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The Forgotten Ones

It is cold and the snow blows sideways in Sarajevo on this March Saturday. As I watch it quietly, I reflect upon the things I have seen this week in the cold drizzle of a late Bosnian winter. I have been twice now to the cantonal city of Bihac (say: BEE-hah-ch) in the far northwest corner of what is still Bosnia. The Bosnians will tell you that Bihac sits in a part of the country called the "edge", and it really is, it seems, at the edge of the world. This territory, found straddling the edge of Bosnia and the edge of Croatia, suffered tremendously during the war as a result of its strategic geographic location, and it was inflicted with some particularly vigorous and nasty ethnic cleansing early in the war. Many of the paramilitary groups who were responsible for instigating early ethnic tensions, and fomenting hatred with their lies and some clever brainwashing, began in Knin (say: "ka-NEen"), a town not far from Bihac. The town of Prijedor (PREE-ay-door), where two war criminals where snatched this summer, is the next largest city to the East of Bihac - now located in the Republika Srpksa (the Serb controlled piece of Bosnia). Whispers about concentration camps in Prijedor make the area all that more eerie.

The Una (OO-na) River, the cleanest, clearest river in the Balkans runs through the middle of Bihac, and the trout from the Una are the sweetest fresh fish over which I've ever squeezed a lemon. Named "Una" (from "unique"), the river gives the canton ("county") its name, Una-Sana. My dear colleague and friend, Ahmet Hukic and his team of electrical engineers have spent the last six months putting in an electrical system, a substation, and a series of poles and lines through the remote hills in the Una-Sana canton. The war destruction in the remote villages forced many people to flee their homes to the small cantonal towns, like Bosanska Krupa and Sanski Most, where there was room to hide, relatively speaking.

After leaving Bihac in convoy and winding our way through the Una River valley, a deep gorge cut by the water, we drive slowly through the little town of Bosanksa Krupa and begin to wind our way out of town up through the hills. For thirty minutes we bump up and down in the Land Rovers along a gravel road cut into the sides of some serious rolling hills. The only company we have is the occasional ghost of an empty farmhouse, the roof gone, and the bricks from the walls littered around the surrounding landscape. There are no signs of life, not one bird, not even plant life. Just when I am feeling like Milo in the "Phantom Tollbooth" when he reaches the 'doldrums'...we arrive in the tiny village of Arapusa (arAH-poosha).

Out here in the middle of nowhere there are suddenly scores of people. The villagers are out en masse, walking in groups of eights and tens toward the top of the hill in the center of town. There is a large banner strung between the first two houses in the village that reads, "Dobro Nam Dosli" ("We" Welcome you), and they have put up balloons and streamers wherever any tall structure provides a spot to place them. We are there at the urging of Ahmet and in the company of the donors, ECHO (The European Community's Humanitarian Organization) and the IMG (International Management Group). We are there to officially open the electrical substation, listen to and make the speeches, and flip the switch that will bring electricity to 500 families in numerous tiny villages scattered throughout these remote hills.

BiH Television, the mayor of Bosanska Krupa, and the director of the regional electric company are all in attendance, and all clutching crumpled pieces of paper from which they will read their speeches. The young mayor of tiny Arapusa, his dark blue beret perched over tinted myopic lens on a sorrowful face, gives a brief and powerful speech about the terrible losses they have suffered and the profound gratitude they feel for their friends in the international community for remembering the smallest corners of his country.

A large group of village men and women dressed traditionally in the muslim manner, sing the national anthem, and then kneel on pretty carpets spread over the large sheets of UNHCR plastic put down to prevent the cold water in the ground from soaking their knees. It is cold so all the speeches are brief. After the last speaker, the mass of Arapusa and their guests flow down through the little muddy streets in town to the pylon on which the master switch is. The representative from ECHO, a tall, gangly sort, ceremoniously puts on large red rubber gloves, and a lemon yellow hardhat, his jug-ears holding it straight. He says a few words, flips the switch, the lights go on, and the crowd applauds.

The climax over, we all meander back through the town to the abandoned school building where the villagers have put out a spread, buffet style, to rival the finest restaurant. Our fare includes fresh roast chicken, roast lamb, fresh bread, tangy pickles, meat and cheese phyllo dough pastries, bananas, oranges, cakes, and cream-filled tarts. After we feast, we bid a fond farewell to our hosts, leaving them with the mounds of banana peels, plastic plates and half emptied juice bottles and soda cans, and we drive back up in the doldrums.

The roads from Bosanska Krupa to Sarajevo pass through many towns and cities which were known to me previously only through news articles and documentaries. The first hour of the trip is dramatically solomn. There are no radios in our vehicles, none that work, anyway. My rover mates, Kirk and Colin are uncharacteristically silent. Together we experience the eerily quiet countryside, kilometer after kilometer of vast nothingness. It is made worse by the fact that we can clearly see where the farmlands once sported produce, and where the farming families once lived, scattered far and wide in large, square, three-storied buildings that are now burned out shells. Nothing remains.

On occasion we pass the skeleton of a twisted, once burned vehicle, now rusting, craggily sticking out of the side of the road shoulder. War is evil anyway, but these scenes drive the imagination to hideous new lows. There was nowhere to hide out here. These families had no nearby town to which to escape. They had no basements, no forests, no defenses. Anywhere. The views are panoramic, we can see for miles out over the countryside, and we cannot speak because we are all choking on the same thoughts about what we are seeing and not seeing, but mostly about what we are sure happened here.

It starts to rain and the windshield wipers seem so loud in my head that I begin to allow them to screech out my worst thoughts. We reach Kluc (CLUE-ch) and suddenly there is traffic: SFOR vehicles, produce trucks, a few beat-up Yugos and an occasional horse and cart. The homes in Kluc are being rebuilt, there are signs of life and the living everywhere. The townsfolk in the outlying houses are gardening, and plots of fresh, dark, newly turned earth remind us that Spring has already begun. Our conversation turns to weather, and road conditions, and I take out my Bosanski class text book and study for this evening's lesson.

Once I am back in Sarajevo in the comfort of my city, surrounded by loved ones, I think about what the Minister of Reconstruction and Social Services in Bihac told me during a previous visit. "No one remembers we are out here. We once had textile factories and wood-processing plants. We had great farming communities in this part of the country. Now we have nothing. Even if we did rebuild, who would come back? There is nothing for them to do out here. You can't live in a new home if you have no way to earn a living." He is right, for the time being. But, I think, the village of Arapusa has electricity today. Maybe tomorrow someone will come to help them rebuild their school so the children have a place to study.

I am sure to travel through the Una-Sana canton again and again. And each time I go I will look forward to the day when I drive from Sanski Most to Travnik, and I begin to see the plows out in those rolling fields, and the chickens are once again a nuisance on the roads. Maybe the Minister is half right. Indeed, they have been forgotten out there on the "edge", it is true. But I am hoping that they won't be forgotten for too much longer.

Copyright © 1997 – Rachel Peterson

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