Bijela

We traveled north from Sarajevo and made a stop at some castle ruins near the village of Srebrnik, where Steve's platoon performed site security for a communication tower on Hill 722. In a state of disrepair in the 1990's, the castle had not seen any improvement since then, and now had its entrances blocked off by iron grates. We stopped by the village market and probably confused the locals with our interest in the dilapidated castle, our desire to drive our rented economy car directly up the side of the mountain, and our excited consumption of Jadro cakes.



We pulled into Bijela just in time for lunch. Out of the seven days we spent in the Balkans, we probably averaged at least one pizza a day. That's just an average. There were days when pizza meals outnumbered non-pizza meals by a notable margin. I'm not sure how pizza production factors as an indicator in post-war development, but Bosnia should recieve high marks from the UN, the EU, OSCE and the World Bank for its ability to produce high quality, low-cost pizza. We won't talk about the spongy ham served at breakfast buffets, however.

After a couple of minutes of waving old photos and gesticulations about the quality of the pizza, Steve convinced somebody to call Galich, a Croatian-militia army officer with whom Steve had developed a relationship during his deployment. The village of Bijela, largely an ethnically Croatian settlement, housed an arms depository for the local militia units. Under the Dayton framework, each of the militia groups, Croatian, Serb and Bosnian, were permitted to keep and maintain certain weapons. Steve's platoon dropped in occasionally to count and inspect the arms kept in Bijela, as well as monitor the training the local unit performed.

Galich appeared at the pizzeria within a few minutes, and despite the complete language barrier swapped some war stories with Steve, using the photos and some charades to communicate what had become of many of the village notables. Steve was pleased to hear that Mr. Tomic, the Mayor of Bijela was still around; we dropped in on him later in the afternoon and between our basic understanding of German, Russian and assisted with shots of a potent clear liquid, we communicated our shared belief that life had gotten a lot better in Bosnia in the past ten years.

Below are some photos of Bijela, before and after. After dropping in on Mayor Tomic, Galich took us on a tour of the village - back to the school where Steve's platoon often delivered humanitarian supplies, the weapons storage site where Lieutenant Steve and Lieutenant Galich counted AK-47s and played ping-pong, and the local church. The church suffered extensive damage during the war and was still being rebuilt, completely out of concrete.