civilians. By 1995, infuriated by atrocities committed by RS, NATO launched air strikes against them. Coupled with victories by the Croats on the field, all parties were eventually forced to sign the Dayton Agreement, dividing BiH into two entities, a strange state of affair that lasts till today.
The first town I passed through was Bijeljina, where in April 1992, the Serbian warlord and gangster, Arkan, launched the first of the ethnic cleansing raids, killed a few local Bosniaks and frightened the rest into flight.
Next was Brcko, in the so-called Posavina Corridor – a strip of RS controlled territory 3 km wide linking a wide swath of RS land around its largest city, Banja Luka, with Serbia itself. During the war, this was the lifeline of RS, through which supplies and reinforcements braved Bosniak and Croat bombardment to reach Banja Luka. The control of Brcko was so contentious that it has been made a special territory of the BiH not subject to either RS or FbiH. As the bus approached Banja Luka, the landscape became a chaotic mixture of lush green farmlands and rolling hills. Many houses look newly refurbished since the end of the war, but one also passed by many ruined villages and burnt buildings, their previous occupants perhaps victims of ethnic cleansing. I wonder if they were now sitting in refugee camps abroad, or resting in unsettled peace under the rubble of their own houses.