One rotten apple can hold a whole nation hostage, as is the case with Serbia. Young Serbs have yearned for years for their parents’ nightmare to come to an end. Maybe there is time again for dreaming after Mladic is arrested.

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By Tijn Sadée

“Look at me. Am I a monster? I drink, I smoke, and I laugh with you. Nothing to be scared of.” Countless times I had to listen to these kinds of statements in Belgrade cafés. Statements from Mira, Dusan, Danica, and many others: all of them teenagers at the time when Yugoslavia was bulldozed under the hate speech spread by Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic.

The dirty Balkan wars were the wars of their parents, and they looked on from their classrooms. Then they were also sucked into those wars. When the mass graves around Srebrenica were uncovered, one thing was for sure: the Serbs were butchers. The international community inexorably put the Serbs on the wrong side of the war.

Caught in a web
I got to know Mira and the others during my time as a correspondent in the Balkans between 2001 and 2009, the years just after the conflicts. I never saw a grenade, kalashnikov or a ripped-off arm from up close. But I did encounter a minefield of emotions. Traumatised men, Bosnian women who mourned their lost sons. Girls who started stuttering when they were reminded of bombings in Belgrade. Boys from Vukovar singing at the tops of their voices during their punk band sessions, trying to outshout the screams of their fathers.

On the outset, I tried to disregard ‘the war’ and wanted instead to speak about the dreams and the new challenges faced by young Serbs, Bosnians and Croats. But that turned out to be wishful thinking. Journalists were also unable to circumvent the web of bitterness and hate. In one village you hear about Mladic’s atrocities. Five kilometers from there, Mladic is praised for exactly the same deeds: “Those bastards gouged out the eyes of our boys. Then Mladic got back at them. He’s our hero.”

A hero or a ‘sick mind’, as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia describes him?

Scars
During one of the many commemorations of the massacre at Srebrenica, I travelled with a colleague through the surrounding mountains. We took a dip in the lake, ate trout by the shore and felt guilty. Nearby, the Mothers of Srebrenica were mourning, surrounded by hundreds of cameras from all parts of the world. And we were guilty of committing banalities such as swimming laps in the lake and joking with the men who caught the trout for us.

While we drank our rakija and sunk our teeth into the trout, suddenly one out of the two macho men accompanying us lifted his shirt. “Look! He did this.” He pointed to a scar on his stomach, and winked at his friend. The friend, in turn, removed his shirt. “And what about this?” he said, pointing to his own bullet wound. “This came from his gun.”

We stared while the two men fell into each other’s arms, laughing. Friends, in their forties, sitting by a fire in a valley near Srebrenica. In 1995 the friendly neighbours suddenly turned on each other. Now they grill fish together while their teenage sons play together in the background, kicking their football against the wall of a bullet-sprayed house.

I still see those two subdued teenagers in front of me. Their youth has been held hostage by Mladic’s legacy. Now they are in their twenties, and the ‘sick mind’ has been arrested. You wish them a life without the traumas and hollow laughter of their fathers.