The Ruin of a Cat, the Ghost of a Dog

By LANCE MORROW SARAJEVO

A line that turns up in Balkan propaganda catches the spirit of things: People must decide whether they choose "to be the carcass or the vulture."

A fog rises this morning from the carcass of Sarajevo. The city has a clinging, ragged aura about it. Fog seeps through shattered buildings and seems to puff through the bullet holes in windows.

The vultures sit in the hills. Drunk on slivovitz and nationalism, they fire through the intermittent radiance.

Serb artillery shoots from the slopes on one side of the city, and Muslim shoots from the other. Sometimes they throw shells at each other. Sometimes they drop them into town. The big shells arrive with a crisp, concussive WHUMP! But sniper fire you hear only at the shooting end -- an irregular background noise of flat, hard pops. You look up wildly at the hills and imagine the snipers squinting through cross hairs. You wonder what they may be able to see through the mist. You pause to decode the physics: the sound you hear has been taking its time, traveling a lot more slowly than the bullet itself.

The Renault sedan scurries across the Miljacka River on the little bridge where Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. A brainless loop of history: the 20th century, after all its adventures, has arrived back in Sarajevo again, working on blood feuds and apocalypses. Lessons learned: possibly none.

Along the streets, we catch the haggard, unslept faces of the besieged, a glimpse of their trudging, cringing body English. Shops boarded up. The driver, who is, improbably, a Russian, pitches the Renault along, overrevving and popping the clutch, to the National Library. It is a splendid 19th century Moorish building that has been hammered so often, so heavily, that it is a gutted shell. In a city where more than 17,000 have been killed and 110,000 wounded since the siege began last spring, it may be odd to be disturbed by the fate of a building. But to murder a library is metaphysically sinister and wanton. What dies, of course, is more than individual life -- the stuff of the civilization, the transmission of past to future, goes up in smoke. It is not an accident.

That is the deeper wiring. We ask the driver about mere electricity. None for 17 days, he says. Do he and his wife fetch water in buckets from a central supply somewhere?

"My wife does not," he says. "She was killed by a shell 67 days ago." Stunned silence. I cannot see his face. We mutter, "Sorry." The driver hurtles on.

Elie Wiesel arranged this visit to parts of what used to be Yugoslavia. He tells a press conference later that Sarajevo looks to him like "a ghost city, a tragedy formed into a city, like a city in Germany in 1945." He says, "I saw a cat that was a ruin of a cat. I saw a dog that was a ghost of a dog." He says, "I feel the time has come to weep."

I am not moved to weep, but rather to feel anger and disgust. This is not tragedy. The word tragedy would give this business too much moral elevation. What has happened in Bosnia is just squalor and barbarism -- the filthy work of liars and cynics manipulating tribal prejudices, using atrocity propaganda and old blood feuds to accomplish the unclean political result of "ethnic cleansing." The displacement of a million innocent civilians, turned into refugees, is not a consequence of the war, but precisely the purpose of the war. It has worked.

Wiesel leads his delegation into the palace of Alija Izetbegovic, Muslim President of the shrunken republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is only an archipelago of besieged fortresses now. Wiesel has come to try to project a little of his luminous sanity and decency in the war zone, to hold everyone to a higher standard and possibly to make some of the killers ashamed of what they are doing. In an ornate ceremonial room painted toxic green, Wiesel, wonder rabbi out of Auschwitz, sits side by side with Izetbegovic, whom the nationalist Serbs see as the spearhead of a fundamentalist Muslim state, the nightmare of Islamic conquest drifting up out of the 14th century from the Battle of Kosovo, which locked the Serbs into 500 years of Turkish rule. Gunshots outside. No one even blinks. Part of the mise-en-scene.

An elegant, doleful man named Miroslav Jancic, poet and former diplomat, introduces himself. Sarajevo is a concentration camp, he says in quiet anguish. "How do you eat?" I ask. "Not well," he says. "This shirt used to fit perfectly." He inserts two fingers between his neck and the buttoned white shirt collar. Possibly the worst crime of the war -- worse even than the ingenious atrocities that are the specialite de la maison of the Balkans -- is the systematic starvation of entire populations by the Serb fighters surrounding cities like Tuzla and Srebrenica and Sarajevo.

A surreal transition: in armored personnel carriers supplied by the United Nations Protection Force, we make our way from the besieged to the besiegers. We pass through the lines, through checkpoints and no-man's-lands, to the headquarters of Radovan Karadzic, the Serb nationalist chieftain. Karadzic is a poet and, in civilian life, bizarrely enough, a psychiatrist. A sleek, fattish man with an expensive double-breasted suit, bushy eyebrows and flamboyantly styled long hair. I try to conjure up a psychiatric session with this healer. I see certain Hippocratic problems with a head doctor who would lead his patients not out of murderous fantasies but deeper into them. After you've spent a short time in Bosnia, your mind seems to slip into hallucination.

Karadzic says, with some accuracy, "This is not an ideological war. This is just two close neighbors who hate each other." Then the hallucinations begin. Elie Wiesel asks him why he is besieging Sarajevo.

"We are not besieging Sarajevo." Oh.

Why did the Serbs destroy the National Library?

"We did not destroy the National Library. They did. You can see. It is ruined by fire from the ground floor up. We could not have done this. They removed their books and burned the building."

Entry from notebook: God didn't make little green apples. And it don't rain in Indianapolis in the summertime.

The drama has several simple, fierce motifs. One is Revenge and Counterrevenge (Newton's third law: For every atrocity there must be an equal and opposite atrocity). A second motif is Complete Denial (We did not do it; they did). Which yields the third theme: Everyone Is a Victim, which means of course that everyone is justified in committing any act. We-They. We victim; They did it. The dynamics of rage and outrage reverberate through the mountain forests and down the generations.

Karadzic, the Balkan commando-psychiatrist, explains, "This war is a continuation of World War II -- the same families, the same revenge." Everyone agrees about that. After the war, Tito and communism merely suppressed the blood hatreds. Tribal memory and the fierce dynamic of revenge went into a kind of holding pattern for nearly 50 years. With the collapse of communism, all the terrible deeds committed during World War II (and World War I, for that matter) came streaming back, demanding vengeance. The Croats' alliance with Hitler, and the savage enthusiasm of the Croatian ultra- nationalist organization Ustashi in slaughtering Serbs from 1941 to 1945, created a vast accumulation of hatred and blood debts. A Serb will say, "Croats are a genocide people."

Dusko Zavisic, a young Serb photographer who has escaped from Sarajevo, told me that as a boy he was taken to visit the museum at the World War II Croatian concentration camp at Jasenovac. The pictures there of murdered Serbs were so horrifying he could not eat for two days afterward. In the latest war of Croats and Serbs, the Croats destroyed the museum. It was Dusko Zavisic who took the photographs of atrocities in Vukovar last November. He said that for days he was afraid to close his eyes because the afterimages of mutilated bodies and smashed heads would always jump back into the foreground of his mind.

A display of the Vukovar photographs now hangs in the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade. Applied art indeed. They depict slaughters of amazing awfulness, performed with a conscienceless ingenuity that makes a man want to resign from the human race. Here, for example, we see an instrument that looks like a tuning fork, but with the prongs more widely spaced, about 3 1/2 inches apart. A local trademark is to gouge out both eyes. Hence this handy device. Studies in the Balkan Department of Comparative Atrocity.

The worst part of it is some vibration of horrid pleasure. Too many of these people enjoy killing. It has become a sort of cultural addiction.

Entry in notebook: This place is sick and crazy. It needs moral baths and light treatments for three generations.

In the Museum of Applied Art, five women stand sobbing in front of the photographs of the burned and mutilated Serbian victims of Vukovar. The women's shoulders heave, tears flood their cheeks. They point to the savaged bodies in the pictures: That was a cousin. That was a brother. That was a husband.

The last leaves cling to the trees. It has rained: the water caught in furrows of the fields holds reflected sunset -- sweet sky visible through holes in the earth. We cross the Bosna River and head into the mountains. There is a sliver of new moon. It looks somehow covert -- like an eyelid, watching.

It is full dark at the Manjaca camp. Here the Serbs hold more than 3,000 prisoners, mostly Bosnian Muslims, mostly fighters, we are told. We find one smirking, screwy kid who is a German. He joined the Croatian forces (he was wearing a black Ustashi T shirt) because he said he wanted an adventure that he could write a book about. The camp commander, Lieut. Colonel Bozidar Popovic, is a barking, strutting martinet who wields a Mini Maglite as if it were a swagger stick. His voice never drops from a shout. He bellows, "I am a humanist!"

An enormous shed, unheated, dark except for a few short-wicked oil lanterns -- smudged night-lights. The hundreds of prisoners sleep close together, in orderly right-angle ranks. They have straw mats and blankets (though how many blankets is a point of argument -- the colonel says five, which seems extravagant, and the men say fewer). They keep their possessions in cardboard boxes that they hang from what look like the railings to hold dairy cows as they are milked. The shed smells of cows (an effect both disturbing and distantly wholesome, a smell from childhood). The army insists that the building is an equipment shed.

The small parade of visitors, beaconed by the lights on shoulder-held TV cameras, sweeps in like a surprise midnight political parade. But it is silent -- eerie and embarrassed. The prisoners rouse themselves and stare from the shadows with big, wondering eyes. They seem young, with fierce, thick, uncombed hair and raw, cold-roughened faces.

But Popovic is better than he seems. The Serbian camps at Omarska and Trnopolje became notorious earlier in the year. Atrocity stories poured out of them -- beatings, torture, murders. Manjaca now seems disciplined, well regulated. The Serbs of course would not display it otherwise. The prisoners, out of earshot of their captors, speak well enough of the camp, and even compliment Popovic as strict but fair. Popovic returns, defensively wagging his finger, and says he can disprove all the lies the prisoners have been telling. Elie Wiesel raises his eyebrows: "Actually, Colonel . . ."

"No, no," Popovic barks on. "They say they are innocent! But did they tell you about the lists of Serbian women they kept that they wanted to put into harems?" There it is again, the Muslim horde. Wiesel calms the colonel and pleads for more blankets for the prisoners.

Marshall McLuhan's famous metaphor sees the world as a global village. Actually, it has become a global city, a megalopolis with some rich neighborhoods and many poor neighborhoods and some that are terribly dangerous. Unfortunately, the big city has no police department, and the neighborhoods (the former U.S.S.R., the Muslim world, South Africa) are getting more dangerous. Almost everyone agrees it is too late for military intervention in Bosnia. The place makes me think of W.B. Yeats' haunting line, "And wondered what was left for massacre to save." The place to intervene, they say, now must be in Kosovo and Macedonia. Everyone talks about the coming winter, about people freezing to death and starving. Everyone talks about a Balkan war.