This week, our team heads to Sarajevo, Bosnia for a 12-day trip of connecting
with believers, preaching in churches, and teaching a class at the
Mostar Bible College, the only Christian higher-education option in the
country. We will also work alongside the Alliance team at Izvor, the cultural center in the heart of that great city.
Recently, author Philip Yancey toured Bosnia and Croatia as two of his
most popular books were translated into those languages. I am re-posting
his thoughts and observations for you to consider as our team prepares
to leave. May these insights prompt you to pray and intercede for the
people of Bosnia and Herzegovnia.
Be sure to check back during the next few weeks for updates on our trip and insights into what God is showing us!
On a book tour last month, as we were driving along the highway
from Croatia to Bosnia, traffic came to a sudden stop near the border.
Car doors opened, drivers stepped outside for a smoke, and everyone
speculated on what had caused the backup. An accident? Road work? No,
as it turned out: personnel were sweeping the adjacent fields for mines
left over from the war that ended 17 years ago. Welcome to the former
Yugoslavia. More than five million mines were planted during that war
and they continue to maim or kill unsuspecting farmers, hikers, and
children.
When we finally reached the border, the world abruptly changed. A
four-lane superhighway narrowed to a windy, potholed two-lane road.
Road signs now used both the Roman alphabet of Western Europe and the
Cyrillic alphabet of the East. Most obviously, every other house was
vacant, its interior gutted by fire bombs, a relic of the Serbs’ ethnic
cleansing campaign to force Croats and Bosnians from Serbian areas.
“Who owns these homes now?” I asked my Croatian host. “Probably the
people who were chased away and live somewhere else now. But would you
want to go back and reclaim a home in the same town where your neighbors
raped your daughter and slit your wife’s throat?”
In Sarajevo, our destination, East and West meet on the same street.
Standing in the bazaar, if you look one direction you’d swear you were
in Austria with its neat buildings, onion-dome churches, and sidewalk
cafes; look the other direction and you’d think you were in Istanbul
with its tea shops and covered Muslim women browsing in the spice
market. Indeed, not far from here bloody battles stopped Islam from
taking over Europe centuries ago, and no one has forgotten.The Balkans
dominated the news back in the 1990s. International leaders stood by
wringing their hands while the horrors of World War II seemed to be
playing out again on miniature scale. I could never keep the
adversaries straight back then, much less pronounce them, and the
villains seemed to change weekly. Who can make sense of the former
Yugoslavia?
Under communism Yugoslavia forced three major groups (as well as
other minor tribes) to live together: Croatian Catholics, Orthodox
Serbians, and Bosnian Muslims. Before the 199os war Sarajevo had a
large population of each; now the city is 90 percent Muslim, with
greatly reduced Orthodox and Catholic populations and only a sprinkling
of Protestants (perhaps 800 out of 400,000).
For
just shy of four years Serbian soldiers who inherited most of the
Yugoslavian army took up positions in the hills that surround Sarajevo
and strangled the city in a brutal siege, the longest in modern times.
An average of 329 grenades rained down on the city every day, and on
busy days ten times that number. Snipers cruelly picked off easy
targets: a seven-year-old Muslim girl, a 70-year old grandmother, a
medical worker administering aid. At least 11,000 civilians died during
the siege, including 1600 children. Bodies floated down the river that
now picturesquely winds through town. Cemeteries filled up so that the
dead had to be buried in a soccer field just down from the site of the
1984 Olympics.
This was modern Europe, where such things were not supposed to happen
again, especially not here, the exact site of the assassination of an
archduke that triggered World War I. But it did happen, for 1443
horrific days of bombardment on a city that had no electricity, no heat,
gas, or telephone service. (Imagine the inconveniences of those
affected by Superstorm Sandy in the East, for
four years, plus
relentless bombardment.) The main source of water was a brewery that
generously opened its supplies to those brave enough to dare the snipers
who fired down on them at will.
The residents of Sarajevo lived on a diet of beans, macaroni, and
rice, humanitarian aid supplied largely by air from the UN and NATO
forces who controlled the airport. It took four months to dig a
half-mile tunnel under open fields to the airport, and at night as many
as 1000 Sarajevans crowded the tunnel to fetch the heavy loads of
rations that kept them alive. The entrance to the tunnel provided a new
target to snipers, who targeted any who braved the run during daylight
hours.
Few buildings have been fully repaired even today, 17 years after a
cease-fire. Most bear the scars of bullet holes and shrapnel. Plaques
mark the spots where grenades fell among civilians: 27 died on this
corner, 40 in that pedestrian mall, 70 in a nearby food market. I
stayed in a Franciscan monastery, now restored, that had received 42
direct hits from grenades.
n
the world exists only one human; everything else is statistics,” said
Jorge Luis Borges. Speaking with a few who had endured the siege, I
heard some of their poignant stories:
• “For nine days in a row we ate plain
pasta. We had no spices, no meat, no flavoring. My mother was so
desperate for flavor that she went out and gathered grass to sprinkle in
just to add a bit of variety and color. When we got something
different, like rice or powdered milk, we would throw a party.”
•
“Without heat, we would burn anything at hand in the winter to stay
warm. I had a newborn baby, born in the midst of that hell. We chopped
up heirloom furniture with an ax. You go numb after a while. One
Christmas a friend brought me a priceless gift: the dirt-covered root
system of a tree he had found somewhere. I cried. I have never
received a Christmas gift that meant so much, and I still have it. I
could not burn it. I tell you with shame, that gesture moved me more
than hearing that thirty more people died.”
• “The worst thing is, you get used to
evil. If we knew in advance how long it would last, we would probably
have killed ourselves. Over time, you stop caring. You just try to
keep living.”
• “I have two brothers. One joined the
Muslim army to fight against the siege. One escaped and served with the
Croatians. My sister was married to a Serb, who was conscripted to
serve with the forces besieging us. So many marriages were mixed like
that—Serb/Croatian, Croatian/Bosnian, Bosnian/Serb—and many of them
broke apart.”
• “Why such brutality? These were our
friends, our neighbors, now shooting at us, blowing up our homes.
Hannah Arendt writes about the banality of evil. The biggest criminals
were nice fathers and husbands, people I knew. They were like the
Nazis who would gas Jews in the day and then go home and listen to
concerts with their families.”
Croatia was the first region to
resist the Serbs, who sought a Greater Serbia comprising most of the
former Yugoslavia. The Croats had no army to speak of, just a few tanks
left over from World War II and a handful of planes used for
crop-dusting. Improvising, they learned to drop propane tanks and water
heaters out of the crop dusters onto Serbian forces. To get around an
international arms embargo, they released some Mafia-type gangsters
from prison, gave them trucks full of money, and commissioned them to
find a black market in weapons. (As a reward, some of these criminals
now hold high government posts.)
Dubrovnic, Srebenica, Vukovar—these
names stand out as sites of the worst brutality, crimes that are even
now being tried before the International Criminal Court. More than
100,000 people died in the wars. In Srebenica Serbs rounded up every
male over the age of fifteen, 8000 in all, tied their hands behind their
backs, and shot them. Workers are still digging up the mass graves in
an attempt to identify the bodies.
To read the eyewitness reports from the
international court in the Hague is to read a litany of horrors: of
pregnant women cut open, their unborn babies smashed with rifle butts;
of gang rapes of girls as young as nine; of toddlers decapitated, their
heads placed in their mothers’ laps. There is only one explanation for
what happened, one Bosnian told me: “God overslept.”
I came across this poster promoting my talk on suffering posted in a Zagreb bar window!
I came to this part of the world because two of my books,
Where Is God When It Hurts and
What’s So Amazing About Grace, had
just been published in the Croatian and Bosnian language. I had
prepared talks on grace, informed in large part by the splendid work of
the Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, a faculty member first at Fuller
Seminary and now Yale Divinity School. With one exception, however, I
was asked to speak on suffering, not on grace. When I asked, “Are you
ready for reconciliation,” not one person answered Yes. The wounds are
at once too fresh and too old, for these disputes go back more than
seven centuries. “Every compromise is defeat,” said one Serbian leader.
And another: “Any reconciliation is betrayal.”
To be sure, all sides shared guilt, not just the Serbs. Two Croatian
generals were sentenced for their crimes, and mujaheddin fighting with
Bosnians and Albanians fighting in Kosovo also committed atrocities.
Though the war ended, in part because of NATO bombing and the Dayton
Peace Accords, the disputes have not ended. The one nation of Yugoslavia
split into seven: Serbia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro,
Bosnia & Herzegovina, and Slovenia. Serbians ended up with the
largest share of territory, but ethnic minorities remain in each
country, including a “Serbian Republic” within the borders of Bosnia.
Conflict in the Balkans could erupt up again.
Today Syria dominates the news, with a reprise of the kinds of
atrocities I heard about firsthand. It happened in Rwanda, of course,
and continues today in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Nigeria.
I could not help thinking of Gandhi’s remark that if you take the
principle “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” to its logical
conclusion, eventually the whole world will go blind and toothless. I
have never visited a place in such need of grace and forgiveness, and
yet so resistant to it.
One
afternoon in Sarajevo we were escorted by a cheerful Franciscan monk
named Ivo Markovic. He took us first to the Jewish cemetery on a hill
high above the city, one of the main lookout posts for Serbian snipers.
Every grave had been marred in some way, pockmarked by bullets,
gravestones overturned. I had read of Markovic in Miroslav Volf’s book
Free of Charge.
In his village, Muslim Bosnians were the villains, massacring 21 men
including nine members of his family—all senior citizens, his
71-year-old father the youngest of them.
The Franciscans lost most of their church members as Catholics moved
out of Sarajevo. Yet the monastery stayed behind, leading the frail
peace movement and distributing food and practical help. After the war
stopped, Father Markovic visited his home village. I will let Volf tell
the story:
Occupying the house in which his brother used to live was
a fierce Muslim woman. He (Markovic) was warned not to go there because
she brandished a rifle to protect her new home. He went anyway. As he
approached the house she was waiting for him, cigarette in her mouth and
rifle cocked. She barked: “Go away or I’ll shoot you.” “No, you won’t
shoot me,” said Father Markovic in a gentle but firm voice, “you’ll make
a cup of coffee for me.” She stared at him for a while, then slowly put
the rifle down and went to the kitchen. Taking the last bit of coffee
she had, she mixed in some already used grounds to make enough coffee
for two cups. And they, deadly enemies, began to talk as they partook in
the ancient ritual of hospitality: drinking coffee together. She told
him of her loneliness, of the home she had lost, of the son who never
returned from the battlefield. When Father Markovic returned a month
later she told him: “I rejoice at seeing you as much as if my son had
returned home.”
Did they talk about forgiveness? I don’t know. And in a sense, it
doesn’t matter. He, the victim, came to her asking for her hospitality
in his brother’s home, which she unrightfully possessed. And she
responded. Though she greeted him with a rifle, she gave him a gift and
came to rejoice at his presence. The humble, tenuous beginnings of a
journey toward embrace were enacted through a ritual of coffee drinking.
If the journey continues, it will lead through the difficult terrain of
forgiveness.
ur
last day in Croatia we toured an odd tourist site that has gained
acclaim for its originality. It mainly displays items donated by lovers
who have broken up. Some are nostalgic: a wedding dress, the chiffon top
worn the night he told her it’s over, the sticky roller he used to
remove her cat’s hair. Others are bitter: an ax used to chop up her
music collection, a framed photo shattered into pieces, the side mirror
of his car that she broke off when she found it parked in front of a
rival’s apartment. A few items refer to other kinds of broken
relationships, such as the a
Newsweek cover featuring Barack Obama with the note, “I really wanted it to work out.”
The Museum of Broken Relationships, it’s called, and I can’t think of
a more appropriate symbol for that part of the world. A visit to the
Balkans gives a stark picture of what can happen among human beings
apart from grace. As I wrote in
What’s So Amazing About Grace?
If you ask a bomb-throwing teenager in Northern Ireland
or a machete-wielding soldier in Rwanda or a sniper in the former
Yugoslavia why they are killing, they may not even know. Ireland is
still seeking revenge for atrocities Oliver Cromwell committed in the
seventeenth century; Rwanda and Burundi are carrying on tribal wars that
extend long past anyone’s memory; Yugoslavia is avenging memories from
World War II and trying to prevent a replay of what happened six
centuries ago. Ungrace plays like the background static of life for
families, nations, and institutions. It is, sadly, our natural human
state.
On Saturday, our team got to do something in Sarajevo that I have been hoping to do on every trip. We drove over to the south side of the airport and visited a small, family-run museum. This family home is the end of the famous "Tunnel of Life". During the 3 year long siege of Sarajevo, the tunnel became the only connection Sarajevans had to the outside world. The tunnel took over 4 months to build, and stretches over half a mile. Through this tunnel flowed, troops, arms, food, water, and medicine. Many historians say that without the tunnel, dug by hand tools, Sarajevo would never have endured the siege. The tunnel to me represents the fierce resolve of the Bosnian people. They can and will do whatever they must do in order to survive. Pray that Bosnians will come to know Christ as the true tunnel (way) of life!
The rest of the day Saturday was spent on preparations for the open house, and then celebrating Thanksgiving with Bosnians at the open house. Around 150 people flowed through the doors of Izvor. People of all ages came- children and their families came for a kids program, high school students and their parents came to see a classes artwork on display, and many adult English students and members of the Evangelical church came as well. This was a great time of making new connections and renewing old friendships.
In this picture, you can see Vesna, the Izvor assistant, as well as a young girl named Zerina. Perhaps a few of you will remember her. Zerina was one of the very first contacts at Izvor as she and her brother came to a Kids English Camp our church presented in 2010. She has stayed connected ever since! It was great to see her again. She still remembered our English camp caricature "Surfer Sam."
