A Letter From Tuzla

By Christian Hummel | Monday, August 31, 1998

'What do you think of when you think of America?' I asked.

'I think of a land of opportunity,' the girl replied.

'You really believe that?' I was incredulous.

'Oh yes.'

The girl is eighteen and has lived in Tuzla all of her life. She is my student. I am teaching an English-language class this summer with another Dartmouth student at a teen center here. Tuzla is a city of about two hundred thousand, located a three-hour drive north of Sarajevo.

The city is currently home to a temporary US Air Force base, built there as part of the United Nations' peace-keeping effort.

Throughout the town, white Range Rovers drive around emblazoned with either UNHCR [United Nations High Commission on Refugees] painted in blue or the logo of some other aid organization. The sight of camoflauged soldiers sitting in cafes is no longer startles me.

These are the parameters of life in modern Bosnia.

Working in Tuzla on a Tucker Foundation grant has lent a new immediacy to my notions of Bosnia and its war, which ended only three years ago. The flight from Vienna into Sarajevo landed at an airport which I had watched being shelled on CNN. Bombed-out homes and buildings still dominate the urban landscape.

Also visible, though, was a revitalizing energy in the scores of rebuilding projects. In Tuzla, there are the rumblings of a true market economy. The streets are full of homeless (the word takes on new meaning with its universality here) peddling their goods — CDs, camoflauge, and single cigarettes out of their packaging.

There is a peculiar dichotomy between poverty and consumer decadence here. The Gap and J. Crew may not have made it to Tuzla yet, but Adidas and Nike certainly have. Coca-Cola has monopolized the soft drinking of Tuzla residents, and Heiniken is omnipresent.

Despite these positive signs of progress, the remnants of the war still loom omnipresent. In the central area of town there stands a memorial commemorating the 72 youths killed in an attack on May 25, 1995. On that night Serbian gunners aimed their artillery on all the major cities in Bosnia, releasing a deadly barrage across the entire nation. The shell landed outside a discotheque and exploded immediately upon impact.

Some teenagers in the English class where I work, students no older than me, led us up a hill on the outskirts of town.

At the small cemetary lay the friends of my students. Someone had lain a picture of each victim on each marker; I remember thinking how much the faces of the dead Bosnians reminded me of friends from Dartmouth. Tragically, some were even too young for Dartmouth. One grave bore a three-year old; the oldest buried was twenty-four.

I remember, several years ago, visiting the graves of American soldiers killed at Omaha Beach, in Normandy. The endlessly rolling fields of white headstones lent a sense of surreal awe to the monument and instilled a sense of divine inspiration in the American mission.

I felt no similar emotion at the Tuzla graves.

The graves were horrible and decrepit, covered in dirt and mildew, less white than green and brown. They left me not with a sense of divine inspiration but of frightening human irrelevance: these bits of flesh have been returned to the earth, dirty and stained like any root or stone you'd expect to find lying here, on the side of this hill.

The photographs didn't help. They seemed, in the face of it, thoroughly insufficient, symbolic, lifeless tokens of real life. Where was the humanity?

War is, I realize, an exercise in anti-humanism. I knew that when I arrived in Bosnia. Much as I steeled myself for it, though, I couldn't anticipate the apathy in the burned out, narcoleptic eyes of the Bosnian adults.

My students might have thought English could bring them prosperity, that America could deliver their personal salvation, but there was no such optimism in their parents. The parents seemed ciphers — after the horrors, waiting to die.

There is, of course, hope for the American mission. But that mission, I think, can only help the youngest Bosnians, like my students. Their parents seem and look beyond human help.

The soldiers cannot remain forever. As peaceful as Tuzla seems now, the way the country is set up—with one discontinuous part controlled by Bosnian-Serbs and another discontinuous plot controlled by Bosnian Muslims and Croats—and with the region's long history of conflict, another war seems almost inevitable.

It is sad to look around at the beautiful red-roofed houses on surrounding hills and to look into the eyes of youth and think of the horrors they have known and may perhaps know again.

A Letter From Tuzla

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