City in Black

Reports of renewed fierce fighting following two-three days of relative calm on the Dubrovnk-Herzegovina front arrived while this article is written (Wednesday). Bozidar Vucurevic, chairman of the Trebinje war presidency, told a VREME reporter at around 4:00 p.m. that he had no time to talk because fierce fighting broke out. He couldn't give any details at that moment not even if that was the start of the final battle feared by the international community and the men on both sides of the front lines.

Vucurevic just said an EU observer mission had been in Trebinje but brought no specific reply from Croatia's spokesmen to the peace offer made two days earlier. Instead, Vucurevic said, they brought an offer from the Dubrovink mayor calling for a meeting and added that a date is being discussed. At that moment no one knew whether the meeting would be set up for Thursday.

We did know that the 10 days of fighting which saw 5,000 shells land on the Dubrovnik region (the Croats claim) and 7,000 on Trebinje (locals said) was just a testing of power with both sides bringing in reinforcements and establishing a balance of power and fear.

The waiting could be felt in the air on Tuesday when VREME reporters went to Trebinje.

The villages along the road are terrifyingly empty. Carefully tended land and houses were simply abandoned. Along 40 kilometers of road we saw just 5-6 farmers hurrying across the clearing.

Trebinje town is different. "There's more people out than last Friday," someone told us. The largest single group is in the market under the 100 year old chestnuts in the center of town. Ten stalls sell fruit, vegetables, cigarettes, smuggled Albanian coffee. Everything is two or three times more expensive than in Podgorica.

The market is the only place where you quickly get around the mistrust for a stranger. We found out that people living outside the town are forced to stay close to their shelters because of the constant and always sudden shelling. Trebinje itself, like Dubrovnik on the other side has been spared the shelling and the people (mainly women, children and the elderly) can go shopping.

Trebinje town hall has been damaged by shells. That is where we met Vucurevic who apologized for the delay because he was meeting state security officials. Soon, he politely invited us into his office, wearing a uniform and pistol on his belt. "Herzegovina won't fall because it isn't being defended by the JNA (former Yugoslavia's army), or the Yugoslav Army, and especially not by Slobodan Milosevic," he said. "It is being defended by the Serb Army. And we had luck and misfortune: the JNA left us in 1992 and we organized our own army. The misfortune is that the JNA handed a third of Trebinje land to Tudjman and we have to liberate it ourselves now. And what is the Yugoslav Army doing? Yesterday, when I left for Herceg Novi I saw them digging in at Nudo village near Montenegrin Grahovo. Why are they digging in there, who are they going to defend there, did Montenegro ever do anything like that?"

We touched on rumors that Karadzic could fall. A reporter who was in Vucurevic's cabinet last week showed us a picture of Serb leader Jovan Raskovic and the empty spot next to it. He whispered that a photo of Radovan Karadzic once hung there. "Serbian politics trade people," Vucurevic said. "No one from outside is going to decide the fate of the Bosnian Serb Republic (RS) and all the efforts to break up its leaders are futile. The new Croat-communist coalition is more dangerous to us than the Moslem-Croat coalition. Karadzic is still RS leader and no one can endanger him because here things are different to what the Belgrade and Podgorica media say."

We met some front line soldiers on a one day pass. They spoke of the waiting in expectation "which is more difficult than the shelling". "We haven't moved forward at all," a 20 year old said. "They can't advance either and we can't go through them even if we were much stronger. There's at least 10,000 of them and the same number of us. The lines are as close as 30 meters apart in places. We watch and wait to see who's going to get who. We aim at each other, he at my house and I at his. Both of us waiting for the command and when we get tired of the deathly silence we fire all guns."

Another soldier said there are almost no civilian casualties because of the shelters and added: "the best illustration of the situation on the front is that we haven't been able to get six of our dead out for three days. There was a fierce clash on Popovo Polje. We tried to take a bunker and two of our men were killed. Four others managed to capture three Croats but when they were close to capturing the bunker the Croats shelled the area killing there own men along with ours. There are nine of theirs and six of ours lying in no man's land."

Vucurevic often said he was wary of peace brokers "who are the greatest danger to the Serbs now". The uncertainty is deep in Trebinje.