In Europe

to draw up maps with clear and practicable lines of demarcation.
    The average Bosnian saw Srebrenica as a stronghold of brave resistance, but the Bosnian army command saw things quite differently. Srebrenica had absolutely no strategic value, it was merely a fly in the ointment, it kept troops out of action that were sorely needed elsewhere and it interfered with the formation of clearly defensible front lines. That was almost certainly the background to the ‘kidnapping’ of Naser Orić and the other paramilitary leaders, and to the withdrawal of a great part of the Bosnian troops, leaving the town virtually undefended in summer 1995.
    The fall of Srebrenica, in other words, came as a great relief even to the Bosnian strategists. But no one will ever hear about that.

Chapter SIXTY-SIX
Sarajevo
    IT IS SNOWING ON THE HILLS OF BOSNIA. IT SNOWS ON THE OLD trenches around Sarajevo, the blasted trees, the SFOR cars patrolling Pale, the little road up to the newly built villa of Radovan Karadžzić. I suggest that we drive past it. ‘No,’ Dužsko says grimly. ‘That would really be very unwise.’ At the entrance to the market sits the picturesque old woman who has appeared on every television screen in the world. ‘So there you are again,’ she shouts to Dužsko. ‘You haven't forgotten what I say, have you? Radovan Karadžzić is and will always remain our president!’ She makes no bones about it: he is her hero, her liberator from the Muslims of today and the fascists of the past; for her all wars have melted into one, and she is willing to protect him with her life.
    We wind our way carefully down the hill. The windscreen wipers sweep the snowflakes aside. On both sides of the border, taxis are huddling against the cold, thirty metres away from each other, strictly divided by descent and religion. No Serb taxi driver dares show his face in Sarajevo, no Muslim in Pale. Anyone who wants to go to the other side has to switch rides. In the middle of the pine forests, a desperate businessman from Belgrade asks us for directions to Sarajevo. The Serbs will only tell him the way to
their
Sarajevo, and that is Pale. The real city no longer exists for them.
    The snow covers everything: the shiny, rebuilt shopping streets, the ruins of the newspaper building and the antique library, the packed apartments on the outskirts, the street corner along Apple Quay where Gavrilo Princip fired his shots in 1914, the dome and the flashing illuminated minaret of the new mosque, the rusting trams, the fields with their thousands of graves, the shell-blackened flats along the big road – nicknamedSniper Alley – to the airport. ‘I always had to drive like mad along this road,’ Dužsko says. ‘If you stopped to take a picture, you were safe for three seconds. A sniper needs one to two seconds to spot you, and another three seconds to get you in his sights. With three seconds, you were always okay.’
    The snow keeps falling. We have settled in at Pension 101 on Kasima Efendije Dobrace. The street was renamed recently, like others all over the city, this time after a Muslim cleric. The Gavrilo Princip Bridge no longer exists either, it has become the Latin Bridge again, just like before 1918. The other guests at the boarding house include two representatives of a German pump manufacturer, someone from the ING bank, a French camera crew and an Italian diplomat.
    The next morning, the city is deathly quiet. The only sound that carries in the freezing air is the clatter of shovels, and now and then a voice. All of Sarajevo lies beneath a white layer at least a metre deep. Cars become stuck, some roads are blocked by fallen branches. Halfway through the morning the electricity goes out, an hour later it suddenly pops back on again. The airport is shut down tight. Everyone is jammed together in the little departure hall: aid workers, businessmen, journalists, tired Bosnians off to visit family in the West, American GIs with big duffel bags full of Christmas presents. I kill some time with Captain Gawlista and Sergeant Niebauer of the
Bundeswehr
; they've been down here for six months in the service of peace, and now they have precisely ten days’ vacation, their wives and children are waiting for them in Frankfurt. A tour in these parts is no picnic, every snow cloud in the Balkans drops its load in this miserable valley. Then the electricity goes out again, but everyone remains in good spirits: Christmas will be here in three