SARAJEVO, 1996

Peter A. Hempel

In the summer of 1996, I found myself in an all too familiar situation – out of work and desperate.

I was living in Austin. I had returned there 2½ years earlier following the end of my marriage. That was now two jobs ago. I had been job-hunting for several months with no leads in sight.

Out of the blue, I got a call from Doug Schoen, one of the founders of Penn + Schoen, the market research company I had worked for twice before. (Don’t ask – that will send us down a whole other rabbit-hole.)

Although my employment with P+S had been quirky, both Mark Penn and Doug still appreciated my writing skill, my intelligence, and my adaptability. Doug was a very well-known political consultant in the US (Bill Clinton among others) and internationally, and he had a possible project for me in Yugoslavia. (I had already done one 12-country international trip for the company, so he knew I was international travel-tested.)

The client in this case was Milan Panić, who had been the first Prime Minister of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Doug had been a consultant on his political campaign and continued to consult for him. Panić was a decidedly unusual character, serving as Prime Minister of Yugoslavia while still being an American citizen. He had been born in Belgrade, but had moved to California some years earlier and was now a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Panić had founded a pharmaceutical company, ICN Pharmaceuticals, which had made him very wealthy. It now had operations in California and Belgrade, along with many other Eastern European countries. (For the record, it is now known as Valeant Pharmaceuticals, and now has a whole new set of stories to tell.)

I didn’t really know much about what was going on in Yugoslavia at that point, although the fighting between the Serbs and the Muslims and stories of atrocities and massacres had certainly made news in the US.

By now Panić had been defeated in his bid for the presidency of Yugoslavia by Slobodan Milošević, a notorious dictator. Doug was working for Panić during this campaign – I remember his telling a story about some attractive spy from the opposition who was sent to seduce him and get information out of him (he was married at the time). (Sadly, like the comedian who forgets the punchline, I can’t remember the actual outcome of that story.)

Despite his election defeat, Panić remained dedicated to bringing about peace in his country and to finding a solution for the future. By now enough progress had been made (i.e. there had been simultaneous massacres and ethnic cleansing in all different parts of the country, and some sort of new de-facto ethnic-based equilibrium was emerging) that plans were in place to hold an election in Sarajevo in September.

It’s useful to keep in mind how relative this “progress” was. Following World War II, Yugoslavia, led by Josip Tito, became part of the Soviet bloc. In 1948, however, Tito broke with the Soviets, and took Yugoslavia on its own independent path (which included accepting American aid). The country itself held a huge variety of national groups and different religions. The potential tensions from this situation were minimized by a community approach of treating all national groups and all religions equally. Tito was a dictator, but under his leadership the country prospered and become more modern and urbanized. People from different national groups and religions worked together and often intermarried. Moreover, the beauty of the countryside made it a continuing tourist attraction. In 1984, the city of Sarajevo was the site of the international Winter Olympics.

It’s hard not to remain somewhat ambivalent about any dictatorship, but under Tito the many pieces of the puzzle came together at least somewhat, and peace and prosperity seemed to be the order of the day.

So what we were seeing now was really a different kind of stage, one where nationalism and religion and hatred took over, and the best you could hope for was to try to stop the killing.

In this new context, holding elections of any sort could be seen as some kind of a good thing. Sort of.

In any case, whatever else might be the case about Panić (the trail of financial allegations and sexual harassment cases trailing in his wake kept the tabloids busy), he definitely did seem to be dedicated to the cause of bringing about peace in his home country. So he had decided to bring together a team of outside experts to act as observers of the election itself. In Sarajevo, on election day.

Given all the violence and brutality I had been reading about, this made me a little nervous, but it appeared that my part of this would be carried out in Belgrade as a sort of home base while the others headed out to whatever might lie in wait in Sarajevo.

Doug put me in touch with a man named David Calef, who had been serving as an assistant to Panić both on the business side and the political side for some years.

When I talked to David that first time, he was in California where ICN Pharmaceuticals had their US headquarters. He was getting ready to fly to Belgrade and needed to get me set up with plane tickets and general information.

Because of the tight time frame, there wouldn’t be time to get a visa for Yugoslavia before leaving, so he arranged a flight that would take me to Frankfurt, which had a Yugoslavian embassy, and then I would take another flight to Belgrade. Although he couldn’t get me the visa himself, he sent me a letter from Milan Panić to get me a visa on behalf of ICN.

David also encouraged me to bring “as much cash as possible” since they didn’t really use credit cards in Yugoslavia. The idea of bringing a lot of cash with me to a country in that unsettled shape made me very nervous. In any case I didn’t have a hell of a lot of money available, so I brought along about $800 or so, which still left me worried.

Two days or so after Doug’s out-of-the-blue call, I was on a plane to Frankfurt. Austin to Frankfurt is a very long flight, and the plane I was on was big enough to have a center row with five seats. And yes, I ended up with the center seat. On either side of me were the four members of a German family – perfectly nice, but apparently not acquainted with deodorant. A long flight indeed.

My flight landed in Frankfurt in the late afternoon and I went to my hotel for the night. The Yugoslavian Embassy opened at 8:00 the next morning, and my plan was to arrive as soon as it opened. If all went quickly, there was an afternoon flight I could catch to Belgrade.

The next morning, I was the first visa applicant there. The visa office was at the bottom floor of the embassy building, down the stairs from the main entrance. The office was fairly basic, with a fair number of chairs and a vending machine for snacks. The main window had a full pull-down curtain blocking any view of who or what was behind there. I filled out my visa forms, attached my very official-looking letter from ICN (signed, I assume, by Panić), and tapped on the bell. The curtain was pulled up, a brusque-looking woman took my passport and forms through the opening in the window, and without a word slammed the curtain back down again.

As I said, I was the first one there. Soon other people began arriving, quite a few other people. A few were dressed like businessmen, but many of them looked like workmen, perhaps from Turkey. They all turned in their forms, had the curtain slammed down again, and we all waited.

The afternoon flight to Belgrade left a little after 3:00. I figured if I got my visa by noon, I could make it.

After an hour or two, they began calling names. And one after another the other people in the room went up to get their passports and visas. They had all come in after me. I was still waiting. I was afraid to go out to look for food, or even to go to the bathroom in case they called my name and I didn’t hear it. By late afternoon everyone else had been called and had picked up their visas. And I was still waiting. Finally, a few minutes before the office was to close I heard them call my name. I went up to the window. The woman, looking perhaps even more unfriendly than before, handed my passport and visa through the opening. Then she immediately slammed the curtain down again. (Perhaps a letter from Panić wasn’t the most helpful credential to present, given the political situation.)

So I had another night in Frankfurt and arranged to catch a morning flight to Belgrade.

The flight next morning went fine. But then when I got to customs they wanted me to declare how much cash I was carrying. This definitely looked like a bad set-up, but I also realized that they would check that later against how much I was taking out of the country with me, so I filled out the form.

I had never been to Yugoslavia, or Belgrade, or any part of Eastern Europe before. It turned out that we were staying at a very nice international hotel – a Hilton or something of the sort. It didn’t give me much of a flavor of the country, but I was smart enough to appreciate the comfort.

David Calef was already at the hotel, and came out to meet me. He was very nice, but also very professional and fast-paced. Over the course of the trip I came to admire him a great deal.

David explained that our first order of business (it was just the two of us so far) was to make phone calls to the US to people who might come join the project. Most of them were academics with a scholarly interest in the conflict; some of them also had personal ties to the area. Across the group they would bring different perspectives on what had happened, who had done what, and so on.

I put my bag in my room and David and I had dinner. Then, some time around 7:00 pm or so, we began placing calls to the US, starting with California and working our way east.

I had never heard of any of these people, but fortunately they had all been contacted about the project before. I was just looking for final confirmations as to who would be coming.

David and I kept on going until 3:00 am or so, at which point I was pretty much falling over. David said he would take the last few calls and let me get to bed. As I say, he had a level of energy that the Energizer bunny would envy.

In the morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and then took a car over to ICN headquarters to meet some of the other people working on the project. I don’t really remember how many people there were that morning; the one I remember best was a mild-mannered man with a gray mustache, who was a journalist. He was very nice and unassuming, and had a family living there. Over time I began to understand that with Milošević in charge, he was in a very risky situation that took a lot of courage to stick with.

David and I and the others assembled in an inside room in one of the buildings. Despite the lack of windows, there were multiple ashtrays on every table.

David started laying out the things we needed to do for the election. He used easel papers and hung the sheets around the room as he went. He was very precise and organized. Since I am pretty much the opposite of organized, I was very impressed.

We put in a pretty full day there, and then David and I headed back to the hotel. We had dinner, and then afterwards we began the same routine of phone calls as the night before. This was a very long day. But by late night we had reached pretty much everyone on the list, so we were ready on that front.

David also took me over to meet Panić to let him see me for himself. Although David had worked for him for years, he still seemed somewhat nervous about him. Panić was somewhat formal and overall pretty much what I expected. Our conversation was quite brief, but apparently he was satisfied.

Over the next two or three days, the people David and I had been talking to began to arrive. Most were academics of one sort or another, although there was at least one writer who was connected with a Washington journal of some sort, and one man who was a labor organizer from San Francisco whose connection here I never entirely understood although on a personal level I liked him a lot.

We all had meals together at the hotel. It was interesting since they were all bright and intellectual and all had insights and opinions about what was going on. Some of them came from different sides of the issues, but it never became combative, perhaps in part because we were there to see the beginning of whatever was next.

I had mentioned the ashtrays everywhere. A number of the people smoked, but there was one woman, who was from the region originally but was now at a university in Massachusetts as I recall, who chain-smoked like nothing any of us had ever seen, lighting each cigarette from the last. Even the smokers found her to be an embarrassment.

One member of the group was a graduate student from Harvard, who had, I believe, spent some time working at refugee camps in Bosnia. He was obviously bright, and was bi-lingual. He was sort of average-looking but had one deformed hand from some sort of birth defect. Although he in fact spoke the local language, he got permission to hire a translator to work with him some afternoons. It turned out the translator he hired was a former girlfriend who was now married but this gave them the opportunity for some afternoon trysts.

There was another woman who seemed very nice and was perhaps a bit younger than me. She seemed to be potentially interested in me, but I didn’t find her exciting so it sort of passed by. (I mention this for a reason, and I will come back to her later.)

Although many of the people who had been brought in had seen parts of the conflict in person, in the hotel it all had the feeling of a mild-mannered academic conference. I do remember, however, a meeting I had with one or two other people with a young man who apparently was a student leader of protests. He seemed very nice, bright, friendly, and in the luxurious comfort of the hotel lobby area, it all seemed very casual. But the risks he had taken, and was still taking, with Milošević and his thugs in power, were all too real. So much of what was really going on simply remained invisible to me.

During the days, David and I and the others involved in the organization continued to go over to the ICN Pharmaceuticals campus for work sessions. The others stayed at the hotel, presumably getting a chance to exchange ideas.

One of the ideas they apparently exchanged was about compensation. Their travel, hotel, food, etc. was all paid for, and they were getting to be in on a truly historic occasion, but now they realized that they really should be paid some sort of honorarium as well for their services.

They came to David to discuss this – one more thing for him to deal with. They were able to come up with some sort of satisfactory arrangement, and the group was set to go forward.

I didn’t get much of a chance to see Belgrade. The only trip I recall was to go to the American embassy there to get some additional pages for my passport, which was almost out of room from my earlier travel visas. I was the only one there in the passport office so they added the pages on the spot. The most convenient such experience I’ve ever had.

Dinners were interesting. As I had mentioned earlier, David had warned me that this was not a credit-card society. As a result, when we headed out in the evening, perhaps 30 or so strong, the ICN CFO had to go to a safe and get out cash to pay for the evening. This means a lot of cash in a country which didn’t seem to me to be all that safe.

One evening we ate at what I recall as being a restaurant on a boat in the river – quite elegant in impressive. On the last night, they took us to another restaurant which was probably a very good place but looked utterly boring. Some of the academics were upset that their last meal there was going to be at a place so utterly devoid of local color, and so we switched to another restaurant that was considerably more colorful.

My expectation for some reason had been that I would be remaining in Belgrade while the others went off, and would hold down the fort to do whatever was needed at home base. Suddenly I discovered that in fact I would be going along to Sarajevo.

This idea basically scared the shit out of me. Belgrade was nice, peaceful, boring. That was fine. Sarajevo? Who knew what the fuck was going to happen there?

Unfortunately I was already there, and there really wasn’t anything I could think of to do.

The next morning, we got on a pair of buses to start out towards Sarajevo.

In some places, the signs were in Roman lettering, in other places in Cyrillic. Same language. But you had to have some differences to fight over. Lots of history there.

The trip took us through some spectacular scenery – mountains and steep valleys, rivers and forests. This was the landscape that used to bring tourists from all over – before the shit hit the fan.

I had not brought a camera with me. Everyone else was snapping away with their cameras in all directions. I felt like a total idiot.

Up on the hillsides I would see some spectacular farmhouses – immaculately kept, with goats and chickens that looked incredibly healthy and well fed. It was like Heidi’s landscape as painted by Norman Rockwell.

And then, the house next door would be blown to shit.

And so on.

It was weird and eerie. There was no fighting to be seen (or even heard), just the ghostly outcomes.

When we stopped and got out for a rest stop, we were warned not to get off the paved surfaces. (No using a nearby tree for the menfolk.) There were landmines all over the place that had not yet detonated. Many students in the local schools had lost legs stepping on mines.

Eventually, sometime in the afternoon, the bus pulled over and stopped. We were now in the neutral zone between Serbia and Bosnia. Our bus had Serbian license plates and our driver very understandably had no interest in actually driving into Bosnia.

This was a sudden reminder to us of the seriousness of this whole situation. They had arranged for a bus from Bosnia to come meet us and take us the rest of the way into Sarajevo. But we waited and waited and no sign of a relief bus.

Finally, after what must have been a long and complicated discussion, our driver apparently agreed to drive us the rest of the way into Sarajevo to our hotel. (I hope he got a lot of extra money for doing so – there was nothing guaranteed about this on any score.)

So we got back on the bus for the rest of the trip into Sarajevo.

As we drove into Sarajevo, we saw lots of UN tanks patrolling the streets. This was reassuring in some ways I suppose, but also a vivid reminder of what we were up against.

Our hotel was pretty much the only big hotel in town. (Or perhaps the only one left.) So everyone from the press and anyone else interested in the election would be staying here.

The hotel’s color scheme indicated that it had once been part of one of the major hotel chains (Holiday Inn perhaps), but its franchise must have been voided long ago. Most of the buildings around the hotel were missing upper floors from the shelling and bombardment. Our hotel had bullet holes everywhere outside, even in the round brass railings on the stairways in the lobby. I was not used to this.

When I got to my room, I put down my suitcase and went to lock the door and set the chain. Not much point. The door had obviously been kicked open at some point and the chain was gone. The lock still worked, sort of.

The American journalist with the pipe from our group had made a number of trips to Sarajevo during the war. He told us how he would check into the hotel, go up to his room, pull down the blinds, and pull the mattress off the bed and place it against a wall away from any sniper sight-lines.

I wasn’t doing that, but I never know when I’m being too naïve for my own good.

There were other reminders as well, as when I was in a car with some other people going somewhere from the hotel. One of the people in the car commented to us, “This street was sniper alley. There used to be snipers up there on that side, and over there on that side. And they would shoot at pedestrians and at the cars on the street.”

Maybe I should just get out here?

It was David who had the most sobering tale of all. There had been an embargo of the area during the war, so no planes could fly in from the US or Europe. He went to Hungary and took a plane in from there. There was a mini-van to take them from the airport to the hotel. During the drive, a sniper fired at the van and hit and killed one of the passengers – a journalist in the seat next to David.

Holy shit! You went through that – and you’re back again? I didn’t even know how to begin to compute all that.

We had a day or two before the actual voting. David had me write up a press release about the group and its plan to monitor the elections. I wrote it up and he offered a few edits and we made some copies and were ready to go.

We were in an office space on the third floor of the hotel. The press room was on the ground floor. But we had to have someone with a press pass to carry in copies of the release. The Yugoslavian journalist I mentioned earlier, the one from Belgrade, had a press pass, so we were all set. Walk down two flights of stairs and we’re done.

Except for one thing. The journalist told me, “Yes, Peter, we will go. But first, we will have lunch.”

What?

There was a restaurant on the second floor of the hotel and we went there. There was a group of our people there, including David, and we all had lunch. I’m not talking a quick sandwich, this was a full-on, sit-down, multi-course lunch. And I’m totally incredulous. But David is there and he’s aware of all this. And I asked him later how he could deal with this kind of attitude. He simply said, “You get used to it.”

Why didn’t we just go down and drop off the press releases first? I still go crazy when I think of this. It brings up all the Type A in me.

So, after a leisurely lunch and conversation with the group, the journalist and I headed downstairs and he delivered the press releases to a table there. I suppose it didn’t make much difference either way, but jeez…

The tales of sniper alley and all that had made me very nervous, but nonetheless, a group of us went out into town. The day was bright and balmy and the town was ancient and scenic, precisely what used to draw in international tourists in droves. There was a famous old bridge that still seemed, somewhat miraculously, to be standing – or had it been rebuilt?

Suddenly a truck stopped near us on the street and a bunch of young men leaped out and started waving some sort of flags and chanting some slogans in support of one of the parties in the election. After a couple of minutes, they hopped back in their truck and headed off, presumably to do the same elsewhere. I found a souvenir shop where I could buy some souvenir T-shirts for my daughters. The others in my group started stocking up on hand-carved pipes and hookahs. Some of the pipes were quite large and elaborate, and I guess would be a nice conversation piece for a living room. I bought a pipe as well, though a considerably more modest one. It still sits, unused, as a decoration on one of my bookcases.

In the evening we went out to eat at some local restaurant and then I went walking around on my own. There were a lot of people out enjoying an evening walk on a perfect evening, with lots of cafes with sidewalk tables. What would it have been like even a few months earlier, without all the UN tanks wandering around?

At one point I passed by what looked like a stadium of some sort and people were going in, so I decided to check it out. (I can’t quite believe I did this; I had no idea what any of this was.) I got inside and it was some sort of rally for peace and people were holding up lighters in the way they do at rock concerts. It was very moving, and a reminder of what everyone had been through for so long.

On the day of the election, David passed out waiver sheets for everyone to sign promising that we would not sue Panić’s company if anything bad happened to us. This seemed like something of a bad sign, and some people were resistant. On my part, I had two young daughters, and however irresponsible it might have seemed for me to even be here in the first place, this really freaked me out. I never did sign, but it was irrelevant in my case since David wanted me to stay at the hotel anyway in case people wanted to report in.

David had bought a number of white ski vests (the padded kind) for people to wear as a kind of uniform, and we all got photo ID badges as members of the “Independent Election Monitoring Commission,” which of course had no official status whatsoever.

The other members of our party were divided into groups and were assigned to visit different election stations.

The thing to keep in mind about all this is that by now we had had years of massacres, atrocities, ethnic cleansing, and forced relocation. There was no option for people who had fled or been relocated to return to their home area to vote – if they could vote at all, anywhere. So…whatever elections were being held would reflect the views of whoever was in power after killing or driving out everyone else. It would be, whatever the niceties of the idea of democracy, a win for the aggressors.

With that in mind, was it really surprising that at the polling places themselves our teams were greeted cordially by polling officials? And that things seemed to be wonderfully smooth and orderly, with no hints of violence or foul play?

The voting, and the counting of votes, all went perfectly. The next day, when the results were announced, Panić held a press conference in support of the election and the election process. Obviously, he knew far better than I the toxic background for all this, but I believe he was a genuine optimist and was looking for a way forward for the region.

Burying the past is, especially a past like this, is always ugly and distasteful. I have been to Germany many times, despite my own family history and a national history that dwarfs the atrocities that had happened here. Western Europe has largely moved on. Countries with long memories don’t. The Middle East is fraught with ancient hatreds which remain at the boil. Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Serbia, even Croatia, all seem to be better off now, even though they could have been so much better off still by simply tolerating and working with each other.

There was a good turnout for the press conference. I don’t know how much of it was due to Panić himself and how much was simply reporters looking for quotes after the voting was over. But however quixotic the venture, Panić had spent a lot of money on this effort and seemed to be genuinely motivated by a deep patriotic spirit.

The next morning, the buses came to pick us up again – this time no talk of switching buses at the neutral zone.

The scenery was as beautiful as on the trip in. We stopped off somewhere for lunch and then went on. Finally, somewhere in the mountains, we stopped off for dinner at what looked like a lone trailer that was serving as a restaurant. David’s people had called ahead to make arrangements, and they had roasted a goat for us. There were tables outside and plastic chairs – nothing elegant, but the setting and the situation were impressive. Dinner consisted of roast goat and loaves of rather spongy white bread – rather as if they had come from the Wonder Bread bakeries. No kind of sauce or anything for the goat. No salad, nothing else. Which was somewhat inconvenient for the various vegetarian members of the group. Since I was not a vegetarian, I was okay, but it still seemed to fall short of the possibilities.

There were soft drinks and beer available from a refrigerator in a side alcove. Someone whispered to me that I should look behind the door to the alcove when I went back again. I did. There was an assault rifle – a proverbial AK47? – with a fully loaded banana clip propped up against the wall. Yet another reminder of how little I really grasped about the realities of the region.

After we got back on the bus, we still had a long way to go. Along the way we ran into a checkpoint of some sort. Some not particularly friendly officials got on and talked with the leaders of our group. They announced we all had to hand over our passports for inspection. At night, in a country where who the hell knew what was going on, we were all nervous about relinquishing our passports. As if we had a choice. I think there was some question about whether we had had our passports stamped somewhere where we shouldn’t have along the way. The officials disappeared into their office in the checkpoint building. After a while, they came back and handed us back our passports and we were able to drive the rest of the way into Belgrade without anything else happening.

The next day, I hopped on a flight back to Austin. My flight had a connection in Paris with some time to kill in the Paris airport. To my surprise, I ran into the pipe-smoking journalist from DC who was on his way home to his girlfriend. He began talking to me about the young woman in the group whom I had not been interested in. He wanted to know if everyone had noticed the fact that he and this woman had been getting it on during the visit. I hadn’t at all of course, though I was slightly relieved that she had found someone interested in her. The guy went on to talk to me about how when he had been living in France and had a girlfriend, French girlfriends were so much better because they weren’t uptight about his bringing in another woman for a three-way.

Eventually the time for my flight arrived and I was relieved to be able to end the conversation.

After I got back to Austin, I sent in an invoice to ICN for my work. It took them quite a while to send a check, but when they did, it was for more than I had asked. Totally curious.

David eventually left Panić and ICN (and his long-time girlfriend in California) and came to New York. By then I had left Texas and returned to the northeast, ultimately living in NJ and working at my old company in NYC. David ended up joining the company as well, so we were able to work on some projects together. David married a woman he had met in Belgrade and they had a daughter.

David eventually went off to work at KPMG and seems to be doing well for himself there.

 As for myself, I sometimes wonder about what I learned from my trip. I have traveled around the world, talking to and listening to people in many cultures and situations. Many of the people were living in countries which were in transition into the new world, whether it was being the first in their family to own a car, or, as in Vietnam, in a country trying to shift from the most repressive form of communist rule to a free market. My first trip to South Africa came a week before their first free election in 1994, and I made many trips back over the next ten years or so. I rarely got to see the usual tourist highlights. I was working with local people in local research companies, the people who weren’t on the tourist radar screens, and yet had powerful stories to tell. Like a black moderator in South Africa – he was one of the best I’ve seen – but he ended up telling me about how he had been an alcoholic and had gone to AA and was now trying to keep his son on the right path. He wasn’t on any tourist’s radar screen. But I found him inspiring.

I end up seeing bits and pieces from the back alleys of history. If I had set out to study the conflict in Yugoslavia, I would probably know more about who was right and who was wrong. But I suspect it is never as clear and reasonable as that. For historians, there are big landscapes and big stories. For the rest of us, it is our own stories, writ small. But if we’re lucky, we get to appreciate what we see along the way.