The Wolf of Sarajevo (11 page)

MOSTAR

OCTOBER 23

T
o look at it now, it was hard to believe that Mostar had been the site of some of the most intense and vicious fighting of the Bosnian War. This city had been the focal point of the fighting between Croat and Muslim forces before Washington had forced a peace and a shotgun wedding between the two sides in a Federation that neither had ever fully embraced. The centerpiece of Mostar was Stari Most, an elegant bridge made of white limestone that arched gracefully over the Neretva River. The bridge had stood for more than four centuries, and a rotating cast of conquerors and foreign overseers had marveled at its otherworldly beauty: Ottomans and Austrians, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, Yugoslavs of all flavors and the nationalist splinters left after the country's disintegration. All had trod the bridge's cobbled street as rulers.

Then, in 1993, a Croat artillery unit had targeted the bridge,
hitting it with some sixty shells before it finally collapsed into the Neretva, leaving behind two towers on opposite banks with stubby stone arms reaching out across the river straining to touch. The Croatian Defense Council claimed that the bridge was of strategic importance. In truth, it had held little military value. The shelling of Stari Most was an assault on culture, an act of killing memory. The Croat paramilitaries had wanted to erase any trace of shared heritage, of Islamic achievement.

In this, as in so many other things, they had failed. The bridge had been rebuilt after the war at considerable expense, using as much of the original stone as possible. Still, while the physical gap across the river had been repaired, the rift between the two sides had never really been closed.

Eric told Annika something of the history of the bridge as they walked from the old mosque on the left bank to the bazaar area on the opposite side of the Neretva. The sky was the color of slate. It had been raining lightly off and on all day, and the cobblestone streets were slick. They took their time.

At the midpoint of the bridge, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy stopped to take a selfie.

“For my Facebook page,” she explained somewhat sheepishly. “At the end of the day, I'm still a politician.”

Eric nodded absentmindedly. He was distracted, thinking about Sarah.

They had had it out on the ride back to Sarajevo. Sarah clearly knew more than she had let on about what leverage Marko Barcelona had on Dimitrović. She had been holding back on him. Even more worrisome, she had not really pushed back against Viktor's accusation that she was essentially freelancing, operating without
official sanction from their government. How Mali could know that seemed an important and interesting question. But neither as important nor as interesting as whether or not it was true.

“Is it?” Eric had demanded. “Is it true?”

“It's complicated,” Sarah had replied.

“Bullshit. It's yes or no. Do you have the authority for what we're doing out here, or did you put our necks on the block on spec, just looking to see what you can turn up?”

“Eric, the CIA is a bureaucracy, and like all bureaucracies, it sometimes wants things that it cannot ask for. You need to see that we are doing the right thing.”

“Where's the line, Sarah? What separates an informal effort from a rogue operation?”

“Success,” she countered. “And secrecy.”

The drive back to Sarajevo had seemed to take a very long time.

With a conscious effort of will, Eric shunted all of that off to the side. That problem was for later. He was in Mostar to introduce Annika to someone he thought could help them.

“Can this really work?” Annika asked, as they neared the café where Eric's friend had agreed to meet them. “What you've proposed is more than unorthodox, it's . . .” The High Representative was at a loss for words.

“Nuts?” Eric suggested.

“Yes. That just about sums it up.”

“Got any better ideas?”

“No,” Annika admitted. She looked tired. The burden and responsibility of peacemaking was weighing heavily on her. They were not succeeding, and the consequences of failure were too awful to contemplate.

“So why not at least put this on the table?” Eric asked.

“Why the hell not,” she agreed.

—

It started to rain again
just as they reached their destination, a café with a view of the old bridge and the somewhat unimaginative name View of the Old Bridge. Much of life in the Balkans revolved around the café. This is where business was done, friendships sealed, and courtships conducted. The View of the Old Bridge had been in business for more than a century, and it had not changed all that much over the years.

A few patrons looked at them with unabashed curiosity when they stepped inside. Annika was well known to those who read the papers and Eric's look—which was mainstream for New York or London—was decidedly exotic by local standards. He had long ago learned to tune it out.

The café was open to the street, with a mix of tables inside and in a fenced-off garden area out front. Eric led Annika to a table in the garden under an awning that shielded it from the rain. The man sitting at the table was young and looked even younger than his thirty-four years. Black hair framed a face that was arresting if not conventionally handsome. His ice-blue eyes were his dominant feature and together with his easy smile were the key to his considerable appeal to women. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. A copy of the Sarajevo daily
Oslobođenje
sat on the table next to his coffee.

He rose when he saw Eric and folded him into an embrace.

“Good to see you, my friend.”

“And you. Annika, this is Nikola Petrović, leader of the political opposition in Republika Srpska.”

“Such as it is,” Nikola said modestly.

He took Annika's hand and held it for just a moment too long, an invitation. Nikola was incorrigible, but Annika, Eric was quite confident, could handle him.

They sat at the table and ordered coffee. The rain was heavier now, running off the awning and wrapping them in a curtain of water and sound. Eric realized that Nikola had chosen the table deliberately. He did not want their conversation to be overheard. It was why they were meeting in Mostar, far from the reach of the RS state security. It was so easy to slip back into the old paranoid behaviors.

“Nikola is the head of the Social Democratic Party,” Eric said to Annika, as though she were hearing this for the first time. In reality, he had already briefed her thoroughly in advance of the conversation, but it would be helpful for Nikola to hear the thinking behind the proposition Eric was about to put to him. “The SDP was part of the governing coalition with Dimitrović's National Party when it was backing a unitary Bosnia and eventual EU and even NATO membership. When the National Party turned back to the dark side—or however you want to describe it—the Social Democrats left the government and set themselves up as the loyal opposition.”

“How many seats do you control?” Annika asked Nikola.

“We have seventeen deputies,” Nikola said.

“And how many seats are there in the RS assembly?”

“Eighty-three.”

“But the SDP has allies,” Eric hastened to assure her.

“Powerful allies,” Nikola added with a grin.

“Dazzle me.”

“Well, the United Party of Roma—that's the Gypsies—have two
seats. The Party of Pensioners—that's the graybeards and the blue hairs—have four. And Youth of the Left—that's the longhairs—have three. That's pretty much it, bringing my grand coalition up to a total of twenty-seven opposition parliamentarians.”

“About a third of the assembly,” Annika suggested.

“Missed that mark by zero-point-seven assemblymen. Believe me, I've done the math. And there are a couple of guys in the ruling party who would easily count as zero-point-seven human beings at the most if we were allowed to keep score that way.”

Annika laughed, and it seemed to take years off her age. It was nice to see her start to relax.

Nikola too seemed to sense that Annika was warming to him, and while his motives may well have been less than pure, he was clearly doing everything he could to radiate charm.

“Nikola, how much do you know about what Annika is doing in Bosnia?”

“Just what I read in the papers.”

“The Sondergaard Plan may be Bosnia's last, best chance to avert another war. Another terrible war. The peace conference is going ahead with or without Zoran Dimitrović in two weeks. That doesn't give us a lot of time to prepare.”

“Then why are you wasting a precious afternoon on me?”

“We need your help.”

“To fix Bosnia?”

“Yes.”

Nikola looked at Annika, his blue eyes focused on the High Rep as though she were the only person in the world.
It was a neat trick,
Eric thought. One he would do well to learn.

“How much has our friend Eric taught you about Bosnia?” Nikola asked.

“More than I knew two weeks ago.”

“Has he introduced you to the wonders of Mujo and Haso?”

“What is it?”

“Not what, who. Muhamed and Hasan are the quintessential Bosnian everymen. Simple village folk who somehow are always coming out on top near the end.

“In any event, Haso goes fishing one day at the height of the war and catches the magic goldfish. ‘Let me go,' the fish says, ‘and I will grant you a wish. Anything your heart desires.'

“So Haso shows the fish the Contact Group map that had been proposed by the big powers as a way to split the country up among Serbs, Muslims, and Croats, and bring peace to Bosnia. Things weren't going so good with that. And Haso says to the fish, ‘I want you to draw the lines on the map in such a way that everyone's happy and there's peace in our time.' The fish takes a good long look at the map and says: ‘I can't do that. I don't think anyone can do that. Do you have anything that might be more within the scope of my power?'

“‘Well,' Haso says. ‘There's my wife, Fata. I'd like Fata to be beautiful.'

“‘Bring her by,' the fish says. So Haso goes home, and he collects Fata and brings her to the lake and presents her to the fish. And the fish takes a good long look at Fata and says: ‘Let me see that map again.'”

Annika laughed. Eric smiled. He had heard the joke before. He had heard all of Nikola's ten thousand jokes before. But Nikola told them well.

“So what do you want me to do?” Nikola asked. He seemed genuinely puzzled that an EU diplomat might be in need of his assistance. His confusion was not without foundation. What Eric was about to offer defied conventional political logic.

“We want you to represent Republika Srpska at the peace conference in Sarajevo,” Eric explained. He tried not to make it sound like “We want you to grow wings and fly,” but it came awfully close.

Nikola snorted.

“My joke was funnier.”

“I'm not joking.”

“Come on, Eric. I'm the leader of the opposition. It's a parliamentary system. The opposition is like a third tit. I can't even fix a parking ticket. How am I supposed to speak for the RS at a bloody international conference?”

“Easy,” Eric said calmly. “You represent the RS public. Not the government. Not Dimitrović. Think about it. The people who voted for him voted for his platform. They wanted Europe. They wanted a functioning state. They wanted peace and reconciliation. There were plenty of far-right loonies on the ballot. They didn't win. Dimitrović won and you won. Now you still represent those positions—the positions that won the democratic election—and Dimitrović does not. He's not the guy the people voted for. You are. You can speak for them. They asked you to speak for them.”

“That's a little . . .” Nikola was not certain how to finish the sentence. For the first time ever in their long friendship, Eric saw that he was at a loss for words.

“Bold?” Eric suggested. “Visionary? Brilliant?”

“No, that wasn't where I was going. Lunatic is closer to what I was thinking.”

“It was Dimitrović who broke faith with the electorate,” Eric insisted. “It was all a giant game of bait and switch. Step forward and let the people know that they still have a champion.”

Nikola looked over at Annika helplessly.

“Don't look at me,” she said. “Eric's right. You can do this. We need you to do this. You may well be the only thing standing between the Bosnian people and another bloody civil war.”

Nikola looked unhappy.

“Don't put that on me,” he pleaded.

“No one can put it on you, Nikola. You have to take it. You have to accept it. No one can force you to.”

“But how would it be legitimate? How could it? I only have a third of the assembly.”

“Legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder,” Eric said. “If enough people believe that what you are doing is fair and just, the legitimacy will follow naturally from that.”

“This sounds almost like a coup,” Nikola insisted.

“Nope. You're not overthrowing the government. You're representing the majority of RS voters who chose peace and reconciliation when they were given the opportunity. Come to the conference. Speak for them. Give them a voice.”

“You know that they might just kill me and dump my body in the Drina.”

“I can get you protection.”

“Easy for you to say.”

The rain had let up and the clouds broke. The sun peeked out
uncertainly, and the wet limestone of Stari Most glistened like the scales on the brook trout that the local fishermen pulled from the green waters of the Neretva. Nikola noticed it as well.

“All you need is a pigeon with an olive branch and you'd be Noah.” Serbo-Croatian did not distinguish between pigeon and dove.

“Do I get my own miracle?” Eric asked.