The Pillars of Hercules

The Ustasha were Croatian commandos, much like the Serbian chetniks. They modeled themselves on the Nazi SS and wore black shirts and a “U” insignia. Their ruthlessness and racism dated to the fascist Ustasha regime which had governed Croatia with Nazi help during the Second World War and off its own bat, without Nazi control, had operated its own death camp. Serbian “ethnic cleansing” was now well enough known to be universally condemned, but this policy of Croatian “purification” was new to me.

“So what’s going to happen here?”

“In ten years”—that magic figure again—“things will be quieter,” he said. “And there will be a greater Serbia, a greater Croatia and a smaller Bosnia.”

On the quay, having just bought tickets to Italy, was a family of refugees—a hollow-eyed man and his painfully thin wife and his child. The little boy looked robust, the parents half-starved, and so it was easy to conclude that the child had been given the parents’ rations.

“We were airlifted by helicopter from Tuzla,” he said, and since Tuzla was in Bosnia, the family obviously had been through the wringer.

They had escaped from Sarajevo, leaving their parents and their house and everything they possessed. All they had were two small suitcases, and a pram for the child (who was too heavy for them to lift), and a bag of food. This family had been sponsored by a French organization, Solidarité, which had provided the helicopter getaway.

The family’s story was not complicated, but in its simplicity it amply illustrated the despicable nature of this civil war, which was a border dispute fueled by ancient grievances (the assassination of the Croatian King Zvonimir in 1089, for example), wartime collaboration and score-settling, racism, and religious differences.

“I am a geologist,” he said. His name was Dr. Tomic; he was probably in his mid-thirties but his haunted look made him seem much older. “I am from ex-Yugoslavia. My parents are Serbian, but I was born in Bosnia, so I am a Bosnian. Sarajevo is my home. My wife is a Muslim. That’s the problem.”

Mrs. Tomic gave me a wan smile and shrugged her skinny shoulders.

“For eight years I had been at the university in Sarajevo, specializing in the geology of the area,” Dr. Tomic said. “Then my colleagues began to ask me questions as though to test me. Finally they said, ‘We have lost confidence in you.’ ”

“Did they say why?”

“No—they couldn’t. My geology is very local, just the thing that is studied there,” he said. “My neighborhood was next. My neighbors began to make problems. They were blaming my wife for things. They know she is a Muslim. It got very bad.”

“How bad? Give me an instance,” I said.

“Dangerous—threats,” he said, and seemed so shaken by the memory that I did not press him.

“We considered fleeing to Slovenia,” he said. “They have camps here, but we don’t qualify. They have Serbs in one camp, Croats in another, Muslims in a third. We don’t fit in, because we are mixed.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Go to France,” he said. “Take the ferry to Italy, then the train to Paris.”

They were leaving everything behind, most of all abandoning hope for their country. It interested me that they had only two small bags and this folding pram; I imagined it to be the little boy’s clothes, and a change of clothes for themselves. The average tourist in Italy on a short holiday—they would probably be sharing the train with many such people—had ten times this weight in baggage.

After that, whenever I read about troop maneuvers or politicians grandstanding or mortar attacks on cities or the pettiness and terror of the war, I thought about this skinny man and wife, each one holding a bag, pushing their little boy down the quay at Split, their starved faces turned to the Mediterranean, waiting for the ferry to take them away from here.

The next day I saw the refugee couple on the ferry Ivan Krajc standing in the rain by the rail watching the Croatian shore recede from view.

The rest of the passengers divided themselves into groups—Italian truck drivers who joked and sang and ate, Italian pilgrims who had just come from Medjugorje and were still praying (dozens of them, standing on deck in the rain and chanting the rosary out loud), Croatians like the Tomic family, looking furtive and anxious; and aid workers down from Bosnia, with a few days to spend in Italy.

“We drove down from Zenica today,” an aid worker told me. Zenica was about forty miles northwest of Sarajevo. “Last year it took us ten days to drive from Zenica to Split, because of roadblocks and fighting. Today it took eight hours. Maybe things are improving!”