Good morning to you, too.

June 30, 2010:

We were sitting at breakfast this morning on the patio outside our hotel, eating bread and drinking strong Bosnian coffee, when suddenly Vahidin put down his cigarette. “That man with the moustache was in charge of all the mass graves in Sanski Most,” he said, nodding toward a white-haired man who had just walked in.

We all looked at him, startled. His face was composed, though he had lost the jovial tone now so familiar and beloved to us. (Vahidin is a Bosniak—an imam, in fact—who lost many family members and village neighbors to those mass graves during the war.) He continued to explain, saying that the man now held a government position in Sanski Most. (The law now requires representatives of all three ethnic groups to hold office, even in areas like this one where Serbs committed most of the war crimes.) So when Vahidin’s father had had to go to the municipality office to sign the paperwork relinquishing all his land, that man was the official who watched him sign. Now, Vahidin said, he sees that man and his wife around, but he still has not been able to say hello.

And to add insult to injury, it seems, the man with the moustache is now a member of the national Bosniak party. “That’s why I hate politics,” Vahidin finished, and returned to his cigarette.