My War Gone By, I Miss It So by Anthony Loyd

Author:Anthony Loyd [Loyd, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Vareš became a ghost-town overnight. The only HVO that remained were the three dead men, killed in action in the hills, who were left lying in the hospital in their bloodied uniforms. Raji and his killers, the Bobova Brigade, and 20,000 Croat civilians disappeared. Squeezed by advancing government troops on two fronts, their fear of retribution translated into a flight through Serb lines to the east, then, with notable exceptions, on to Kiseljak further south. If Raji had expected Serb units to come in and bolster his forces his hopes were dashed. The Serbs had other ideas, which involved the Bobova Brigade. As for the Muslims, they had fled en masse to the sanctuary of the Swedes’ camp at the northern edge of town.

Except for a few snipers left in the high ground, Vareš seemed to us totally deserted, its heavy silence broken only by the crackle of flames from an apartment block torched by the retreating HVO. Then a pair of arms reached through one of the smoking windows and pulled out a line of washing. We stared up in disbelief. A man looked out.

‘Hey,’ we called. ‘What are you doing?’

Some minutes later he appeared at the door: a handsome man in his forties wearing an immaculate blue pin-stripe suit and a pair of winklepickers, and carrying a guitar.

‘I thought I’d hang out the washing before I left,’ he said. ‘I’m a Serb and I’m not too sure where I should go.’

Other than an unnatural shine in his eyes, there was nothing to indicate he was insane. As the windows shattered with heat and the ground floor began to collapse inwards in fiery cascades he lit a cigarette and wandered away up the empty high street, guitar on hip like a lonesome cowboy.

The Swedes broke in to the two improvised prisons to find the Muslims beaten and humiliated but otherwise unharmed. Those in the schoolhouse had to remain there because of the snipers on the valley slopes. A lone woman ran ducking through the alleys towards the building, the Croat wife of one of the prisoners. Her husband watched her progress, hope and fear running through his eyes in a concourse of emotion, blowing out into a spasm of tears as she made it.

It took the BiH troops a further twenty-four hours, moving on foot across the hills, to reach the town, and the first reconnaissance unit to arrive was, ironically, a Croat one made up of Catholic troops loyal to the government. ‘I am from Vareš,’ one of them told me, ‘and my brother in the HVO has fled with Raji. I believe in multi-ethnic Bosnia, not the fascism of Raji and Herceg-Bosna.’ I had heard the refrain a million times now and rather than admire the speaker’s idealism I began to wonder at how he would deal with the inevitable disillusion ahead.

Following quickly behind these men were files of fighters from the 7th Muslim Brigade. Some saw this unit as a disciplined, religious force, others regarded it as a rabble of thugs and Islamic extremists.

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