In Bosnia, ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ Returns, and a Grandmother Dies

MOSTAR, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The last time her family saw Rukija Bejtovic alive, the frail old woman was settling in for an evening of television.

Within the next two hours, men kicked in the door of her first-floor apartment, where she lived alone. They tore her from her bed and roughed her up, autopsy and police reports would later indicate, then wrapped her in sheets and hauled her away into the winter night.

Bejtovic’s body, clad in yellow pajamas, was found 13 days later by shepherds tending their flock. The 70-year-old grandmother, a Muslim, was dumped in a field alongside the highway.

Officially, she had died of a heart attack. Her legs, frozen, had turned blue.

The night after Bejtovic disappeared, a Bosnian Croat soldier calmly moved into her apartment. And Bosnian Croat police refused to investigate, according to Robert Edwards, the retired California detective who handled U.N. monitoring of the case.

“When they find out the father’s name”--that is, learn a person’s ethnicity--”that terminates the investigation,” he said.

The Bejtovic kidnap-murder was the most egregious example in a long series of evictions of Muslims by Croat police and gangs trying to rid the western half of this southern Bosnian city of its Muslim population.

The ousters in Mostar represent one of the most systematic examples of “ethnic cleansing” since the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina ended and dramatize the undying animosity between Muslims and Croat nationalists, despite U.S. efforts to make them form a government together.

Indeed, the principal U.S. investment in postwar Bosnia, in both military and political terms, rests on the success of a united Muslim-Croat Federation, which controls half of Bosnia and is supposed to serve as counterweight to the other half, the Bosnian Serbs’ Republika Srpska.

But events here in Mostar, bastion of hard-line Croat nationalism, show that a functional federation remains a fantasy.

Distilled to its most basic, the Bosnian war was about who could live where. Today, 18 months into an internationally sponsored peace process, those who want to live where they are an ethnic minority are evicted, beaten, blocked and, in some cases, killed.

In Mostar--where Croat-controlled west and Muslim-controlled east still use different currencies, flags and license plates--the failure is particularly acute.

Western Mostar still pays allegiance to Zagreb and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. His representative this month bestowed medals on Mostar’s Croatian police--the very agency implicated in the evictions and a deadly attack in February on Muslims trying to visit a cemetery.

The Bejtovic slaying five months ago in Mostar was the beginning of a downward spiral in Muslim-Croat relations. “It was the terrible peak,” U.N. refugee protection officer Olivier Delarue said. “We thought at the time they could go no further, do no worse. The international pressure was high. But still they continued evicting people.”

About 130 Muslim families have been driven from their homes in Croat-controlled western Mostar in the last year. The evictions were carried out by a well-organized criminal network run by special police and with tacit approval of political authorities, international monitors say.

Only the arrest in late February of two notorious gang bosses appeared to stop the evictions temporarily. International officials were able to restore 35 newly evicted families to their homes and now hope to build on that initial success in the coming weeks.

But Croatian officials indicated again last month, in meetings with international officials, that they will not cooperate.

The morning after Bejtovic was snatched from her home, her son and daughter-in-law arrived to an empty apartment. Boot prints marked the door. Bejtovic’s slippers and robe were scattered on the floor. Bejtovic’s favorite easy chair was wet with urine--a sign, U.N. investigators said, of her terror during her ordeal.

Instead of approaching their local police, the Bejtovic family turned to an evictions task force headed by Edwards, the retired Oakland detective serving the second half of a yearlong stint in Bosnia.

Years in the Oakland police gang unit prepared Edwards for Mostar. He said the Croat-dominated west Mostar police did not even do a door-to-door canvass for potential witnesses. “There was no crime in being missing--that’s the kind of response I got from the local police. As though this little old lady was out for a night of frolic,” he said. “They refused to investigate it at all--even when we found a soldier and his family had moved into Mrs. Bejtovic’s apartment.”

One neighbor said he saw Bejtovic’s door ajar the night she disappeared, enabling authorities to pinpoint the time of the attack. Fadil Bejtovic, her son, had left his mother that night around 7:30.

Two autopsies were conducted--one by Croatian authorities, the other by Muslim authorities, and both with Western officials present. The exact time of death could not be established, but Edwards said she probably died in the initial attack. Her heart was weak and she was not in good health, relatives said.

Bejtovic’s children were born and raised in what is now the west side of Mostar and lived with her for 30 years in the apartment from which she was evicted. But the family was split by the war. One son, Fadil, 47, lives, fearfully, on the west side, one of the last Muslims on his block. The other, Nusret, 44, lives, bitter and with anger, on the east side, where he fled in 1993 to join the Muslim army.

Afraid of the risks, Nusret does not venture into the Croat-controlled part of Mostar and saw his mother rarely. “It’s only half a kilometer [about three blocks] away,” he said of his old home, “but it might as well be America--it’s that far. I have no idea what is happening on my street.”

The soldier who moved into the elderly woman’s apartment later told police that he paid 3,000 marks to a man at a cafe for what he believed was an empty apartment--even though the signs of violence in the apartment were unmistakable. He was arrested by Bosnian Croat military police but was soon released. No charges were filed, and no other arrests have been made.

The apartment sat empty for a while but was reoccupied a few weeks ago. A new, hand-scrawled name is on the door: Zdravko Boras. Jeans were hanging on a clothesline on the balcony, and parked in the drive was the new occupant’s red Opel, fresh from Germany.

Bejtovic’s building is being taken over gradually by Bosnian Croat refugees and veterans. The Muslim residents--Bejtovic was the last--are gone, as is the lone Serbian family, and only a couple of the original residents remain.

They include the 60-ish Croatian neighbor who cooked for Bejtovic when she was sick and the elderly woman who shared space in the basement during the terrifying shelling of the city when war raged between Muslims and Croats in 1993-94.

“She was not a bad woman,” one of these timid neighbors, standing in her doorway and speaking in a low voice, said of Bejtovic. “This should not have happened.”

These neighbors insist that they heard nothing, saw nothing. Even with the right ethnic credentials, they evoked helplessness and vulnerability.

The woman who cooked for Bejtovic and occasionally bought groceries for her told of being burglarized twice when she was briefly away from her apartment. The burglars helped themselves to “everything but the chandelier,” she said. She did not call the police.

“It was not done to me by Muslims or Serbs. It was done to me by my own people,” she said. “But I didn’t report it. To whom could I report it? To whom can I complain? Then someone wearing a mask can come and expel me [from my home]. I was silent, and so far no one has come for me. I’m bitter, but I’m silent. I have to be silent.”

Leaving one’s apartment unattended for even a few minutes is risky in lawless Mostar, as Muslims have found out.

But the worst single spasm of evictions came after the February attack by Bosnian Croat police on a crowd of Muslims trying to visit a graveyard. The deputy police chief was among those seen shooting into the backs of retreating Muslims. Swiftly, men with guns began knocking on the doors of mostly elderly Muslims, rousting them from their homes after dark and depositing them on the line that divides the city. Bosnian Croat police or soldiers then moved in. While the tactics were all too familiar, the speed was unusual: 37 families were evicted in less than 48 hours.

More unusual, U.N. and NATO peacekeepers responded just as quickly. With international pressure on Zagreb, almost all the families were returned home. International officials accompanied the Muslims and kept guard as they broke the newly changed locks and gained entry. Local Croatian police were obliged to attend; it became evident that the police were tipping off the illegal occupants, who managed to run away each time before the troops arrived.

But so traumatic was the eviction, most of the returning Muslims were afraid to spend that first night at home. And since then, many have been threatened or harassed.

International officials in charge of maintaining peace in Bosnia hope to resolve an additional 80 to 90 cases in the coming weeks, but the chances are slim. The momentum has been lost in a debate over how to proceed and negotiations with local officials, say several of the peacekeepers involved.

“How do they want us to bring back 200,000 [refugees] if we can’t reinstate 80?” asked one frustrated European U.N. police officer. “As time goes by, it gets more and more difficult to get any cooperation.”