07 Apr 2022 12:56
Thirty years ago the Bosnian War began. They are not few. In thirty years Italy has passed from the referendum on the monarchy to that on divorce, Europe from the rubble of war to the freest and most opulent years in its history. In Bosnia, wartime has forever entangled itself in the pitted buildings of Sarajevo, in the roofless houses south of the Sava River, in an institutional architecture that seems to unite three peoples only to separate them better.
Thirty years after the start of the conflict and twenty-seven after the Dayton accords that decreed its end, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Croats and Serbs have a single state but two and a half republics: one for the Serbs, one for the Bosniaks and the Croats and one coveted by Croatians who would like to set up on their own. The brotherhood and unity that, willy-nilly, all the citizens of the former Yugoslavia professed has vanished without residue: along the Drina or in the Bosnian Krajina the civil war was so violent that thirty years were not even enough to recover the bodies of all victims.
In September 2016, a mass grave returned a black sack with the remains of reporter Kjašif Smajlović. Interviewed by Balkan Insight, his daughter Alma says something that gives the measure of an infinite post-war period: “That’s why we had never found a bone of my father, it was all there”. As if it were a privilege, to recover the whole corpse. Smajlović was 51 years old and was the local correspondent for Oslobođenje, the courageous newspaper that helped the Sarajevese through the 1,425 days of the siege. Serbian paramilitaries, most likely under the command of Commander Arkan, aka Željko Ražnatović, killed him on April 9, 1992. Exactly thirty years ago, he was the first journalist to fall in the Bosnian war.
Depending on the sources, the count of reporters killed in the three years of the Bosnian conflict varies greatly: the Mediacentar of Sarajevo speaks of a number between 34 and 52, the Committee to protect journalists counts 19, in their recent, highly documented essay Damn Sarajevo (Neri Pozza) Francesco Battistini and Marzio Mian give the names of 25 journalists killed between April 1992 and September 1995. There are many Bosnians but also Italians, Europeans and Americans.
The siege of Sarajevo and the Bosnian war terrified and thrilled the whole world. But the first to fall, Kjašif Smajlović, was not a war reporter. In the family photos he gives the impression of being a happily sedentary man, smiling, ironic, instinctively well disposed towards those in front of him. The son Nedim now lives in Austria, in Linz, and does not need many words to indicate the existential coordinates of his father: “he loved journalism, family, friends”. For years he had covered the lower reaches of the Drina, the region between Srebrenica, Bratunac and Zvornik, which from an idyllic out-of-the-way district would soon become the epicenter of the conflict.
Kjašif Smajlović.
(Mediacentar)
Smajlović did not have an envoy’s fever, and he was not looking for war. It was the war that found him: he overflowed into Bosnia from the Croatian battlefields and in a few days spread everywhere. In Zvornik the war came to tear down the “river mosque” and build new Orthodox churches that would rededicate the lands conquered by the “Turks” half a millennium earlier. But it came above all because the troops of Arkan, Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević were craving the bridges over the Drina that connected Bosnia to Serbia, or the scene of the clashes, to the immense rear line that would never stop supplying men, weapons, ideological and diplomatic cover-ups: “Twenty-four years after his death, my father’s body was found in a sack with the Yugoslav army mark,” says Nedim. On the first day of the war, the inhabitants of Zvornik made a dramatic appeal to the Yugoslav People’s Army to defend them from the Serbian militias that were entering the city. They did not know that the Belgrade commands had already lined up alongside them.
It all happened in less than twenty-four hours: “At 9.55 am on 8 April the first grenade was thrown from the opposite bank of the Drina, then it was a frenzy of explosions until the evening”, recalls Nedim Smajlović. Kjašif’s best friend was Serbian and worked as marketing manager in Oslobođenje: “He hadn’t been to the office for two days and a few hours before the fighting started he spoke to my father on the phone: ‘Sorry if I didn’t warn you but I moved to Serbia, I prefer to stay a bit far from Zvornik ‘”. Even Nedim’s best friend was Serbian, he had a shop in the center but that day he left the shutters down: “A lot of them left, they had warned them of the attack and they didn’t tell us anything”. Nedim and his Serbian friend had a third great friend, a Muslim like the Smajlović: “They captured him in the very first days of the war,” recalls Nedim. “He was in line with the other prisoners when he saw our Serbian friend pass by who was already wearing the uniform of the paramilitaries. In the end he was saved, today he lives in Tuzla, but he has never forgotten that in times of need for him, his close friend of him pretended not to know him “.
The war suddenly breaks out and suddenly severes the bonds knotted in an intimate sequence of elementary, middle, high schools and much more.
If he had gone too, who would have told of the disaster? Precisely for this reason they killed him
Meanwhile, under the bombs, Kjašif Smajlović does not stop working: on the day of his death Oslobođenje has his correspondence from the day before on the page. It tells of the Serbian ultimatum, the appeal of civilians calling for protection from the army and the arrest of four Arkan militiamen by a last shred of established authority. In this last article Kjašif probably talks about those who will be his killers. He does not have time to write that they were released that same evening, but provides a final proof of desperate professional rigor: he lists the names and professions of those arrested, but he is also keen to report their reasons. Arkan’s four say they are in Zvornik “to prevent Muslims from arming themselves”. It is his last article by him before being overwhelmed by a slaughter which, in Zvornik alone, will make almost three thousand civilian victims found in dozens of mass graves in the surrounding area.
For Kjašif, the war lasts very little, from morning to morning: “We met the night before, I told him I was going to leave, I asked him what he thought he was doing,” recalls the son. “He told Me that he would stay. And that if he had disappeared his colleagues would have been able to discover the truth ”. He is a reporter. He has no weapons, he does not fight, he does not run away. The next morning he is back at work: there is so much to tell, you have to do it quickly, because the war is running and every minute is news. He tries to call the central office in Sarajevo, but the siege has started there too, the communication is interrupted. He then calls him Tuzla.
Selveta “Sele” Ahmedinović, historical secretary of the Oslobođenje correspondence office, answers. Kjašif does not know that while he dials the number of his colleague a jeep with three soldiers has already stopped in front of his office. He said his latest dispatch: gusts, grenades, the fall of Zvornik between continuous explosions. And then his last words: “Move Sele, write faster. I’m afraid they’re coming for me. I hear their footsteps on the stairs. I’m afraid this will be my last communication ”. Kjašif Smajlović is killed on the morning of April 9, 1992, the family will know it only two weeks later: “But we soon understood what had happened: with my mother we were sheltered in Serbia, on the other side of the river, and from there we saw the trucks full of corpses that left the city accompanied by excavators ”. To the terrified secretary who asks why he didn’t run away, Kjašif replies “I am a journalist”. If he had gone too, who would have told of the disaster? Precisely for this reason they killed him: “As soon as they entered the city, Arkan’s men rushed towards his office,” says Nedim. “They knew that ethnic cleansing was going to be bloody and they didn’t want witnesses.”
Just as the Bosnian war was not simply a war but a massacre, so the assassination of Kjašif was not just a murder but a massacre: it was immediately said that they had tortured him before killing him, for years rumors ran around that before they had smashed the typewriter in the head to shoot him. He was not only a Muslim but a journalist, he had to be suppressed with the tools of his trade. The discovery of his body revealed that in addition to six gunshots to the chest and pelvis, Kjašif suffered a skull breakthrough. His fingers were broken: “A neighbor had seen everything from the window and she described a scene of absolute brutality” explains Nedim. “Tests on the corpse confirmed the story.”
No one has ever paid for the death of Kjašif Smajlović. No one has been prosecuted or convicted, no one has ever asked forgiveness for his murder. And in the city where he was killed, now overwhelmingly Serb, nothing remembers his life as a brave reporter: not a street, a school, a license plate. Absolutely nothing. But fifty kilometers from Zvornik, just before the Drina goes to swell the large water of the Sava, stands Bijelijina, which by number of inhabitants is the second center of the Republika Srpska of Bosnia. In his latest articles for Oslobodenje, Kjašif Smajlović had time to register the taking of the city by the Serbian paramilitaries, the same ones who later killed him. Here, in Zvornik no one remembers the victim, but in Bijelijina the main street is dedicated to the executioners. More: Serbian Volunteer Guard street, the official name of Arkan’s tigers, flows into Draža Mihailović square, leader of the Chetniks in World War II.
The weight of toponymy should not be overestimated. But here the full and empty seem to compose almost a manifesto, an absurd self-condemnation: in these parts no peace, only angry intervals between one war and another.