‘You really should try one of the NGOs,’ suggested the regional controller, trying to be helpful. ‘They meet right next door at the café.’
The UNHCR might be the world body but that was far from the end of it. Disaster relief is an entire industry and for many a profession. Outside United Nations and individual government efforts come the Non-Governmental Organizations. There were over three hundred NGOs involved in Bosnia.
The names of no more than a dozen would ring a bell with the general public: Save the Children (British)
, Feed the Children (American), Age Concern, War on Want, Médecins Sans Frontières – they were all there. Some were faith-based, some secular, and many of the smaller ones had simply come into being for the Bosnian civil war, impelled by TV images beamed endlessly into the West. At the extreme bottom end were single trucks driven across Europe by a couple of beefy lads who had had a whip-round in their local bar. The jumping-off point for the drive on the last leg into the heart of Bosnia was either Zagreb or the Adriatic port of Split.
Ricky found the café, ordered a coffee and a slivovitz against the bitter March wind outside and looked around for a possible contact. Two hours later a burly, bearded man, built like a trucker, walked in. He wore a plaid mackinaw and ordered coffee and cognac in a voice Ricky placed as coming from North or South Carolina. He went up and introduced himself. He had struck lucky.
John Slack was a dispatcher and distributor of relief aid for a small American charity called Loaves ‘n’ Fishes, a recently formed offshoot of Salvation Road, which itself was the corporate manifestation in a sinful world of the Rev. Billy Jones, television evangelist and saver of souls (for the appropriate donation) of the fine city of Charleston, South Carolina. He listened to Ricky as one who had heard it all before.
‘You drive a truck, kid?’
‘Yes.’ It was not quite true but he reckoned a big off-road was like a small truck.
‘You read a map?’
‘Of course.’
‘And you want a fat salary?’
‘No. I have an allowance from my grandpa.’
John Slack twinkled.
‘You don’t want anything? Just to help?’
‘That’s right.’
‘OK, you’re on. Mine’s a small operation. I go and buy relief food, clothes, blankets, whatever, right here on the spot, mainly in Austria. I truck-drive it down to Zagreb, refuel and then head into Bosnia. We’re based at Travnik. Thousands of refugees down there.’
‘That suits me fine,’ said Ricky. ‘I’ll pay all my own costs.’
Slack threw back what remained of his cognac.
‘Let’s go, kid,’ he said.
The truck was a ten-ton German Hanomag and Ricky got the hang of it before the border. It took them ten hours to Travnik, spelling each other at the wheel. It was midnight when they arrived at the Loaves ‘n’ Fishes compound just outside the town. Slack threw him several blankets.
‘Spend the night in the cab,’ he said. ‘We’ll find you a billet in the morning.’
The Loaves ‘n’ Fishes operation was indeed small. It involved a second truck about to leave for the north to collect more supplies with a monosyllabic Swede at the wheel, one small, shared compound wired with chain-link fencing to keep out pilferers, a tiny office made out of a workman’s portable cabin, a shed called a warehouse for unloaded but not yet distributed food aid, and three locally recruited Bosnian staffers. Plus two new black Toyota Land Cruisers for small-cargo aid distribution. Slack introduced him all round and by afternoon Ricky had found lodging with a Bosnian widow in the town. To get to and from the compound he bought a ramshackle bicycle from the stash he kept in a money belt round his waist. John Slack noticed the belt.
‘Mind telling me how much you keep in that pouch?’ he asked.
‘I brought a thousand dollars,’ said Ricky trustingly. ‘Just in case of emergencies.’
‘Shit. Just don’t wave it around or you’ll create one. These guys can retire for life on that.’
Ricky promised to be discreet. Postal services, he soon discovered, were non-existent, inasmuch as no Bosnian state existed so no Bosnian Post Office had come into being and the old Yugoslav services had collapsed. John Slack told him any driver running up to Croatia or on to Austria would post letters and cards for everyone. Ricky wrote a quick card from the bundle he had bought in Vienna airport and thrown into his haversack. This the Swede took north. Mrs Colenso received it a week later.
Travnik had once been a thriving market town, inhabited by Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims. Their presence could be discerned by the churches. There was a Catholic one for the departed Croats, an Orthodox one for the also departed Serbs, and a dozen mosques for the majority Muslims, the ones still called Bosnians.
With the coming of the civil war the triethnic community which had lived in harmony for years was shattered. As pogrom after pogrom was reported across the land, all inter-ethnic trust evaporated.
The Serbs quit and retreated north of the Vlasic mountain range that dominates Travnik, across the Lasva river valley and into Banja Luka on the other side.
The Croats were also forced out and most went down the road ten miles to Vitez. Thus three single-ethnic strongholds were formed. Into each poured the refugees of that particular ethnic group.