The Serbs by Tim Judah

Author:Tim Judah
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300158267
Publisher: Yale University Press

Among the most tenacious Serbian fighters for the corridor were the men of Milan Martić's Krajina Militia. Once the fighting was over, the road sign from Odžak was taken as a trophy and installed in the office of Krajina's minister of defence. The Krajina Serbs and the Bosnian Serbs at the western end of the corridor called it the Corridor of Life, because if it was ever cut their supply line would have been severed. It was not just their only road to Serbia but, hemmed in on all sides by frontlines, it was their only road to the rest of the world.

Throughout the war the Serbs held on to the corridor, but at Brčko, at its narrowest, it was only two miles wide. For weeks all would be quiet and then fighting would flare up. For the Serbs who lived in Brčko and in the other corridor towns and villages it was a miserable existence. In winter, troops would walk for miles down its icy roads hitching lifts home to Banja Luka and elsewhere. Hundreds and probably thousands of men lost their lives in the corridor and in futile attempts to drive the Croats from Orašje, an enclave inside Bosnia from where it could be shelled.

In January 1993 fighting along the corridor led to a typical spasm of panic among the Serbs who lived along it or depended upon it. As artillery boomed in the distance Snežana bundled her two children into the back of the car in Brčko and said, ‘It's followed us all the way from Teslić.’ Dragan, aged four, threw up. A man wrenched open the car door and said, ‘Take us, take us too, I'll pay!’ He almost paid with his life. A car speeding the other way screeched in the mud, swerved and just missed him.

Snežana had set off at dawn. Serb-held Teslić, sitting on the front-line by a tongue of Muslim-held territory that licked deep into Serbheld land, had come under artillery attack. ‘First the war was a game,’ she said. ‘Now it's for real.’ People had scrambled for buses, but there were not enough seats. She had got on to one but it broke down in Doboj and the shells were falling there too. Her bus crept on to the outskirts of Brčko, where it died, tossing its passengers out on to the road. Here at the corridor's narrowest point they were left to flail at any passing car.

Brčko, on the River Sava, had been brutally cleansed during the spring of 1992 and was one of the oddest places in the whole of Bosnia. By the river there was a grain silo. From the top one could see the village of Gunja in Croatia and to the south, with binoculars, the minarets of mosques in Muslim villages on the other side of the corridor. Brčko was shattered and desolate, but children still played in the street. As the sound of artillery was constant in January 1993, why were they allowed out and

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