Day 118b: Split - Bugojno

JULY 30 - Sit around for about an hour at the windy pass that constitutes the border of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. For sake of simplicity, I will refer to the latter henceforth as BiH, a common shorthand used in many guides and references.

I currently have about US$100 worth of BiH currency, called the Convertible Marka (KM), also sometimes abbreviated as BAM. There are about 2 KM per Euro.

I can feel the transition as we begin moving through the country. There is the unmistakable sensation of passing through a cultural and economic barrier, into something that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the city at which we embarked the bus. Time has slowed down in the towns we pass, and the wrecks of cars litter the backyards of some residences.

The bus driver stops at a petrol station. Unleaded 95 here costs 3.26 KM/liter, which comes to about US $6.42/gallon. He mysteriously fills up several 2 liter water jugs and we drive on up the road another 20 minutes, just to stop again at a broken down bus of the same company (Jelinak). For the next 30 minutes, the driver helps be a mechanic on the other bus. They use up the jugs and next comes the siphon, as the driver fills another six jugs from our tank and passes them over. I’m unclear on why so much petrol is needed, since it obviously is a mechanical problem, but at any rate the problem is solved and we can move on.

Stop at a roadside cafe. Since the trip has now gone on for an hour longer than expected, we are really hungry. However, we realize that the place is going to completely fill with cigarette smoke in no time, from the two busloads of people entering all at once. This drives us outside.

I didn’t really have a clear idea what the BiH countryside would look like before coming here. What I see are few towns and a lot of empty plains, hills, and thick forests.

The owner of the property we are staying at in Bugojno kindly offered to collect us at the bus station. She is there, even though we are about two hours late and without means to let her know beforehand. The apartment we have is the upper two floors of the family home, a creaky old wood building, lined with colorful rugs, bookshelves, old wooden furniture, and even a pool table. It is by far the largest accommodation I’ve booked on this trip.

Walk into town, as we are desperate for food.

While eating, we are treated to our first call to prayer from a nearby mosque. Odette doesn’t quite know what to think, as it is rather loud from where we sit. I haven’t heard it for almost twenty years, and it has that time capsule effect of bringing back many memories.

Time to bite the bullet and talk about this war, since it informs so much of the traveling experience here. It occurred in 1992-95, at the time of Yugoslavia’s breakup, and was especially violent because of the mixed ethnicities in every corner of the region. While Croatia’s violent independence war was mainly Croats fighting Serbs who wanted to carve out their own ethnically dominant areas, here it was Croats, Bosniaks, and Serbs, all fighting in the same areas. All three have their own languages (the Serbs even have their own alphabet). Croats are Catholic, Serbs Christian Orthodox, and Bosniaks Muslim. So you can see already the gulfs of cultural understanding that would invariably crop up. At the outset of the war, the population was about 44% Bosniak, 33% Serb, and 17% Croat, with a small remainder of other ethnicities. All three had their dedicated fighting force: the Serbs had the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), the Bosniaks had the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), and the Croats had the Croatian Defense Council (HVO). Initially, the Serbs were on one side of the conflict, while the Bosniaks and Croats fought together on the other. However, early on the Croats and Bosniaks began infighting and essentially pitted all three against eachother.

If you are from my generation or older, you probably remember some of this. The war was insidiously barbaric, with indiscriminate shelling of cities (for example, Sarajevo), charges of ethnic cleansing by mostly Serbian forces (but also accused of Croats and Bosniak forces), and massacres (for example, Srebrenica).

The best equipped military force was the VRS, as it was supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) in what remained of Yugoslavia (which was almost purely ethnic Serb). However, over time Pakistan began supplying their fellow Bosniak Muslims with weapons, which slowly evened the odds. Also, the Croats allied again with the Bosniaks. In any case the deciding factor was the intervening of NATO, which targeted Serb forces and basically neutralized their capacity to prolong the conflict.

Peace negotiations were convened and all concerned parties signed the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (the Dayton Accords) in December of 1995. It stopped armed conflict but was a overly complex document that could not hope to bring real inter-ethnic harmony.

The country is basically divided in two ‘states’ that sometimes function at odds to each other. One is the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, an amalgam of the Bosniak and Croat ethnicities. The other is the Republika Srpska, which is ethnic Serb. Srpska is in two large pieces, completely divided geographically by the Federation, and the Federation has two small enclaves in Srpska. There is one small area that is a ‘neutral’ zone administered by both (called Brčko, or Брчко).

Almost 30 years later, the devastation of war is still evident. Long ago enough that a significant fraction of the population does not have a living memory of it.