A lesson from Bosnia: How prejudice can destroy a nation

BY CAMERON McWHIRTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Mustafa Hot was struggling quietly as we walked into the room. The 50-year-old man sat upright on a foam mat, lifting small metal weights above his head. The strain caused his eyes to water. His heavy breathing was the only sound.

His stiffened legs - lifeless as dry wood - lay perpendicular to his braced, upright back; his misshapen body seemed like the jointed parts of a puppet.

I asked Mr. Hot if he would mind telling me how he ended up as a long-term patient in the invalid clinic of Sarajevo's Kosovo Hospital. No problem, he said and smiled at me, photographer Glenn Hartong and our translator.

He told me that he had been a garbage man before the Bosnian war. When fighting erupted, city services broke down. He couldn't do his job, even though garbage remained heaped along the streets of besieged Sarajevo. As the fighting grew worse, he spent most of his days hiding in his apartment with his wife. They lived in a neighborhood near the airport, where fighting was particularly fierce. The couple only went out at night to be safe.

On Sept. 2, 1993, as he stood outside his apartment building, Mr. Hot was shot in the back by a sniper.

"It was very quiet and suddenly, the shot," he said, matter-of-factly. "It was about 2 a.m. With these infra-red scopes, it's not a problem for them to shoot. Night is like the day."

I asked him what he planned to do with his life now that all sides had signed the Dayton Peace agreement. That thousands of Americans and other NATO troops had arrived to enforce the peace accord and provide some hope that the fighting had ended.

XXXXXX TEXT MISSING HERE XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX me and blinked. He wasn't looking for sympathy or money or anything at all. He just answered the question honestly: The war broke me. I'm finished.

While talking to Mr. Hot, I thought about the bullet that I pulled from the wall in the apartment where Glenn and I were staying. The bullet had been fired long before we had arrived and, thankfully, had missed its target in the civilian apartment complex. The bullet was shiny and sharp - a little piece of metal just like that one that ripped through Mr. Hot's back.

I looked out the hospital window at the gray sky, took a breath, then turned to Mr. Hot with my standard reporter stone-face.

That's how it went, day after day. Everyone I met conveyed their sadness. Every scarred building was a grim testament to this human-made disaster. And gradually, the tragedy seeped into me, a process of emotional osmosis.

People in Cincinnati have asked me, "Were you ever scared?"

I was never not scared. To some extent, I still am.

The question that I found myself asking in Bosnia had little to do with Yugoslavian history or international politics. It had much more to do with people.

How could someone do this to another person?

It's a simple question, admittedly. People who haven't seen war's devastation might even consider it naive. But they're wrong. After Bosnia, I am convinced that it is the only one worth trying to answer.

You don't have to read scores of books on Balkan politics to understand what happened in Bosnia. You don't have to speak Serbo-Croatian. You just have to think about Mr. Hot and ask, why would someone shoot him?

The answer is prejudice. That blind human impulse caused all this misery.

That pale rider is a social ill that has been with us perhaps as long as we have been social, before written language recorded our first wars in China, Sumeria and Egypt. It's an unthinking process, something habitual in our behavior. Perhaps at one time, in humanity's pre-history, it served as a survival mechanism. Today, it's a cancer.

Look at the examples, just in this century: the Nazi concentrations camps, the Turkish slaughter of Armenians, inter-tribal violence in Rwanda, religious violence in India and Ireland. In the United States, racial prejudice rears its head in violence every day in every city.

When horrendous events like Bosnia occur, politicians shout "Never again." Under the Nazi regime, millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, Gays and others died in concentration camps. The Nazis, humanity's ultimate slaves to prejudice, killed in the name of "purifying" German land. Humans have slaughtered innocent people because of their color or language or religion on every habitable continent of the planet. Whites, blacks, Arabs, Chinese, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Native Americans - each group has been a victim of prejudice.

And now we have Bosnia. Fifty years after the world's politicians shouted "Never again," we have again. Prejudice, the hideous virus infecting the collective human mind, is back.

The truth of the matter is it never left. Prejudice never stopped. We don't have to look on a grand scale for prejudice's impact on human relations. We see it everyday here among our friends and relatives, among our co-workers. It breeds in Walnut Hills, Covington, Sharonville and Fort Wright.

Ignorant prejudice lurks in all our social interactions. Black equals nigger. White equals honky. Jew equals kike. More subtle examples of prejudice are more pervasive. Look around your neighborhood. Whom do you live with? Whom do you associate with? Why?

It's easy for us to think of Bosnia as an abstraction. That sad country now joins the growing list of "other" places, where bad things happen: Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia, Cambodia. . . But prejudice isn't just "there;" it's here, inside of all humans. It has nothing to do with the rational mind. It follows no logical path in its development or in its consequences. The only rules of this virus are: 1) it needs a host 2) it needs victims.

Victims were everywhere in Bosnia.

Take Nikolic Davor, a 17-year-old dentistry student in Sarajevo. He was a Bosnian Croat whose family had lived in the city for 500 years. On Oct. 8, 1994, Bosnian Serb gunners fired a machine gun at a tram crowded with civilians. Two people were killed and seven wounded. Davor was one of the seven. His right hand was pierced by a bullet and partially paralyzed. His hand bears an ugly purple-red scar.

"I didn't even know I was wounded until I looked down and saw the blood," Mr. Davor said through a translator. "Why would someone do that to me? I wasn't a soldier. I didn't even know them."

His face was flat, calm, just like Mr. Hot's. I asked him what he wanted to do now that NATO troops had arrived.

"How did there get to be so much hatred in these people? I don't know. But I don't trust this peace," he said. "I want to leave the city. My parents want to stay, because our family has been here for so long, but I need to leave. I must go to start a new life away from all of this."

In the Serb-held neighborhood of Grbavica, I met Sandra Djuric, 15. The rail-thin girl shivered in a green military jacket as she waited to cross through a military checkpoint from Grbavica to government-held Sarajevo. When the war erupted, Ms. Djuric and her family abandoned their downtown apartment, their belongings and their friends. They spent the war cowering in an abandoned apartment in Grbavica, hoping to escape persecution by Muslims.

Ms. Djuric had no idea what the future would bring. Her family would have fled to other Serb cities, but they had no money and nowhere to stay.

"People are just really scared," she told me. "They don't feel safe now. They don't believe the Muslim government will protect them. Most of the people who can are leaving for the mountains."

These words came from a girl about to visit high school friends, most of them Muslims. The other day, news services from Bosnia reported that Serb residents of Grbavica were being attacked by Serb young men if they didn't leave before the Bosnian government took over.

Apartments were set on fire in broad daylight, forcing families to flee the area. Prejudice, born of fear to preserve one's own, had turned in on itself. Serbs destroying Serb homes and beating Serbs to save them - from what? Being beaten by Muslims? It's a fitting culmination of all this idiotic hatred.

As part of our visit, we went to Tuzla, headquarters of U.S. military operations on northeast Bosnia.

Because of fog, we were stuck in Tuzla for an extra day. To avoid being stuck yet another day, Glenn and I took a civilian bus that had just started running from Tuzla to Sarajevo. Before the war, the buses left several times a day and took only two hours. These days, only one bus left a day, and it took eight hours. The reason: the bus had to take a circuitous route through central Bosnia, passing through territory held by all three factions in the war. The arduous ride, along roads where no bus should ever go, gave me a great view of the Bosnian countryside.

We passed dozens of gutted villages. Here, the destruction was not the random bomb splash marks of besieged Sarajevo. These villages were wiped out systematically, with each building burned to a shell and all the inhabitants gone.

The few other passengers - civilians from Tuzla - stared forlornly out the window as the bus jostled into mountain valleys, past clumps of blackened buildings. The serene countryside should have been beautiful to me. Instead, it was eerie because it was utterly abandoned. The virus of prejudice had run out of energy here; no more hosts. I kept thinking, this is the end result of prejudice.

People tend to treat the war, so broad and cataclysmic, like a natural disaster. Even in Bosnia, they call the war period belaj, which roughly translates as misfortune or troubles. But this war was not equivalent to a drought or a flood or a monsoon. These "troubles" were made by humans.

Before the war, millions of Bosnians lived together in mixed communities and relative harmony. Muslims, Croats and Serbs have told me that before the war, they lived together with much less discord than black and white people live together in the United States. I believe them.

And that belief scares me. The same ugliness that led to that war is here in the United States - in Cincinnati - converting hosts and looking for victims.

I have heard a woman in Norwood talking about how the "niggers" were ruining her city. I have seen young black teen-agers verbally abusing a white woman walking down the street in Over-the-Rhine, calling her a "honky bitch." Cincinnatians of all backgrounds make insulting statements about Asians, Jews, Hispanics, blacks and whites every day.

My uncle, living in a Chicago suburb, used to announce at Easter dinners, "If a nigger comes on my lawn, I'll shoot him."

Pass the stuffing.

I used to meet these eruptions of prejudice with a shrug. That's just the way things are, I said. It's bad, but it won't get out of control. After all, this is America.

Now I think of Mustafa Hot.

Mr. Hot was not a politically active man. He was of Muslim descent, but not particularly religious. He was a garbage man in socialist Yugoslavia, and when Bosnia declared independence, he had every intention of being a garbage man in the Republic of Bosnia.

But a Bosnian Serb sniper justified squeezing a trigger because he felt this little man was a threat to the Serbian cause. He caught him in his gun sights and left Mr. Hot disabled for life. Right now, Mr. Hot probably is sleeping in his hospital bed. In a few hours, he will awake and begin his day of painful physical therapy. No matter how hard he tries, he will never walk again.

He is forever a paraplegic, one victim in yet another nation felled by prejudice.

Published April 14, 1996