"The Soil Soaked With Tears" - Around Banja Luka & the Road to Zagreb

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Tim Judah, in his book “The Serbs”, describes the occasion when around the Orthodox Easter 1995 the motorway across Croatia, closed because of the war, reopened for a short time. Families divided by the conflict met up in the rest areas and petrol stations for reunions which were understandably emotional events. A man quoted by Judah said, “It does not need to rain here, the soil is already soaked with tears”. After the weather we’ve been having that would have been an awful lot of crying, but I suppose that then it was Easter and the ground hadn’t yet baked so hard. Judah goes on to describe how great hopes were stoked up for peace once the people met again and the will to fight removed, but then quotes the American ambassador to Croatia who opined that the event was more akin to the Great War Christmas truces between German and British troops when they played football before returning to the trenches to continue slaughtering each other (understandable: there were after all some dodgy offside decisions). In fact within days a “blood feud” erupted, culminating in random shootings and the Croatian Army’s Operation Blitz, which recaptured the area in question from the Serbs.

It was through roughly this area that I was to travel next on a trip to Zagreb for a meeting. For a change the weather was blazing as normally when I have been on the road for business it has lashed down with rain, reducing ‘photo and sightseeing opportunities. Typically on this day I had forgotten my camera and the views were, for large portions of the trip, fairly banal. We drove out of camp and were soon on our way towards the border. Passing through Laktasi I remarked again on its welcoming aspect and was told how much of this is because the town is the birthplace of a leading Serb politician, who naturally has the influence to ensure that the place gets a regular lick of paint. The other villages we passed through were more ramshackle: part of this is because local fiscal laws state that no tax is payable on houses until they are finished. This has led to a classic ruse whereby nobody completes building work, so properties are left with walls unrendered and perhaps a few windows unglazed. Most alarmingly balconies as high as the third storey have no balustrades, so I hope the risk of falling to a nasty death is outweighed by the tax savings. Industrial property is built level-by-level as cash allows and thus the assorted petrol stations and car washes under construction have concrete reinforcing bars protruding from the top like shoots reaching for the sun. The overall effect is of a nation as a building site. Some of the towns could charitably be described as one-horse (except that the horse was shot or stolen during the war), and the road while fairly solid was dusty and lined with the inevitable melon sellers. The only obvious crop is sweetcorn, but that is never on sale. Presumably it is such a staple part of the local diet that there is never a surplus for the stalls (or like the mysterious haystacks it is purely grown to be picked up and moved somewhere else). Across the plains the Simici Ridge loomed in the distance and it was easy to see how the views from there encompassed such a huge amount of land. Finally we reached the border and crossed quickly into Croatia by the simple expedient of queue jumping and waving our SFOR ID cards out of the window.

My introduction to Croatia was therefore the village of Novi Varos. Here there was evidence of the war, rather than just the systematic destruction of selected buildings as seen in Bosnia. Every house bore even more bullet holes than my first aid instructor at Chilwell but had not been patched up as well where any repair work had been attempted at all. I’ve always thought that FIBUA villages look a lot like a sterile kind of European town (perhaps because FIBUA villages are built using a European style of architecture from the days when we trained to repel the red menace: discuss). However after training for urban operations we always tidy up the villages and blanks don’t make holes in walls like in real life. When conflicts in my lifetime have always been events that have happened far away (like the Falklands), somewhere empty (the Gulf) or been relatively low-intensity or part of life (Northern Ireland) it is slightly creepy to see its full-blown aftermath in an environment almost like home. Here homes which have not been reoccupied (as, frequently, the former inhabitants are too scared to return but no one else is allowed to move in) the surrounding gardens become overgrown and bushes spring up in the shells of the buildings. What would the neighbours say ? These plots are some of the most dangerous for unexploded ordnance, which is why they become overgrown: no one dares go in.

After this, however, a far more prosperous nation in far better repair than the embattled border strip or dusty, melon-stall ridden Bosnia rolls out alongside the unpotholed road. Much of the repair work has been done thanks to large sums of money from Germany as can be seen from the extremely orderly tollbooth on the extremely orderly autobahn. A word of advice for travellers in Croatia: German is the most useful language to speak if you don’t know any Serbo-Croat. They’re grateful for all the cash and less likely to slash the tyres of your Landrover or assault you with iron bars, two incidents which have occurred lately to British SFOR personnel in Croatia, if they think you are a bounteous German. I had been recommended to go into the old part of Zagreb, wrap myself round a cold bottle of Tomislav and admire the local fauna and its lack of foundation garments, but unfortunately this trip was for business not pleasure and I was only to see the airport. There were some compensations in the shape of the scorchingly attractive Croatia Airlines flight attendants, but my visit was all too short and we had to get on the road home again. An amusing sight on the way back was the flock of storks that live next to the road. In one place a pair had built a nest on top of an old pillar, a little reminiscent of a similar nest on the sole standing column of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus in Turkey. The storks have long, thin, pale legs which are strangely familiar to anyone who has seen the legs of some members of the Netherlands Contingent who have just received permission to wear their combat shorts. When this uniform is worn by the more shapely Dutch soldier strapped about with pistol in holster the effect conjures up Lara Croft but unfortunately this sight is fairly rare and the most commonly displayed skin tone is at present (to quote Billy Connolly) “a sortie blue”.

For a bit of contrast I spent a free afternoon with a colleague who knows parts of the hidden Bosnia and has the all important Force Exemption Card to allow him to visit it. Our first port of call was the Tito memorial on a hill overlooking Banja Luka. From a distance this stands out like a shining ziggurat of polished marble which reflects the sun while up close the truth of Communist-era architecture is revealed. The monument, which shows socialist realist inspired reliefs of heroic partisans doing rather unpleasant things to coal-scuttle helmeted German troops and a huge male nude on the front waving a banner, is constructed of panels of what appears to be greying glass fibre, many of which are loose. The effect is completed by water staining and graffiti which continues up as high as a spray-can can be held before petering out. Around the site is a picnic area which is a popular family destination. Here a row of metal signs have obviously been used for target practice, with the first in the row perforated heavily and those getting progressively further away from the firing point progressively less so as the smaller calibre ammunition eventually expended its momentum. The grouping achieved by this fire is less than impressive, as might be expected after the firers had consumed all the beer which was in the bottles that now lie broken and ankle-deep around the monument. This celebratory fire is a part of life which is declining in the country, but one local explained recently that a volley of three shots is still customary on the birth of a son. It is possible to climb up on the monument for spectacular views of the forested hills in one direction and the city in the other. Of particular interest was the chimney of the Nectar Brewery. This produces a local brew (known as HEKWAP after the appearance of its name in Cyrillic) which costs less in the mess than mineral water or Coke yet has wildly dissimilar intoxicating qualities. The trick is to drink the stuff before it warms up and you can actually taste it.

From here we went into the real backcountry, where it is quite possible that the inhabitants are unaware that Tito is dead. We were greeted largely by warm smiles in tiny villages miles up tracks which even our four wheel drive had difficulty negotiating. On a hill we discovered a crashed fighter jet of a type which saw action in the Korean War with the Americans and which had been stripped for anything remotely useful. The neat churches were surrounded with crosses draped in clothes belonging to the deceased, in a tradition which is so old our local clerk back in the office thought it had all but died out. Here again the sheer ruthlessness and efficiency of the ethnic cleansing was brought home with a solid blow. There is a village tucked far down a valley that had been attacked by armoured vehicles which rolled down its only street opening up with all they had. As the vehicles ran out of ammunition the further they moved the houses showed less and less damage until the last which showed only a few desultory shell-holes. In some towns protection could be gained by painting symbols of allegiance on the walls. Here no one could or tried to claim this salvation. It is in villages like these that today the children still hide when they see even SFOR soldiers: they won’t trust anyone in uniform and with weapons. The Colonel, while doing rebuilding projects on a previous tour, eventually got people to come out of their houses by decorating his Landrover with brightly coloured balloons and then waiting.

Despite the extremely hot day I felt chilled to the bone and was glad to return to the car and head back into town. We stopped outside a café for a drink and to watch the world go by. The centre of Banja Luka is very pretty with a truly Mediterranean feel: families were out for Sunday strolls and the bars were doing a roaring trade. This is known as “Morale Street” by those of SFOR who have visited it as it’s away from corrimecs and the factory and not everyone is in uniform. It felt almost normal, or as normal as life can be when having a Sunday coffee, working on the tan, in uniform and with a pistol on the belt. The best thing is that this attractive street distracts the mind from ruined villages, even if one can only speculate how many of the happy crowds enjoying a day out ignored or were even involved in what we had seen in the hills.

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