By 1995, the fortunes of war began to change and the Serbs had largely lost control of that part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were able to begin sending trucks of aid into the city of Bihac, which had endured a horrific three-year siege, and then to our friends’ hometown of Bosanski Petrovac. Suad began to receive messages from people who had already returned home to their town, urging them to come back too. And so, despite having no savings, no paid employment opportunities there, no assurance of safety, only a badly damaged home and some fields that might now have mines in them, they decided to go home. And we decided to go with them. We filled a large truck with all the belongings they had accumulated in Glasgow, as well as various other goods and tools to help them begin their lives again from scratch. Meanwhile, we had also been donated a minibus for a psychiatric hospital in Croatia to which we regularly delivered aid, and so we formed a plan for me to drive the group home in that minibus and then leave it at the hospital before flying home. The BBC heard of our plan and decided to make a documentary about our journey. And so, for the benefit of the cameramen, we waved goodbye to the bulging truck as it departed ahead of us from our Glasgow warehouse, and climbed into our bus. The group ranged from a two-year-old to an elderly granny. We headed south towards the ferry and Europe.
On arrival in Belgium we stopped at the customs post to show our passports. The police studied the Bosnians’ papers and were clearly unhappy. They asked questions and made phone calls. They told us the papers were valid for entry into Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina only, but not for transiting the European countries in between. They decided to deport us back to the UK. We also asked questions and made phone calls, but to no avail, and later we found ourselves travelling back on the boat to England. I realized the Bosnians had no homes to return to in Glasgow and that their belongings were already well on their way to Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with the BBC film crew. I phoned Julie to check what money we had left in our bank account and what flights from Heathrow would cost. We calculated that we had just enough to fly the whole group to Zagreb. So I drove them to Heathrow Airport from the ferry terminal and put them on their plane. I then headed south again, catching my third cross-Channel ferry in two days, and pointed my bus towards Zagreb. By now I could drive to our various destinations in the former Yugoslavia without needing a map, and this time it was pleasing to see just how quickly I was transiting countries compared to the slower pace of progress I had become used to in the lorry. Meanwhile Julie arranged for the Bosnian families to be met by Marijo on their arrival in Zagreb, who took them home to stay with them while waiting for me to catch up. When I finally did arrive the next day, they all climbed back in the bus for the final leg of their emotional journey over the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina. It amazed me, when I finally watched the documentary broadcast by the BBC about this journey, to see how skilfully they pieced together the footage so there was no hint of the deportations and flights that had occurred in between the Glasgow departure and the arrival into Bosnia-Herzegovina!
After the usual checking of papers at the Bosnian border we were finally waved through. As we entered Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zlata broke the silence with a cry.
‘We are no longer refugees!’
Everyone in the bus was crying. And the sobs grew louder when we finally reached Bosanski Petrovac, which was in ruins. Every building was covered in bullet holes and many houses had been reduced to pitiful piles of rubble.
The welcome they received from dear friends they had not seen for over three years was full of raw emotion. There was so much news to exchange. So many terrible things experienced that they had never had a chance to discuss and to try and understand. So many changes, too, in their old town. The Serbs were now gone. The town was now Muslim in a way it never had been before. A new mosque was being built even while many of the houses still lay in ruins. For Muslims like those I had just arrived with, their religion had not been something they previously practised. In fact I had met some young Muslims during the war who told me they never even knew they were Muslim before the war. Only their surname denoted their religion and sometimes sealed their fate. Bosnanski Petrovac might be home, and their hearts rejoiced at being back, but in some ways it was an alien land. I felt a little awkward. These encounters and exchanges that I found myself in the midst of were so personal and intimate that I wanted to leave them to work through it without me, however they could.
I left Bosanski Petrovac very early the next morning, leaving Suad and his family sleeping in their own home. I should have felt elated, but my drive was not a comfortable one. I travelled for many miles through a countryside and villages utterly devoid of people. Wild dogs, the only other sign of life, roamed amid the rubble and rubbish. This was part of the krajina, an area occupied by the Serbs for most of the war. They had only recently been defeated here and I became increasingly scared as I drove through this wasteland on my own. I began to doubt whether those in Bosnanski Petrovac, only recently returned themselves, had been well-informed when they advised me it would be safe to drive this route to Croatia and the Adriatic coast, where the hospital was awaiting the minibus. And given the lack of road signs, and any other way of checking I was on the right road, I began to fear I would drive into an area where I should not be welcome. The hours went past without seeing a human. As well as fear, a new overwhelming loathing for war and its futility rose in me. I wondered what would become of all the Serbs who had now been forced to flee the empty houses by the side of road and the villages to which they had belonged for generations. It was clear there were no winners in this war, only people taking their turn to lose in very horrible ways.
Eventually, I did find my way out of the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina and that same evening I found myself in a different world, eating delicious fish by the sparkling Adriatic with some friends from the hospital, who rejoiced over their new bus.
It was only on the flight home that I remembered our bank account. The £4,200 we had spent on plane tickets to Zagreb had left us with almost nothing. The aid donations would be piling up. I began to wonder how we would pay some outstanding bills and find a way to finance the next delivery. When I arrived back, a smiling Julie could not wait to tell me her news.
‘A cheque arrived this morning from a priest in Ireland. We don’t know him. He doesn’t want a thank-you letter. He wants this to remain anonymous,’ she said, her voicing cracking with emotion. ‘It is for £4,200.’
4
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
MAHATMA GANDHI
It took me a long time to decipher how the jumble of numbers on my train ticket related to the carriages, compartments and bunk beds of a night train pulling out of Bucharest railway station, bound for Transylvania, just before midnight, on a very cold and dark April night in 1998. When I eventually found the right compartment I was dismayed to discover it full of young Romanian soldiers drinking beer. They did not look particularly happy when I entered and I felt a little intimidated. It took lengthy persuasion and much pointing at my ticket (they didn’t have English and I had no Romanian) before a young, well-built man with a shaven head gave up my bed upon which he had been sitting. As the train chugged through an area of bleak-looking high-rise flats in the suburbs of the capital city, one of the soldiers surprised me by offering me a swig of his beer. I accepted and just as I was handing the bottle back the window of our carriage smashed inwards. A small rock landed on the floor between the bunks and shattered glass sprinkled the cabin. The reaction of my travel companions suggested this was just an act of random vandalism, but as the cold night air rushed into our compartment, and we did our best to snuggle under our meagre blankets, I questioned the wisdom of travelling to this country I knew so little about. But then I remembered the email that had led me here. I had received it, out of the blue, a few weeks earlier from an American lady called Kristl Killian. She introduced herself as a volunteer who was working with children in Romania who had been abandoned in hospitals in the city of Targu Mures, and she was making a desperate plea for us to send basic supplies.
Конец