Free The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon Page A

clung to as war loomed over what Sarajevans called “common life.”
    The parliament eventually decided a referendum was the way to go. It took place in February 1992; the Serbs boycotted it while the majority of Bosnians voted for independence. Throughout March, there were barricades on the streets of Sarajevo, much shooting in the mountains around it. In April, Karad ž i ć ’s snipers aimed at a peaceful antiwar demonstration in front of the parliament building, and two women were killed. On May 2, Sarajevo was cut off from the rest of the world and the longest siege in modern history began. By the end of the summer, nearly every front page in the universe had published a picture from a Serbian death camp. By that time, I understood that Karad ž i ć had wagged the stick of genocide at the Bosnian Muslims in his address to the hapless Bosnian Parliament, while the unappetizing carrot was their bare survival. “Don’t make me do it,” he was essentially saying. “For I will be perfectly at home in the hell I create for you.”
    Now I have little doubt that, regardless of the outcome of the parliamentary session, Karad ž i ć would have gladly sped in his motorcade down the hell-and-suffering highway. What I didn’t see then is clear to me now: the possibility of war not happening was already completely foreclosed. The annihilation machine was happily revving, everything was in place for the genocide operations, the purpose of which was not only the destruction and displacement of Bosnian Muslims but also the unification of the ethnically pure lands into a Greater Serbia. Why had he staged that performance before the parliament, since peace was never an option? Why did he bother?
    I have spent time trying to comprehend how everything I had known and loved came violently apart; I have been busy obsessively parsing the details of the catastrophe to understand how it could have taken place. After Karad ž i ć ’s arrest, I watched the YouTube clip, trying to figure out why he had bothered. Now I know: the point of that performance was the performance itself. It was not meant for the beleaguered Bosnian Parliament but for the patriotic Serbs watching the broadcast, for those ready to embark upon an epic project that would take sacrifice, murder, and ethnic cleansing to be completed. Karad ž i ć was showing his people that he was as tough and determined a leader as need be, yet neither unwise nor unreasonable. He was indicating that war would not be a rash decision on his part, while capable of recognizing that genocide might be inescapable. If there was a difficult job to be done, he was going to do it unflinchingly and ruthlessly. He was the leader who was going to lead his people through the hell of murder to the land where honor and salvation awaited them.
    The model for Karad ž i ć ’s role was provided by Petar Petrovi ć Njego š ’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath ( Gorski vijenac ). Just like everyone else, I was forced to study it in school as it was part of the socialist cannon, easy to interpret within the framework of “freedom,” widely available in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Set at the end of the seventeenth century and published in 1847, it is deeply embedded in the tradition of Serbian epic poetry; a foundational text of Serbian cultural nationalism, it always bored me to tears. Its central character is Vladika Danilo, the bishop and sovereign of Montenegro, the only Serbian territory unconquered at the time by the powerful and all-encroaching Ottoman Empire. Vladika Danilo thinks he has a major problem: some Montenegrin Serbs have converted to Islam. For him, they are the fifth column of the Turks, a people who could never be trusted, a permanent threat to the freedom and sovereignty of the Serbian people.
    Wise leader that he is, Vladika Danilo summons a council to help him find the solution. He listens to the advice of various bloodthirsty warriors: “Without suffering no song is sung,” one of