``The city of Tuzla is one of the most remarkable communities in Europe whose people have stood up, throughout history, for the values of pluralism, tolerance and democracy. During the Second World War the Muslim people of Tuzla succeeded in preventing the destruction of the city's Jewish and Serbian communities by Fascist troops. At the beginning of the present war in former Yugoslavia, Tuzla's non-nationalist authority reacted by putting together a multi-ethnic Citizen's Forum of 10,000 people to resist the politics of ethnic division and keep a normal civic life alive... Tuzla's struggle, and Bosnia's struggle, is our struggle. It is the struggle of the whole of Europe for peace, democracy, cultural diversity and tolerance against the evil forces of Fascism.'' -- Paul Harris, in his book "Cry Bosnia."

This summer I traveled to Bosnia-Herzegovina, in order to participate in the first Summer University held in the northeastern city of Tuzla. I was one of several American professors teaching at the university, which took place from mid-July to mid-September under the auspices of the Association des Etats Generaux des Etudiants de l'Europe (AEGEE) and involved thirty professors from fifteen countries and three continents. In April, 1996 when I first decided to make the trip, Youth Support for the former Yugoslavia (YSY) at the University of Amsterdam, the organizers of the summer university, were still uncertain as to how travel to Tuzla would best be accomplished and whether a military escort would be needed.

As it turned out, traveling was not terribly difficult or unsafe though several roads amount to no more than paths across farm fields and many bridges remain unreconstructed. The real difficulties were presented by the urban infrastructure. There had been two reasons to hope that this infrastructure would not have been in bad condition by July, the time of my arrival. First, Eagle Base -- a center of American IFOR (the NATO Implementation Force) deployment -- which had been in place for a half year, was located at the city's airport. Second, Tuzla was one of the UN ``safe havens" not to succomb to the genocidal aggression of the rump Yugoslavian military (the JNA) and the Bosnian Serb Army (the BSA) it supported. However, since only the military implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords was in full swing, only reconstruction serving that purpose had been performed.

I arrived in Bosnia by bus -- there are no civilian flights to Tuzla and were no civilian flights into any part of Bosnia-Herzegovina at the time -- on a makeshift ferry propelled by a small powerboat, crossing the Sava river from Croatia in the north into a region referred to as ``the Orasje pocket.'' At the border checkpoint near the town of Slavonski Samac, which consisted of little more than a mobile office, I was greeted by a flag bearing the sahovnica - the red and white checkerboard shield previously used by the fascist Independent State of Croatia during World War II -- rather than the communist red star that had adorned the Yugoslavian banner. This was the beginning of a seemingly unending display of the Bosnian Croat flag throughout the series of half-destroyed villages and fresh graveyards we passed. The flags made it manifestly clear that this was a part of Bosnia under the control of the Croatian Defense Council (the HVO).

The atmosphere changed abruptly as we reached the infamous Posavina corridor -- whose significance for the viability of a ``Greater Serbia'' led to its reduction to a wasteland by intense village-to-village fighting marked by heavy casualties -- with its show of Serbian flags, again missing the old red star. There I saw the first American troops, small units monitoring the passage across the corridor. Their job was to separate forces and to help guarantee the freedom of movement required by Dayton. By this time en route, some twenty hours from my departure from the US, on the same day as the crash of TWA flight 800, nothing could have been more reassuring than the sight of African-American soldiers calmly sitting in tanks as darkness fell. Near the southern end of the corridor, a university-aged passenger disembarked to the warm and tearful embrace of her parents and younger sister, all of whom it appeared she had not seen likely since fighting began in Bosnia in 1992. Many Bosnians studying abroad were taking the opportunity to visit home before the coming academic year.

After entering Bosnian government countrolled territory at the southern side of the corridor the checkpoints ceased. The bus reached a normal speed for the first time in two hours. We were then just three kilometers north of the Bosnian highlands. A lively debate arose among the passengers -- all Bosnian but for me and two Europeans also traveling to the Summer University -- about what music to play next; the conclusion came when the driver dropped in a cassette of the sort of turkic folk song I was soon to learn young Tuzlans dismissively label ``village music.'' As the bus finally arrived in the outskirts of Tuzla some time later, I first noticed the chemical production plant (HAK) I was later told had been a critical factor in preventing the city's fall: both the attackers and the defenders of Tuzla had viewed this facility as a colossal chemical weapon. Before the war much of Yugoslavia's defense industry was located in Bosnia, and this plant was reputed to have been involved in military production. It guaranteed ``mutually assured destruction'' should it come into use as a tool of war. Like Sarajevo, Tuzla is largely surrounded by hills -- releasing its gases would flood the city and its routes of access, I was told.

That my Dutch hosts were not present to greet me at Tuzla's dim, run-down main bus station came as something of a surprise. But soon to my aid came a friendly Tuzlan, an engineer working for the Norwegian People's Aid demining contingent, exhibiting the Bosnian hospitality I had been told one could rely on. She gave me a lift, in the sort of clean white utility vehicle I would come to later identify with a non-governmental organization, to Hotel Tuzla -- a place in town that electrical and telephone service could generally be depended on, much as the infamous Holiday Inn had been in Sarajevo -- as the city's 11 p.m. curfew fell. A few phone calls later, the organizers of the Summer University were on their way. I was whisked through the city's very underlit streets at a rate I surmised had come to seem unremarkable after years of periodic shelling. As we arrived at B-6 Tower, the sort of grey concrete apartment building typical of many socialist cities, I was informed that we wouldn't be taking the elevator to the twelfth floor flat; since more than a half dozen people had been killed in Tuzla elevator accidents during the last six months, use of the lift was strongly discouraged. My hosts flicked on Bic lighters to illuminate the pitch dark stairwell with its broken windows, blown-out lightbulbs and electrical systems scavenged clean. Upon reaching the apartment I was shown the practical meaning of a chronically disabled water system: the bathtub had become a reservoir, and half the floor was occupied by water-filled 1.5-liter Pepsi bottles. Water was available in the early morning (5 a.m. - 7 a.m.) and for a few hours in the evening, at best. My hosts left me to take my rest.

After a few hours sleep I awoke to the sound of roosters below announcing the dawn, as I would for the rest of my stay. On the way to the liberal arts college for the presentation of my first lecture that bright morning, with a shift of the warm breeze, I was alerted to the fact that the wide stream running just south of the city's center, and beside several of the university's colleges, was serving as an open sewer. That day classes met for each of my two courses during the Summer University, one in quantum theory and the other in the philosophy of science. The courses were attended by students representing all of Bosnia's ethnicities and possessing a great enthusiasm to learn. This was the first time in four years that one could enjoy a summer in Bosnia and these upperclassman chose these lectures rather than escaping to the newly cleared beachside at nearby Lake Lukavica. It was my first experience working with translators, but all went well as they were student volunteers with excellent skills developed working for various non-governmental organizations (of which there were roughly two hundred operating in Tuzla by most estimates) or during studies in the US.

Several of the translators were students who had been studying in the US, with the aid of a North American organization, the Community of Bosnia Foundation (COB), visiting home. Of my physics students several were expected to become high school teachers of physics. Thus my efforts would be multiplied: these students would soon find themselves before students of their own. The philosophy of science course also drew the attention and interest of several members of the university's faculty. Thomas Kuhn's analogy between scientific and social revolutions had taken on a deeper meaning in Tuzla than his overused, and abused, conception of paradigm shifts has taken on here in the States.

In addition to teaching at the Summer University, I acted as a liaison to Tuzla for ,a href="http://pbosnia.kentlaw.edu/projects/bosnia/legal/">Project Bosnia, headed by Prof. Henry Perritt Jr. of Villanova University's School of Law, which is working to implement a new legal system in Bosnia-Herzegovina via the Internet. While technically the Internet is operational in Sarajevo, in practice it was barely accessible. The reason for this was a combination of the intransigence of the local PTT (post, telephone and telegraph service) and the University of Sarajevo's desire to monopolize the medium. In this second capacity, my goal in Tuzla was to contact people who might serve as administrators of the Internet service provider to be set up in Tuzla. What was needed were individuals who could be depended on to resist any temptation that might hold up the development of a modern information infrastructure. I also presented the dean of the economics faculty at the University of Tuzla, formerly the dean of the law school of Brcko -- a northern border town ``ethnically cleansed'' by Serb nationalist forces -- with his new department's first computer. The laptop is now used for email transmission through the ZaMir email network, currently operating throughout all of the former Yugoslavia, in order to facilitate contact between Tuzla Economics and the US.

Supplementing the scheduled courses, several public meetings promoted by the Tuzla Citizen's forum were also held with members of the community. One of these I conducted together with Prof. John Weiss of Cornell University, an historian of science. This seminar addressed the questions of technology transfer and development. Much interest was expressed in the creation of small businesses, primarily by people with backgrounds in engineering. One of the topics focussed upon was the coming of the Internet and the possibilities it would open up, for example the creation of a software development industry such as has recently been successful in India. Along similar lines, another American participant in the Summer University, Prof. Garth Katner from St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, was working to assist the development of small businesses, as he has been doing successfully in Ukraine for several years.

The faculty of the University of Tuzla was most gracious and helpful, and pleased to have American as well as European colleagues in the city. The Summer University and its visiting professors have had a practical impact on the curriculum, such as the introduction of a course in the philosophy of mathematics and science in the upcoming year as a result of my involvement. The Summer University was clearly psychologically important, as it put Tuzla in open and in direct contact with the outside world in a way it was prevented since the onset of the war. Many of Tuzla's faculty members had found it necessary to leave the city to maintain properly their careers and families. As a result, a deep sense of isolation had set in at the university. Those who did not leave told tales of the ethnic cleansing of towns and villages north and east of Tuzla, as well as to the west in the cities of Doboj and Banja Luka. We often shared coffee, heated over a portable butane burner when the electricity was out, in the sparse and compact common room of the department of mathematics and physics, with its bullet-holed windows. Just before my departure the first new textbooks produced by the faculty had arrived -- my colleagues from Tuzla were overjoyed.

The city was a common destination for refugees after the fall of the UN's ``safe havens" of Srebrenica and Zepa, sites of brutal ethnic cleansing campaigns (which reporters like the Christian Science Monitor's David Rohde risked their lives to expose to the world). In August 1995, the city held some 200,000 refugees, including roughly 75% of Srebrenica's ethnically cleansed population. The week before my arrival, an anniversary demonstration took place in the city's sports complex which was, incidentally, attended by some of America's female military personnel. The women of Srebrenica and Zepa, survivors whose husbands and sons had been killed in mass executions, commemorated the failure of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) to protect their towns as promised. (Its soldiers came to be called ``Smurfs'' because of their blue helmets and unwillingness to use force.) Posters announcing the rally still remained throughout the city, showing destroyed homes and children in refugee camps or at the graves of fathers and brothers. Notably, the phrase ``UNPROFOR TREASON" was written beside these pictures in large, bold type.

The feelings of people in Tuzla toward the US and IFOR appeared quite the opposite from those toward UNPROFOR. NATO, unlike UNPROFOR which at times actively prevented it from intervening as the rump Yugoslavia took more and more Bosnian territory, was held in relatively high regard. More precisely, it seemed Bosnians want the Americans, and only the Americans if that were possible, to stay and nurture the peace. Only the Americans had not directly betrayed them. (Perhaps this explains the fact that children regularly ran up to me to ask in American English, ``What's your name?" and were delighted to hear my reply.) So far, NATO's IFOR has been largely successful in pursuing the military goal of separating forces and guaranteeing freedom of movement. However, it is clear that after the end of the current deployment there will be much work to be done in reconstructing Bosnia.

The saddest episode in the war for the people of Tuzla was the vicious rocket-propelled grenade attack of May 25, 1995. May 25 is Josip Broz Tito's birthday. Apparently, by sending in RPGs on that date, the aggressors wanted to make a statement about ``brotherhood and unity.'' Their spokespeople in Pale have made clear their frustration at Tito's having for so long kept them from being the absolute masters of every settlement occupied by a single person of Serbian ethnic background, whether that person liked it or not. More than seventy civilians, mostly youths in their teens and twenties, though including one three-year old boy, were shredded by the grenades, turning a pleasant square near the center of the city -- on one of the first beautiful evenings of the pre-summer -- into ``Hell. There was chaos everywhere,'' in the words of a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross who arrived at the scene. (See ICRC Press release 95/18.) Twice as many were wounded in the attack. The number killed in fact exceeded the number who died in the first Sarajevo market massacre that had so outraged the paralyzed world community fourteen months earlier. The ICRC official called the attack ``yet another major violation of international humanitarian law.'' Photos of the scene taken just after the attack show just how horrendous it was -- too horrific for words.

Every young person with whom I spoke knew someone who'd died in the assault. Some told me how fate had spared them; how only blind chance had kept them from the place, Kapija, that evening. The square has become a memorial, one which I never saw unoccupied -- typically, three or four people would be gathered near the display of framed pictures showing the victims. Fresh flowers always lay beneath the sad poetry on the wall at the western edge of Kapija. One of the university students wrote, the day after the massacre, ``Students, pupils are the only ones that can really understand what it means to be killed during a summer night walk. They are the only ones that do not calculate `strategic consequences'... The killing has nothing to do with ethnicity. This is a savage act of terrorism... children from all ethnic origins'' were killed. Indeed, the especially well maintained corner of the city graveyard -- a hundred or so meters from a memorial to Partisans killed in World War II -- with its variously designed wooden religious markers stands as touching evidence of this latter fact. The three year-old had been out with his parents, themselves both wounded that evening, ``maybe to get an ice-cream... That is what we usually have been doing recently. A walk through the city, pretending to be in the normal, peaceful time.'' While in terms of the number killed this incident pales by comparison to the killing of thousands of civilians in bouts of ethnic cleansing, the psychological impact of this massacre of youths was tremendous.

Tuzla is now struggling to regain the vitality it once had. After the coming new year, the pace of civil reconstruction is scheduled to increase. I plan to return to the city for the annual second summer university next year. Tuzlans are optomistic, provided the U.S. and Europe do not abandon them and leave them vulnerable to further military attack, even as they continue to remember the innocent victims of nationalist aggression. The latest word from NATO is that it will maintain a post-IFOR presence. Let us hope so. During my stay I met many young, energetic and capable Bosnians, particularly engineers, who are hoping and working for a brighter future. Such a future can only be realized with the continued diligence and support of the international community, which in the past prevented the country from defending itself. It is vital that it continue to supply Bosnia-Herzegovina with the weapons of peace: education, law, order and economic opportunity.

(COPYRIGHT 1996 GREGG JAEGER.)