Regardless,
Bosnia had yet to break free of wartime hatreds, corruption, and infighting.
And denial about war crimes, as reaction to the Celebici case proved,
was not unique to the Bosnian Serbs, victims of the most pernicious
propaganda. The Bosnian Muslims and Croats were also still mired in
their war-time hatreds. Reconstruction — and the Tribunal’s
justice — had done little to curb nationalism and heal old wounds.
While
Bosnians freely crossed old battlefield lines without fear, they continued
to define each other as Serb, Muslim, or Croat and as enemies. In
the country’s parliament, leaders had traded in battlefield arms
for the weapons of bureaucratic infighting. Despite the election of
a few moderates, the same nationalists who led the country into war
still ruled it. Had it not been for the international community’s
power to dictate solutions, little would have been accomplished. "Bosnia"
reflected Jacques Klein, head of the United Nations mission in Sarajevo,
"is a patient on life support."
Even in Konjic — a city up the river from Celebici that the U.N.
had deemed an "open city", an area ethnically tolerant enough
to receive extra funds — war-time animosities ran deep, as Gordana
Grubac swiftly discovered when she returned there.
Nearly two years had passed since the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia had listened to Gordana’s testimony,
along with that of her husband Petko, a doctor imprisoned in the Celebici
camp. While the couple was Serb in origin, they thought of themselves
as Bosnians and Europeans; they gave their children names that were
Slavic, but not ethnically identifiable in Bosnia. Yet once the war
had erupted, Petko had been imprisoned in Celebici for no other reason
than being a Serb.
Their case was the exception in Bosnia’s war, in which the majority
of victims were Bosnian Muslims. But war crimes had occurred, nonetheless.
For months, the judges in The Hague had listened to testimony of gruesome
beatings, torture and death of Serbs at the hands of camp guards at
Celebici. Petko himself had told the court of how he tried to nurse
the wounds of those who had been deliberately set afire.
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