In Europe

On thesite of the second mosque, a church is now being built. In the third, Jamia Pero – the tricky snake – has opened a shop selling pots and pans. And mosque number four is now a market square with rusty stalls. The youngest children in Bijeljina don't know that the town ever had four mosques. The commercials shown by the local TV station crow and cheer as though none of it ever took place: women whisk away stains, cheerful families gather around a tasty meal, little elves polish kitchen floors.
    After 1992 the local graveyard tripled in size, today it is an expanse the size of eight football pitches, full of shiny new marble. Most of those who lie here died between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, almost all of them between 1992–5. The portraits of the dead have been painstakingly etched in the marble. Faces stare at you, serious, laughing, some of the men are sitting in jeeps on their way to the hereafter, others are raising a glass in camaraderie, a young paramilitary soldier stands life-sized atop his gravestone, his machine gun clenched in both hands, squeezing off rounds all the way to heaven.
    The next morning we make our way into Holbrookeland, a curious collection of mini-states stitched together at an airforce base in Dayton, Ohio in late 1995 by American negotiator Richard Holbrooke. To the south lies the federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is in turn an amalgam of the former Croatian and Muslim republics. Lying somewhat curled around it, to the north and east, is the Serb Republic. This separate little republic leans on Serbia, but the Serbs themselves want little to do with it these days; it has become something of an estranged little brother.
    Until 1991, Bosnia was seen as the most ethnically balanced part of Yugoslavia: of over four million inhabitants, forty-four per cent were Muslim, thirty-one per cent Serbian and seventeen per cent Croatian. The capital, Sarajevo, had developed into a cheerful, cosmopolitan city. More than forty per cent of all marriages were mixed. Given a few more years, little would have been little left of that multi-ethnic community.
    The Bosnian war lasted three and a half years and claimed more than 200,000 lives. Two million people were left homeless. The war was more or less a continuation of the Croatian conflict, when Serb paramilitary organisations began using certain parts of Bosnia as their base of operations. In autumn 1991 the Serbs announced that ‘their’ areas were now five separate autonomous regions, and not long afterwards the Croatiansdid the same with that part of Bosnia in which they formed the majority. The Yugoslav Army, a Serb Army for quite some time already, began digging in heavy artillery at strategic spots, including the hills around Sarajevo. In a referendum held in late February 1992, an overwhelming majority of Bosnians voted for independence. That, after all, would keep their country unified. Two thirds of registered voters went to the polls, most of them Muslims and Croatians. The Serbs boycotted the referendum: their leaders propagated a Greater Serbia, and the idea of an independent Bosnia was at loggerheads with that. They decided to set up their own Serb Republic in the Serbian sections of Bosnia. At Pale, a ski resort close to Sarajevo, they formed their own government and their own parliament. Then they went on to seize some seventy per cent of Bosnia by force, and in late April 1992 laid siege to Sarajevo from the surrounding hills. After all, it was to be their own capital one day.
    That summer the Croatians established their own little republic as well, with Mostar as its capital. The praesidium of the Bosnian republic had little choice but to set up its own army then, which was in effect the army of the Muslims.
    The first major fighting took place around Sarajevo, but the stand-off soon resulted in a siege which lasted forty-four months. The Serb/Yugoslav Army did not have enough manpower or munitions to take the city, and the Bosnian Army was not strong enough to break through their blockade.
    In the areas they occupied, the Serbs immediately began the process of ethnic purification. All over north-western Bosnia, non-Serbian villages were attacked and plundered, and thousands of Muslims and Croatians were interred. The most notorious camps were Trnopolje and Omarska, an abandoned mining complex not far from Banya Luka. The women were held at Trnopolje under barbaric conditions, and were systematically beaten and