A BLACK MARKET IN HUMANITY
Charles Glass argues that many Serbs are
doing their best to help the Bosnian Muslims, none more so than black-marketeers
Sarajevo HE WAS like most of the Serbian soldiers serving in the army of the Bosnian Serb Republic. He was a little overweight, all the more noticeable to someone coming from Sarajevo. There are no fat people in the Bosnian capital, where food shortages leave little to eat, and the absence of elec- tricity for the lifts and petrol for cars makes people walk everywhere. The Bosnian gov- ernment says the average Sarajevan is 20 kilograms lighter than at the beginning of the year. The Serbs outside the city, on the other hand, are remarkably well fed and look it. The soldier at the checkpoint in the hills above Sarajevo looked tough and self- assured. He had the short hair common to most young men here, wore a dark, pressed uniform and searched our car as insou- ciantly as any Latin customs officer. He and his comrades-in-arms monitor all traffic into and out of the city. It is their task to make certain no weapons or ammu- nition reach their enemies in the Bosnian government army and to control the flow of all civilian supplies. They prevent much food from coming into the city, and they make it difficult for Bosnian young men to leave. They control all access routes, and they stop and check vehicles belonging to the United Nations. They confiscate mail and, occasionally, newspapers. (French UN soldiers have, for reasons the French gov- ernment and the UN have failed to explain, done the same to journalists here.) Every- thing that comes into Sarajevo, and every- thing that goes out, can do so only with the permission of these Serbian soldiers.
The young warrior, whose name I do not know, invited me into his guard hut next to the checkpoint. It was in a quiet spot under some pines. He pointed to a closed card- board box on th'e floor and asked me to take it for him to Sarajevo. He said I could search the box if I liked. He wanted me to deliver it to a friend, whose address in the city he gave me. Inside the box was food.
In Pale, the capital of the illegal Bosnian Serb Republic, a woman who used to live in Sarajevo was telling me that life in Pale was painfully dull without her regular visits to the city. She was a Bosnian Serb who 'It was disgusting — they had a cigarette afterwards.'
had moved to the mountain village to be with her husband. For her and other edu- cated Serbs, Sarajevo was the only escape from the boredom of life among simple peasants.
She took me to a vegetable market in Pale, where old women weighed cabbages and cucumbers and quoted prices in the billions of worthless Serbian dinars. Both of us bought bags of fresh tomatoes, pota- toes, cucumbers and apples. I was taking supplies back to the city for our office staff, and she asked me to take her purchases to a friend in Sarajevo.
Gestures of kindness do not fit the popu- lar image of the Serbs, who have commit- ted some of the most spectacular war crimes of the bloody Yugoslav wars. Yet, every day, Serbs do show themselves to be kind and humane, all the more so because they defy their own leaders to do so, because they risk retribution to remain human amid the bestiality of the war. Although most of the food that reaches Sarajevo comes on UN aid flights, much comes from individual Serbs, whose neigh- bours in Sarajevo will have cause to thank them when the war is over. Much of the rest comes from the black market, which the Bosnian government and the UN, inex- plicably, have done their utmost to close. I suspect it is a mistake to prosecute black- marketeers, who help to keep the city stocked with food, cigarettes, whisky, wine and medicines. They make money, of course, but they also perform a service, as does the decency of a few Serbs.
At a night-club in Sarajevo, La Boheme, I bumped into a friend who appeared to have lost more than the usual 20 kilos. When I asked him what had happened, he said the army had put him in jail for six days for having bought petrol on the black market. Prison conditions were not too bad, he said, but there was not much to eat. Around the cabaret, to the sweet sounds of a woman singing Bosnian love songs, men and women were eating black-market beef and drinking black-market whisky. Black- market diesel powered the generator that gave us electricity. Smoke from black-mar- ket cigarettes lingered in the air. Anyone who has not lived through a war or has not spoken to Londoners who stayed through the Blitz has no idea how important social life and little enjoyments become. Without them, morale collapses. With them, people can endure. If it were up to me, I would award gold medals with clusters to every black-marketeer in and around Sarajevo. They keep the city going.
Some of the black-marketeers are UN soldiers. The more sanctimonious members of the press corps — most of whom would have left Sarajevo long ago but for the lux- uries afforded by the illegal sale of vital commodities — and UN information offi- cers have been most disapproving of the UN soldiers who make money from the war. The UN announced proudly that one colonel was removed from his post and sent home to receive an unspecified pun- ishment for black-market activities. Ukrainian UN soldiers have been caught smuggling cigarettes into Sarajevo to sell for hard currency.
Some quartermasters with UN battalions have requisitioned more supplies, particu-
'Well, now we have all the trappings of failure.' larly petrol, than they need, selling the rest to anyone who can pay. There is money to be made from war, just as there are careers in UN relief work, journalism and soldier- ing to be won. If the UN really wanted to stop the black market, they would remove its causes: the siege, which the UN denies is taking place, and the war, which politi- cians in the United States, Britain and France want to pretend will simply go away.
The worst conditions now are in the Muslim quarter of Mostar, a city on the banks of the River Neretva in central Bosnia. The Croats have the people there, about 50,000, surrounded, and they are permitting nothing in and no one out. The UN, in its feeble and dogged fashion, repeatedly asks the Croats for permission to relieve the town, and the Croats have obliged by allowing one small UN convoy to enter. Perhaps a few decent Croats are smuggling food and medicine into their friends and former neighbours, and I like to think some black-marketeers are finding ways to bring in food that the Croatian army cannot stop.
Winter is coming, and Bosnia-Hercegov- ina is ill-placed to endure it again. Its stocks of firewood and other fuels were depleted last winter. People in Sarajevo fear they will not survive a second winter under siege. The international community, whatever that is, will not stop the war before the snows fall. The only hope is a larger black market, which will keep the Bosnians of Sarajevo, Mostar and else- where supplied with ammunition to defend themselves, with food to feed their children and fuel to light the fires of the long, bleak winter to come.
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