LITERARY | Bosnia and the Value of White Lies
June 2011 | Daniel J. Gerstle
Please note: As it relates to the story, until the 2000s, many Bosnians, Serbians, and Montenegrins who were Muslim or with Muslim family self-identified simply as “Musliman,” as the term Bosniak was still contensious, especially when spoken in Serbia or Montenegro outside of territorial Bosnia.
On World Refugee Day, and as the Bosnian Serb war crimes convict, Ratko Mladić, was arraigned in The Hague, we at HB / HELO Magazine offer you an unusually frank look back at the US refugee resettlement process for Bosnians. Threatened with violence in their home countries, millions of refugees around the world struggle to survive with next to nothing. Some believe starting over in a new nation is their only hope.
Would you lie to get a US visa? What if you were the lie detector sitting on the other side of the desk, how would you decide who deserves a new life? This short story is a composite of true events. Names have been changed.
Where did you live when the war began? When did they first come to your home? How many times did they hit you? How much money did they steal? How many times did they rape you? Tell me everything and I will write it down.
These were the questions I asked seven hundred families who fled the Bosnian War to Croatia in the late 1990s. Each family wanted to go to America to escape the horrific violence plaguing southeast Europe. I was the newest addition to an experienced team of Croatians and Americans creating applications for asylum in an office on the Dalmatian Riviera. After each refugee family passed our gates and waited a good deal of processing time, an American INS officer would detect their truths a second time and give final approval or denial.
That year, I got very close to Bosnian culture, got to know many families, and researched every detail about how each town got divided. While trying to do what was right for large numbers of people, I allowed myself to be manipulated by someone I worked very hard to help. The experience taught me a great deal about refugees, about survival, and about the subjectivity and value of a lie.
“I am a Muslim from Rogatitsa,” one fortyish woman began. She sat across from the table in my office in Split. There was a map of Croatia and Bosnia on the wall behind her. The open window overlooking the Adriatic Sea allowed in soft gusts of salt-water air. The woman, in contrast, was stale, pale, and isolated. Her leathery skin, yellow teeth, and thick forearms betrayed her life as a farmer from the mountains deeper inland. Rogatitsa is a mountainside village in Bosnia’s Drina Valley.
“Please,” I asked through my translator, Ivan, “start from the very beginning. When did you first leave Rogatitsa?”
“April 1992.”
“Why?”
“They wanted to kill us!”
“Who?”
“The chetniks! [a militia claiming to fight for Serbs]”
“When did you first feel in danger?”
“The Yugoslav Army moved weapons and tanks onto the hill across from our village, but they came to our cafes and had our coffee. We thought they were there to protect us.
“Some of the Serbs in our neighborhood became cold to us. Some went away and came back wearing uniforms and carrying guns. One day some of these men came to our house and broke down the door. My husband climbed out the window and ran into the woods. The men wore black masks. They took all our money. They said they would kill us if we didn’t leave town.”
“Why do you think they targeted you?”
“I don’t know. We were poor farmers.”
“Think about it. What was different between them and you?”
“They wore Serbian paramilitary marks. We were Muslims.”
“What happened next?”
“They found my husband behind the barn. I took the kids into the forest and found my neighbors. We watched from the forest. They took our husbands into one house and we heard shooting. They burned the building down. We didn’t know what to do so we fled through the mountains. They bombed us. I haven’t seen my husband since then.”
“Where did you go?”
“Sarajevo. We stayed in a house where Serbs used to live. They bombed us. There was no food.”
As the woman signed the forms and left, Ivan turned to me with a solemn face.
“Do you think she was lying or telling the truth?”
“I can’t see why she would lie about something like that,” I said.
“Who knows?” He said. “We just do our jobs.”
The refugee story is in itself the story of humanity at its extreme. Refugees have fled their homes because the government, a militia, or a gang threatened to kill or harass them, often because of a political idea or pure bigotry.
Many refugees escape, but lose everything in the process. Some refugees escape through a network of supportive friends who help them across the border. Others face attempted murder, rains of mortar shells, and torture, before fighting their way alone across the border.
Sadly, many refugees live honestly until the day they must pass through political gates like that guarded by refugee resettlement caseworkers who had to determine whether their story fit certain “criteria” for a visa application. What if one suffered tremendously without fitting into an approved “category”?
Bosnian refugees applying at our resettlement office on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia that year told of the horrible crimes committed by each side. Serbs told of Muslim brutality in the prisons of Zenitsa. Muslims told how Serbs had murdered civilians on the historic bridge in Visegrad and how Croats had raped a woman in Prozor. Croats told how Muslims had burned a village and shot prisoners near Travnik.
How does the resettlement agency decide who gets one of the 20,000 visas when there are potentially 200,000 or more applicants? To qualify in the triage system of the time, one had to argue that one was a Bosnian citizen (at a time when Bosnia had only been recognized for six years and most records were burned) and that one was either a “victim of violence,” had lost a spouse to an attack, or was in an inter-ethnic mixed marriage. If one had family already living in the US, that earned bonus points.
Bosnian Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian Serbs sat in the same waiting room in our office reading magazines waiting for their turn to tell us about what one side did to the other.
“Adisa!” I call out in the waiting room. Everyone looks at a young Bosnian Muslim woman and her sister.
“Edina!” My colleague, Damir, calls out and the sister stands up. We lead the two women into separate rooms. Adisa tells of her children, says the paramilitaries took her husband away during the war, raped her sister, and tried to rape her. They fled to stay with relatives and now have nothing.
Afterward, Damir tells us that her sister did not admit to being raped, but that it was the sister in our office who had been raped. Who was telling the truth, and why would one lie? Next case:
“Ljubomir!” I call out in the waiting room. An old Croatian man stands up proudly and follows us to the office.
“The Muslim mujahedin detained me and tortured me because I am a Croat,” the man calls out immediately. “I have documentation and proof.” We find his and his wife’s birth certificates, as well as a Red Cross record of his detention, crisp and well-kept.
He shows us a scar on his neck—a raw, reddened gash going nearly all the way around. “They held a chain around my throat and tightened it if I wouldn’t answer their questions. They robbed my house and control my village. I can never go back.” So far so good. Next case:
“Haso!” A thirty-something man approaches with his wife and child. He asks if his family must go in for the interview. I look on his application form, which talks of torture and rape and discuss it with Ivan. We tell his wife and child to wait.
Haso tells us how paramilitaries in Foca raped his wife, detained him in the “KP Dom” prison, forced him to dig trenches on the front line where he saw many of his fellow prisoners shot to death in front of him. He breaks down. He says that they forced him to eat mass quantities of salt from the mines and laughed at him. They held a gun to his head and forced him to have sex with a female prisoner. They raped him. He shakes and cries out. He shows us knife cuts on his chest and face. We calm him. He signs the forms. We’re done for the day.
After work, I walk alone along the Riviera which is filled with outdoor cafes where young men and women sit for espresso and beer. The sun beats down between the palm trees. I walk into the white marble labyrinth of the old town. Thousands of tiny birds scream past screeching at high pitches. I stop in the Peristil, a sunken Roman theatre, and have a red wine.
At the end of the summer, Kate, our head of office, a warm and compassionate woman, asked if I would be willing to help a young man named, Sead, learn English.
This was not customary, but the seventeen-year-old’s mother had been shot to death when he was only twelve and since then he had been wandering homeless until he reached Split and was hired to do construction work. Now he was waiting for his approved refugee visa to the United States.
During the same week, I had another similar, but seemingly worse case. Amir, another seventeen-year-old Muslim boy, told us that Serb police took his father away when he was thirteen. His mother and sister had gone to the police station to ask what had happened to the man. They didn’t return and Amir was left alone for several days.
On the third day, a police car rounded the corner and his mother was thrown out on the street, severely beaten. He tried to nurse her back to health, but she died that night. Before passing on she told him that his sister had been raped and she didn’t know where she was. He buried her in the garden and fled to stay with the neighbors until they were able to smuggle him out to Dalmatia.
He wanted to join his uncle in New York. With a little twist I speeded up his interview with INS and he, like Sead, was waiting for his flight to America.
After a few English lessons I took Sead and Amir out for coffee on the Riviera. They were both excited and afraid about the new change in their life. We watched the Riviera girls parade along the Vestibule and drank espresso and pinot noir. At my flat, I played a Bob Marley CD and we sat on my balcony watching the boats coming and going between the port and the island of Hvar.
“Look,” Amir pulled me to him, handing me a small photo. The portrait revealed a middle-aged man with a deep shadow of whiskers holding a woman. Seated below them, Amir, as a boy, and a young woman with beaming hazel eyes stared into the camera. Amir’s eyes glazed over as he looked across the Adriatic. “This is my family.”
A year later, as I had moved on to another position with the same organization in San Jose, California, I continued to work with people like Amir and Sead, but from Afghanistan, Somalia, Iran, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and other countries.
Curiosity swelled in me enough to call Amir’s uncle in New York and Sead to see what had happened to him. Not getting any answer from Amir, I wrote a letter to him. I couldn’t help, but feel that I owed this young man something intangible.
His case was a victory for the system and made me feel effective; that I wasn’t just a cog in the machinery, but that I had touched someone’s life. I thought quite often about the horrors he told me, especially when I heard acquaintances complain about their lives in America. I thought that if this boy could survive what he did, then there must be hope for all of us. The letter went out without a response and I faded back into my new life in Berkeley.
Another year later, an old friend called me from New York. She and I had worked together in Split. She had a surprise for me. Amir got on the phone.
“How are you doing, man?” He had absorbed English with a strong New York accent. I asked him what he was doing with his new life in America.
“I am doing dishes at an Italian restaurant, you know. It’s not great, but it’s okay. It looks like I will also be the super in my building in the Bronx, so I can get free rent, too. When will you come to New York? I want to talk with you. Please, contact me.”
I laughed about it for days. He had made it. It felt like I had gained a little brother. That autumn I happened to be going home to visit family in Cincinnati and decided to fly via New York to see a friend or two there as well.
I called Amir to let him know and he was excited. We met in front of the Sbarro’s in Times Square, which I figured was appropriate for the final scene in an American Dream story, and we hiked off to a nearby Greek diner to catch up.
“It’s so great to see you,” he said as we sat down. “I feel so much to say thank you for what you did for me.”
I didn’t pretend to be more than the representative of a system, but inside I felt truly proud for one of the first times in my life. I asked him about his new life, and how wonderful it must be to have so many new opportunities. I asked him about how the Bosnian community in New York was. He paused, digging into his dinner.
“I have to tell you something,” he said cautiously. His cheeks reddened. He was nearly twice my size, yet he looked afraid. “Please, don’t be mad at me.”
“What?” I chuckled. “Tell me. Whatever it is, maybe I can help.”
He took another bite and chewed. He surveyed the people around us.
“I’m not really Bosnian.”
I looked around the café feeling my head getting hot. A few other patrons glanced at me as if the glow had already become visible. He produced a thick roll of twenty-dollar bills and threw two down on the table.
“Where are you from then?” I demanded, the stream of clues flashing through my mind as if I’d always known and had actually fooled myself.
He restrained a laugh, having within him a certain childish glee at having tricked the system all this time, but enough respect not to guffaw out loud. He had taken a large risk, not knowing how much connection I still had to INS, or exactly how forgiving I might be.
“Montenegro,” he admitted at last, biting his lip and looking for the waiter.
“Montenegro?” I shouted, almost glad to have heads swivel in my direction in witness to my motive for assault. I rubbed an eye, restraining maniacal laughter. Had I not known this all along? His accent was clearly Eastern, but he had said his father was Albanian. Was?
I had a powerful feeling come over me, as if my reaction to this unsolicited confession could affect his conscience in some way, or if I threatened to have him deported. I imagined myself storming out of the café, screaming “Montenegro?!” across Times Square until the NYPD locked me up for committing sanity in public. Instead, I just rubbed my eye.
“Montenegro?” I ask. I couldn’t believe it.
“It was difficult for me to tell you,” he said, giving his cash to the server and holding up a hand when offered change back. “But you have done good things for me and you are my friend. I had to tell you.”
I shuddered at the thought that he wasn’t a Bosnian Muslim at all, but a Montenegrin Serb paramilitary like some of the men who had committed crimes like those he claimed to have suffered under. What if he had been a witness at their trial? Worried about public sentiment suddenly I switched to Serbo-Croatian and lowered my voice.
“Are you Serbian or Montenegrin?”
“No,” he smiled, holding all the keys. “I am Muslim. I swear it. Only I was born and lived in Montenegro. I must tell you that I am still a refugee.”
“And a liar,” I said, grabbing my bag and heading back out to Broadway. He followed me, blinking rapidly.
“No, this time it is the truth. I swear it. You don’t know what it was like. The Serb police took all of the boys from my secondary school to fight against the Albanians in Kosovo. My father was Albanian so I refused and they put me in jail. When I finally agreed to fight so that they would let me go home, I had to arrange my escape.”
“Home?” I sneered. “What about your family?”
He paused, his face flush with regret. He followed me toward the subway for a moment before answering. I recalled the evening several years before when he sat on my balcony and cried, clutching a tiny photo of his missing father and murdered mother and sister.
“My father actually died in a car accident before the war,” he told me. “My mother and sister still live in Montenegro. I send them money.”
I stopped, suddenly swollen with curiosity, but so quickly Amir stumbled. The thought of cutting my losses and fleeing in denial, telling myself that this was a single case and that the other six hundred families I helped were different, dissolved under an intolerable yearn to hear everything, to pin the boy down and force him to tell me absolutely everything.
Maybe I would solve the mystery at once, even if it turned out that all of my altruistic work had been a joke and my belief in people pathetically naive. I softened, telling him I wasn’t angry at all, just confused, and invited him to walk with me to Central Park, tucking away my growing ire the entire journey.
We wandered out of the roaring canyon of skyscrapers and taxis into the stony woods, finally to the bronze-brick fountain plaza where rollerbladers had put on a disco opera. I told Amir to tell me everything—a new truth if not the absolute.
All the boys from his secondary school in Montenegro were now living in the Bronx, he claimed, having followed the same well-worn path. After receiving a draft notice to join the Yugoslav National Army to fight in Kosovo, he learned of an agency in Sarajevo that worked on the “black.”
After six years, they had become experts on how to cruise through the Bosnian refugee resettlement programs to the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Sweden, and set up an illegal office to forge birth certificates, detention evidence, ID cards, passports, and even stories of identity—all for cold hard cash.
Amir took a bus to Sarajevo, crossing the porous border and the former front line into Bosnia, and paid the agency $5,000, which came from God knows where. A thick man shrouded in a cloud of cigarette smoke created his story and coached him on making it believable, issued him false documents, and arranged a false address with a Croatian family in Split (which our office had already been privy to, but hadn’t yet shut down).
He returned home to Montenegro and waited for a call. At last, late in the night a man picked him up and drove him to the border with Croatia, and pointed out which hillside to run across to get through the fence without the border patrols seeing him. On the other side, another driver met him and took him to Split. When he came in for his interview with me all he had left to do was work up a few tears.
“Since then,” he finished. “I have been working at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, but I loan money on the side, which earns a lot of extra cash.”
He shook my hand, still hoping our friendship was not lost and tapped away much lighter, shouting back. “Call me!” and disappearing into the trees.
That evening hundreds of faces returned to me. I sat on a bench watching the number of rollerbladers and bikers dwindle to one in the dusk. I heard the refugees’ voices again. Their tears enraged me.
“They cut my face, here.”
“Soldiers shot my husband in the forest. We saw from the clearing before we fled.”
“Shells fell on us as we ran up the road. They killed my parents with a grenade.”
“A rocket landed in our apartment. I was the only one to survive.”
“They took me to the fire station and hit me with a pipe so that I would tell them where my sons had gone. They knocked out my teeth. Look here.”
“They killed one man with a knife, another with a rock, and more, each one a different way.”
“They covered my mouth and dishonored me in front of my baby.”
All those words I had once swallowed up like bitter medicine now appeared to be selfish lies—the war imagined—the pain comical.
I was so furious that when I finished my trip in New York and returned to California I called the other boy, Sead, who was now living in Salt Lake City.
“Tell me what really happened,” I demanded.
“What do you mean?” He murmured. “We don’t talk for two years and you call me like this?”
“Did you lie to me? If you’re parents are living in the South of France or Las Vegas right now, I swear I’m going to report you to INS.”
His voice cracked as he tried to formulate words. In Bosnian, he cursed under his breath and my heart sank.
“I found her shot to death in our kitchen,” he cried. “Do you know what it’s like to find your mother, the only one who ever cared for you, like that? The paramilitaries tore her clothing. I tried to help her. Her blood was on my hands.” His voice trailed off for a moment. “Fuck you,” I imagined him saying, but he was just quiet.
On Monday I went back to my job now receiving refugees who were resettlement in California. A Somali woman and her two step-sons had just arrived from Kenya to reunite with the boys’ father in San Jose.
They asked me if I could find them three beds, a couch, a table and chairs, and a computer for school. The woman had a scar on her cheek. I swore to myself never to look at it and never to ask where she had gotten it from.
Whoever she was, like both Sead and Amir, she must have had a pretty big reason to flee her home country, to avoid it for years and to seek a new destiny somewhere judgmental and intimidating like America.
There were so many facets, twists, and turns in everyone’s story, how could one know who among any of us deserved our lot in life? Who among us does not deserve a chance to start over?
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