I N T H E L A N D O F T H E W A R C R I M I N A L S
Street dogs, dead souls and killers who are heroes
By GORDON WEISS
I N T H E L A N D O F T H E W A R C R I M I N A L S
Street dogs, dead souls and killers who are heroes
PRIJEDOR, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA --
Ranko is a nice guy. Good-looking, with a raffish sense of humor and a fluent rap-like English lapped up from the cinema and the meager offerings of Republika Srpska television, he translates for me the lyrics of a Croatian rock band, Atomic Shelter, blaring from the loudspeakers. Nix, 21, is quieter. "The Thinker," his friends call him. He's a writer, a poet, and as militantly Serbian as Ranko, though late at night and drunk, he whisperingly confesses: "My legs carry my dead soul, man; I am empty; I feel nothing. Do you understand me?" Over beer and marijuana at the Ars Media bar in town, Ranko, Nix and other demobbed soldiers from the Bosnian Serbian army -- they call themselves "The Street Dogs" -- espouse in no particular order Stalinism, anarchism, nihilism, punk, metal, genocide, fascism, freedom of the press, love for mother Serbia and undying devotion for Ratko Mladic, the notorious Bosnian Serbian military leader and indicted war criminal. "Mladic, he's our man, our main man; he's a fucking hero and we would all die for him," says Ranko. And they never forget Prijedor's "Silent Night." Prijedor is a town of about 100,000 people in the center of a mining, forestry and agricultural district, nominally in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but to the Serbian residents, a proud component of the self-proclaimed statelet Republika Srpska. "Cleansed" of its Muslim population, Prijedor is also home to an estimated one-third of those indicted by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague for "crimes against humanity" and "genocide" committed in Bosnia's civil war. Many of those crimes were committed in these parts, beginning on a spring night in 1992. Next: The camps of hell |