Blood and Belonging by Michael Ignatieff Page A

prepared to trust. Civilian victims in the area are rightly indifferent to our scruples and our strictures about ethnic cantonment. For the West failed to save Sarajevo, where Muslim, Croat, and Serb lived together in peace for centuries. It is asking the impossible to believe that ordinary people will trickle back to the multi-ethnic villages they have left behind, simply in order to vindicate our liberal principles.
    As you travel through the zones of devastation in centralCroatia, you also have the impression that you have fallen through some hole in time and are spinning backward into the past. You are not in 1993 but in 1943. In Serb villages, old ladies in black scarves and black wool dresses watch you suspiciously as you pass; ribbed hay carts go by, driven by old men in their Second World War khaki forage caps. Out in their back gardens, women are bending over their hoes. On the roads, militiamen, wearing the red, white, and blue shoulder badge of the Serbian Krajina, emerge from dugouts by the road to stop the car and search you. Everyone is wary. Few will talk.
    In one ruined farm, formerly inhabited by Croatians, I came upon an old Serbian couple camped out in the remains of an out-building. They were in their eighties, and they had been driven from their home in Daruvar, forty kilometers to the north, by the Croatians. The old man was sawing up a piece of charred wood for the stove. The old lady was tidying up their tiny room, with its bed, its cracked window, table, two cups and two chairs, and spotlessly swept floor. They had rebuilt the roof themselves, and they survived on what they got from neighbors and the Red Cross. We sit on a stump, in the middle of the ruins, with glass, brick, and burned roof beams littered about, and when I ask them whether this war has been worse than the last one, the old lady replies, with bitter scorn, that this one has been much worse. “In the last one, we all fought the Germans. This time, there was just betrayal.” Neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend. Can you ever live together again? They both shake their heads and look away.
    When I ask them how they manage to survive, they suddenly seem to revive. “God will arrange everything,” they both say, in unison, exchanging a cheerful glance acrosswhat must be fifty years of marriage. When I get up to leave, the old man takes my hand and holds it in a long, intense grip. His bright blue eyes stare deep into mine. “Truth and national rights. That is all we want. Truth and national rights.”
    A mile away, across another checkpoint, this time in the Croatian village of Lipik, I come across a man helping a team of six women in blue overalls to stack up the usable bricks from the rubble of a flattened house. It turns out that he is the owner of the house, and the women are from a municipal detachment sent out to repair damaged houses.
    Tomislav Mareković is the man’s name, Yup to his friends. Yup is the caretaker in the local hospital and a trainer of the local football team in his spare time. I suspect, without knowing for sure, that he also is a prominent local supporter of the HDZ, the ruling Croatian party. Why else, I reason, is his the only house I can find in Lipik where the rubble is being cleared by a municipal work detail?
    He shows me where his kitchen was, where the television set used to be, where his couch stood. Now there is nothing left but the foundations and a mound of bricks which the women are stacking in piles after chipping away the mortar. Next door’s house was untouched. Why? I ask. Serbs, he says. We always got on. Now, he says, they are in West Germany. And the house next door? My parents’, he says laconically. Suddenly he points out into the street. “That is where they left my father. There, in the street, for three weeks, before someone buried the body. And my mother, they took her to a barn and set her on fire.”
    Yugoslav army tanks, dug into