‘I could really do with a fresh, cold drink,’ he said at one point. ‘Anything but this shit!’
And then, from around the corner, without any forewarning, came a silver jeep. The forest had muffled the sound of its approach, and the driver was as surprised to see us as we him. The vehicle slewed to a halt in a modest cascade of gravel and he gave us a cheery greeting, nonchalantly handing over two large bottles of water, so newly taken from a fridge that they still had condensation on the outside.
‘You see, out in the remote areas of Bosnia there is magic at work,’ said Arnie. ‘The first guy we see on the trail in two days, and what does he have for us? Ice-cold water. Magic, I tell you.’ He was smiling now, his cheerfulness restored, and so carefree in his drinking that spilled water gushed down his chin. But then he looked at me out of the corner of his eye, with a flash of seriousness about the power of the supernatural in Bosnia.
As evening approached we finally reached the edge of the forest, with the Glamoč valley opening up beneath us as wide and green as the plain around Obljaj back over on the other side of the Šator massif. I was grateful for the gentle breeze that now reached us and we paused to breathe deep, enjoying what appeared on the surface to be another paradisical agricultural tableau. In peaceful times Glamoč, now visible just a few miles to the south, was known as ‘potato town’ for the large-scale cultivation and processing of that vegetable. But from our viewpoint, looking out over the plain, something jarred. Many of the houses dotting the landscape were in ruins – roofless, their walls blackened from fire, their gardens overgrown through abandonment.
The track descended sharply and, as we came around a hairpin bend, we found ourselves at a modest roadblock. It was manned by an elderly figure sitting outside one of those shipping containers that are used to move goods all round the world. On this Bosnian hillside it served as a hut. His name was Zaim and he too was enjoying the late-afternoon cool, his seat facing down the slope towards the approach road climbing up from the valley floor. The sound of our sticks striking the ground caught his attention and he looked round over his shoulder, surprised.
‘I don’t often get people walking from out of the forest like you,’ he said cheerfully. He raised his eyebrows when he heard we had walked all the way from Mount Šator and then offered to give us a ride into town at the end of his shift. There were still about four miles to go and, while Arnie was willing to accept his offer, I preferred to keep going.
‘Why do you have the checkpoint anyway?’ I asked.
‘It’s to do with the logging. You need a licence to cut timber up in the mountains, but some people try to do it without paying for the licence. I am employed by the local council to check that the loggers have the proper paperwork.’
I smiled. During the war checkpoints were a monumental pain, manned by militia who took routine pleasure in blocking foreign reporters – an irksome feature of life, as you could easily fritter away whole days negotiating your way through. It felt like progress to come across a checkpoint set up for sound environmental reasons. As I prepared to set off I caught sight of a Union Jack stencilled on the side of the container, an unexpected sight in rural Bosnia.
‘The container belonged to British forces when they were based down in the valley after the war ended in 1995,’ Zaim said. ‘They left it when they eventually pulled out a few years back, and it was donated to Glamoč town council. Nice guys, mostly, the British soldiers. I had a job for years cooking for them in the officers’ mess. Nobody eats finer than the British soldier!’
His words stayed with me as I set off for those last few miles into Glamoč, a town big enough to promise a restaurant where we could enjoy a good meal. After a day of ferocious heat, louring clouds promised a summer storm and accelerated the onset of dusk. I left Arnie to wait for his lift and had only my thoughts for company as the sky darkened and the gravel track morphed first into a tarmac lane, then into a main road with painted lines and a hard shoulder. It was Saturday evening, but traffic was scarce. The storm was yet to hit, the air growing steadily more charged. In a hillside pasture three men lay next to scythes on turf freshly shorn, smoking cigarettes and talking next to ricks newly constructed. I raised my hand in greeting, but they looked through me without response. Half a mile later four large tornjak dogs erupted from slumber, charging towards me, a barking blur of fangs and saliva. By reflex I tensed, but thankfully the farm compound had a fence.
Another mile later and I began to hear the intermittent thwack of wood being hewn. A pile of tree-trunk sections had been dumped in the front garden of a modest-looking home and four people were busy splitting them into pieces of firewood, which were then being carefully stacked under cover in readiness for the winter. Again I waved, again no answer. The person wielding the axe was a woman, in her sixties perhaps, her scrawny, tanned arms showing puffs of white skin as her dress rode up near the shoulder with each firm downward cleave. It brought to my mind a traumatic moment in 1993, when the driver of an aid convoy in central Bosnia had been attacked by local Croat farmers armed with agricultural tools, incensed at what they perceived to be help going to their enemies. The man was eventually finished off by a farmer’s wife wielding a pitchfork.
The reaction to me, a stranger arriving in town, was at the hostile end of indifference. I felt sure Princip and his father would have met the same response as they passed through towns like this on their trek. Outsiders were to be treated with suspicion, potential threats to the status quo – a characteristic captured memorably by the writer Ivo Andrić. In his novel The Days of the Consuls Andrić’s fictional description of Westerners passing through the central Bosnian town of Travnik has, for me, more than a whiff of authenticity to it:
Then as soon as they reached the first Turkish houses they began to hear curious sounds: people calling to one another, slamming their courtyard gates and the shutters of their windows. At the very first doorway, a small girl opened one of the double gates a crack and, muttering some incomprehensible words, began spitting rapidly into the street, as though she were laying a curse on them . . . No one ceased working or smoking or raised his eyes to honour the unusual figure and his splendid retinue with so much as a glance. Here and there a shopkeeper turned his head away, as though searching for goods on the shelves.
On the edge of Glamoč I walked into a garage to buy a cold drink and the man at the till asked me where I had walked from that day. When I told him, he broke into the florid vernacular of the British soldier. ‘No fucking way!’ he said in perfect squaddie English as he handed me my change. The British army’s impact on local Glamoč society clearly went beyond the donation of a few old shipping containers.
The sound of a car driving along the hard shoulder had me glancing anxiously behind me. Did local unfriendliness extend to running over strangers? But it was only Zaim slowing down, with Arnie grinning from the passenger seat and saying he would go into the town centre and find us a place to eat. By now I was done in, past caring for a meal that was more appealing in anticipation than in reality. After wolfing down veal accompanied by a sample portion of Glamoč’s famous potatoes – starchy, wholesome and tasty – all I wanted was a bed.
My expectations were not particularly high, remembering the Baedeker guide’s description of the inadequacies of Bosnian accommodation in the early twentieth century. ‘Travellers who do not expect too much will, on the whole, find the inns very tolerable,’ it said. I was too tired to be fussy, grateful to hear from the waiter that, although normally closed, the old guesthouse in the town centre could be opened up just for us.
I hoisted my bag onto my back one final time and set off, Arnie now hobbling at my side, just as the first drum roll of raindrops announced the storm’s arrival. The lights at the guesthouse were off, but a man emerged from the dark, sharp-eyed and shrewish, to open up just in time, fumbling his keys under a strobe of lightning flashes. As he opened the door we jostled in out of the deluge, gratefully taking keys for rooms up on the first f
loor. At the top of the stairs was a picture that made me feel nicely at home, a kitsch oil painting of a local landmark: Mount Šator.
CHAPTER 5
Fishing in a Minefield
Piscatorial Imams, Muzafer Latić, left, and Kemal Tokmić
Memo from Winston Churchill, authorising Fitzroy Maclean’s Mission to Tito
The walk from Glamoč to Bugojno, where Gavrilo Princip caught the train to Sarajevo, took five more days through a landscape that was sometimes wild, often beautiful and always charged. Crossing a high pass in the mountains one morning, we glimpsed the tufted, pale-eyed mask of a wolf watching us intently from the edge of a clearing. Long enough for us both to see it, not long enough for me to take a photograph before it ghosted away to the cover of wooded darkness. On another day we hiked through country the like of which I have never experienced, a boundless, exposed dragon’s back of a plateau without a single tree, its pelt of long grass combed backwards and forwards by the shifting wind. ‘Middle Earth,’ declared Arnie, surveying a scene that could easily pass for Tolkien’s fantasy world. I looked at my mobile phone and registered a modern-day indicator of remoteness: no signal.
Formidable mountain ranges kept coming, occasional rainstorms washed through and we both had periods of footsore exhaustion. But the magic of the journey for me came from the rich overlay of history we touched on, the metronome click on the ground of our hazel sticks marking progress not just along Princip’s trail but through terrain where other key episodes had played out.
I relished the sense of sharing the same physical setting that framed Princip’s journey in 1907: skylines, forests, pastures, medieval ruins that he would have been familiar with. Baedeker’s 1905 travel guide recorded a daily stagecoach, or ‘diligence’, all the way to Bugojno from the valley where Princip was born, a one-way ticket costing ten crowns in the currency of the Habsburg Empire. The price appears to have been too much for him and his father, as they trudged all the way, as we did, on foot. Princip would have recognised the high-sided valleys concertinaing the land that we traversed, the summer heat and the rural simplicity that lay all around us. We skirted north of a town called Livno, where a poster advertised a highlight of the 2012 summer season: a scything competition for local farmers.
Under Austro-Hungarian rule, Livno was the administrative centre for the area where Princip was born, and it was here that a police report was compiled by local officials after the assassination in 1914. The form comprises a list of boxes where standard details are recorded: name, occupation, parents’ particulars. Under the ‘reputation’ category, a colonial officer had written simply: ‘a weak boy’. Another of the boxes indicated the extent to which the colonisers from Vienna had failed to improve conditions for Bosnia’s peasantry at the start of the twentieth century. The typed rubric demanded to know ‘to whom does this serf belong?’. This time the official recorded that Princip was the feudal subject of two local lords, one named Jović, the other Sierćić.
It was during Princip’s overland trip that his rage against the foreign ruler took root. He saw how the poverty he had known in Obljaj was replicated right across the country, regardless of the ethnicity of the rural community. The Austro-Hungarian authorities used to boast of how, under their rule, Bosnia benefited from new schools, industry and infrastructure, and they even goaded Princip at the trial that followed the assassination into describing the quality of life for Bosnian peasants. His answer leaves no doubt about how he regarded their plight:
‘Of what do the sufferings of the people consist?’ he was asked by a lawyer.
‘That they are completely impoverished; that they are treated like cattle. The peasant is impoverished. They destroy him completely. I am a villager’s son and I know how it is in the villages,’ he answered.
The natural beauty I found impressive but what really moved me was that latent sense of charge in the landscape, the knowledge that we were crossing through an area powerful enough to have impacted modern history not just at the start of the twentieth century but at other, later turning points. Tension rose when for the first time we passed through a minefield. On the opening day, we were deep in a forest when we spotted red plastic warning signs nailed to tree trunks on both sides of the track, each bearing a skull and crossbones in white along with text printed in both Latin and Cyrillic script: ‘Warning – Mines’. A less tangible sense of unease would manifest itself whenever we passed through towns. The skylines indicated Bosnia’s three-way mix, with Catholic bell-towers, Islamic minarets and Orthodox spires often clustered in the same view, but the nationalist war of the 1990s had had the polarising effect of leaving only one group dominant in any particular place. Just as like electrical charges repel each other, so these south-Slav communities, which shared so much history, are now driven away from each other.
Before we even set off, the atmosphere in Glamoč gave us a strong sense of how fierce ethnic loyalties remain in the twenty-first century. Even though the town lies some way inside Bosnia, the flags of the neighbouring country of Croatia hung from shop fronts around the town square, and the peal of bells from a huge and newly-rebuilt Catholic church swamped completely the call to prayer from a local mosque. The guesthouse where we spent the night was right in the town centre where three roads merge around a small, paved triangle shaded by plane trees and surrounded on all sides by houses, bars and corner shops clad in the pale, weathered masonry that is common in nearby Dalmatia. Rinsed by the previous night’s rain, the whole scene sparkled in the early light of a hushed summer Sunday. Insects flew holding patterns in air too still to even waft the flaccid flags with the vivid red-and-white chequerboard shield of the Croatian coat of arms. With the bells and muezzin falling silent, the peace was broken only now and then by the sound of a badly-tuned motorbike engine being gunned nearby by some teenage off-road riders. I watched as a nun parked her boxy Yugo car next to the triangle before bustling off purposefully in the direction of the town’s large Catholic church.
There is a mild schizophrenia about the Balkans, a sense of identity that swings between Oriental and Occidental, old world and new. On a gentle summer morning in a town such as Glamoč one could be forgiven for believing you are deep in western Europe. The town square, with its corner shops and pavement cafés, would not look out of place deep in the south of France or high on the Spanish sierra. The owner of the guesthouse, Zdravko Lučić, sat with me that morning on the terrace while I ate a breakfast of eggs sunnyside up or, to use the local wording, ‘on your eyes’. A Bosnian Croat, originally from the town of Bugojno, Zdravko had served as a soldier in bitter fighting there.
When the Bosnian War began in 1992, the conflict had initially been a two-way struggle between Bosnian Serbs and all other Bosnians – that is to say, Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats. Surprised by the speed of the Bosnian Serb land-grab, the two other communities were forced into a working alliance, one that went as far as the two sides fighting alongside each other. But tensions worsened steadily between the Bosnian Croat and Muslim allies, and eventually became all-out war. Just as Serbs reminisce about the glories of medieval Serbia, so Croats venerate their own long history, one that records with pride the existence of an independent kingdom of Croatia. No matter that the nation effectively lost its freedom 900 years ago, becoming first a vassal state of Hungary and later a component of the Habsburg Empire, legends of self-rule were kept alive over the centuries by Catholic Croats just as keenly as stories of early Serbian nationhood were preserved by Orthodox Christian believers.
Epic tales of past glories would be told in Croat hovels, as they were in simple Serb dwellings like the ones in Obljaj. Peasants from both communities then relied on the same zadruga system, gathering families into parish groups where issues could be worked through and burdens shared. They were also the platform where resentments against feudal overlords could be vented and self-pity could fester, occasionally erupting into rebellion. Just as the Ottoman occupiers of Bosnia faced occasional uprisings from
disaffected locals throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so the various elites imposed on Croatia by Hungary and Austria often faced revolts. In both cases the response was very similar: peasants executed, villages burned, communities destroyed, anger fuelled.
In its fundamental details Zdravko’s family story was identical to that of the Princip clan, two days’ walk away on the other side of Mount Šator. The only difference was that one was a narrative of Croat victimhood, the other of Serb. Much as the local communities here in recent times have sought to emphasise their differences, this shared experience shows how the south-Slav peoples of the Balkans have a common historical narrative of suffering, one that is transitive between the different communities.
It was largely a sense of righting past historical wrongs that led to the founding of an independent Croatia when Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s. In 1991, a year before the Bosnian War began, the Croatian War had started, as the Croatian republic that used to be part of Yugoslavia broke away in a struggle that would eventually lead to the creation of today’s independent country. In the flush of this success, a small but influential contingent of extreme Croat nationalists saw the subsequent war in neighbouring Bosnia as an opportunity to grab land that might restore what they held to be their birthright, a Croatian state reaching far into Bosnia, as history shows was the case at its territorial zenith roughly 1,000 years ago. When these ultra-nationalists made their move in late 1992, following months of plotting and preparing, there was only one possible outcome: the Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims turned their guns against each other.