August 1st

Leaving Split, we prepared for another bus day that would take us away from the Adriatic coast north, towards Zagreb.  On our way we entered the Krajina region of Croatia, the "military frontier" of Serbia in which, before the war, a large number of Serb diaspora lived.  When Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, the Serbs in Croatia in turn declared their own independence from Croatia, forming the internationally-unrecognized Republika Srpska Krajina, or the Republic of Serbian Krajina.  These separatists occupied Croatian enclaves in the region, beginning the violence of the wars that would engulf the region (besides the short struggle in Slovenia).  These Serbs were backed by the Yugoslav Army, the JNA, which was predominantly Serb at the time.  At the beginning of the wars, they made significant gains against Croatia.  However, support from Belgrade slowly withdrew due to international sanctions, and the overstretched lines of the Krajina Serbs were pushed back in August of 1995.  The government fled the capital of Knin, and the displacement of the Serbs of the region- numbering in the tens of thousands- was the largest single forced mobilization in Europe since World War II.  Of the original Serb population, numbering at 35-40 thousand, only about 500 to 600 remained in August (these were mainly old people who couldn't make the trip, and would become the victims of war crimes).  Our bus driver, Dragan, a Serb, had served on this front during the war (we didn't get lost anymore!).  Since the war, Serbs have slowly started to move back to the region, but nowhere near their former numbers.  We stopped for lunch in Knin, the formal capital of the failed separatist republic.  I would have liked to stay longer to explore the place where the recent wars of the Balkans essentially began, but we had to move on.

Before heading to Zagreb, our group stopped for an overnight stay in Plitvice National Park, one of the most popular tourist attractions in the region.  This is also the place where, in March 1991, the first casualties of the Croatian war for independence from Yugoslavia occured, when Krajina Serb paramilitaries seized the park and Croat forces attacked to retake it.  Only a handful of us went to experience the park when we arrived, taking a small hike and viewing a few waterfalls.

July 31st

We left Dubrovnik and traveled further up the coast to Split, the second largest city in Croatia.  We had another day off, so again we beached it, swimming and jumping off rocks.  Some of us then walked through the old town (sensing a theme from the history student?).  Split is one of the oldest cities in the area, with some experts dating it at over 1700 years.  Originally a Greek colony, it came under Roman possession.  Walking around, the classical architecture is still dominant.  The marble and layout of the city, with narrow streets opening up into wide squares, certainly is reminiscent of those times.

July 29th-30th

We left Bosnia-Herzegovina to drive to the Dalmatia region of Croatia. Along the way we stopped in Medjugorje, a pilgrimage site for Catholics, to see their big church.  The Vatican has yet to endorse the miracle that is said to have occurred here, when the Virgin Mary appeared to some locals.  We moved on to a Serbian Orthodox church, and one of the clergy there explained how it had been targeted during the war by Croats, with several Serbs being killed in the process.

Moving up the Croatian coast, we drove along the Adriatic into the city of Dubrovnik, a famously beautiful coastal city with a long history.  Dubrovnik was founded in the 7^th century, and was part of the Venetian and Hungarian kingdoms as well as the Ottoman and the Napoleonic Empire.  After World War I, it became part of Croatia.  Early in the war with the Serbs, which the Croats call the “Homeland War,” Dubrovnik was laid siege to in 1991.  The city is built for siege, with high fortress walls, and though the Serbs bombed the hell out of it, they were never able to take Dubrovnik.

After settling in to our hotel, we went to the private beach for some much deserved swimming and relaxing.  Being a tourist town, Dubrovnik is expensive compared to other Balkan cities, but we decided to splurge on a nice dinner for our friend Liz’s birthday!  Dubrovnik was flush with vacationers, and that night out in the old town we met a lot of international people on holiday.  Interesting times were had…

We had Saturday, the 30th, off, so most of us chilled next to the sea, relaxing and swimming.  A group of us went back into town later and toured the fortress walls, offering amazing views of the city and the sea.  Dubrovnik is one of the coolest and most beautiful cities we’ve seen on this trip, though a tad expensive.

July 28th

On our second day in Mostar, we visited the headquarters of the Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica (HDZ), or the Croatian Democratic Union.  This party is a right-wing Croatian party in Bosnia-Herzegovina that represents the conservative Croat minority in the Federation.  Their main issue is the fact that though they are represented in the government, the system doesn’t allow for them to properly select their own officials.  Instead they perceive their Croat leaders as being elected by Bosnian Muslims.  Another goal of theirs is to be as independent in Bosnia-Herzegovina as the Serbs, who have their own defined entity in the country.  They also insisted on using the correct name, Bosnia-Herzegovina, as it includes their region.  It was a strange, crazy visit that we continue to refer to and joke about days later.

July 27th- Leaving Sarajevo

A group of us briefly visited the small museum at the site of the Archduke’s assassination, and spent the morning wandering around Sarajevo, taking in some last minute sights and good food.

We made our way to Mostar, an old, famous city in Herzegovina.  The city is centuries old, and was an important center for the Ottomans, who built the famous bridge there, the Stari Most, in 1566.  The bridge survived all of the conflicts of the region until it was destroyed by Bosnian Croat shelling in 1993, and was the site of fierce fighting during the war.  The rebuilt bridge is a symbol of the history of the city, but also shows its division, with Croats to the west and Muslims to the east.  The authentic old town area, where we ate dinner, offers great food and sightseeing.

July 26th

We visited the Parliament building for Bosnia-Herzegovina, a building that was on the front line during the war and was heavily damaged.  The body returned to the building in 1998 and rebuilding is nearly complete.

We got a deeper look into the wacky government of this country.  Again, it is split evenly among the three constituent peoples of the country: Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Muslims).  Even if someone identified themselves as an ethnic Bosnian, they could not hold an office in the Presidency or the Chamber of Peoples.  We also got to meet two MPs, I forget what party/ethnicity they were.  They stated that Bosnia-Herzegovina’s multi-ethnicity should be an advantage, not a weakness, and showed optimism for reintegration, a different view than we’ve been seeing from our other experiences in Sarajevo.  They realize that they will need a new constitution if they want to join global institutions, such as the EU and NATO, and that the main fault of their constitution, born from the Dayton Treaty, is that it places ethnic rights over civil rights.

We visited the International Court of War Crimes and Organized Crime in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is the busiest war crimes court in the world, both to learn about the current set-up of the federation’s government and to talk with those involved in the prosecution of war crimes.  The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina is complex to say the least.  The constitution that arose from the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 divided the country and government on ethnic lines.  The parties are ethnically based, not necessarily issue-based, which makes harmony and coalition difficult, and some argue that in effect, the causes of the wars have been institutionalized.

We were able to meet two judges from the International Court, both American (one is an NU grad and the other has a son attending now).  Both have worked on important war crimes cases, and serve as judges as well as advisors on effective criminal judicial procedure.  The court uses a hybrid of civil and common law judicial systems, and the Americans offer advice on common law procedure as well training judges and lawyers in the hybrid system, as most that emerge from European law schools are not effective at it.  One example we were shown was a recent decision handed down by one of the American judges that was hundreds of pages long, filled with analysis of each piece of evidence and testimony and a decision based on legal reasoning.  We were then shown a decision from a few years prior in which another judge simply listed the charges, evidence, and decision, totaling to three pages.

At the ICTY in The Hague, of the 86 convicted of war crimes, 79 were Serb.  The court in Bosnia-Herzegovina have a similar ratio, with many more Bosnian Serbs being prosecuted for war crimes, as opposed to Croats and Muslims, of which only a few have been tried.  The difference lies in the magnitude.  The Serbs who massacred have been proven to have taken their orders from the top (Karadzic, Mladic, etc.), and killed mass numbers of civilians in a more or less organized fashion.  The other sides didn’t conduct ethnic cleansing and genocide on the scale that the Serbs did, but it still happened repeatedly.

That afternoon, we met with a Muslim from Sarajevo named Azem, who had been a commander of militia during the war.  He had served in the JNA (for a time under Mladic).  He joined the war in Croatia in September of ’91 against the Serbs, and began organizing and arming local militia back in Bosnia.  When the war moved there he returned to Sarajevo, attempting to form a connection with other neighborhood militia groups to try to fight the well-armed Serb forces.  He described stand-off with the JNA in which he negotiated a cease-fire with the Serb commander in the divided city, and shared other anecdotes and thoughts about the war.  He was mixed on his stance on war crimes, saying that they prolong the guilt of the wars but are necessary for some justice to be had, and could be a way to avoid troubles further on down the road.  However, he also predicted that nationalism will be worse in the future, as the multiculturalism and mixing of ethnicities of pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina and especially Sarajevo doesn’t exist anymore.

That night we went to the Sarajevska Brewery with the NU alum judge for an excellent meal and good beer.  He also walked us around the city a bit, showing the different styles of architecture of the old city.