Phantom Bodies

I’m referring to two BBC online reports about bodies of war victims.

1) 64 corpses will be transferred from Belgrade to Kosova. These are the corpses of Kosovar civilians who were probably killed by Serb security forces during the war between Milosevic’s Serbia and Kosova. The killers buried the corpses haphazardly on a site which catered for some police academy. Once transferred to Kosova, the corpses will be taken to a huge mortuary where they will be laid together with hundreds of other bodies waiting to be identified. The war between Serbia and Kosova – the very last absurd act of the Yugoslav epilogue – ended in 1999. It is expected that hundreds of ethnic Albanians (whose relatives had been declared ‘missing’) will be waiting, hoping to identify their lost loved ones. To be fair, 37 bodies of Serb civilians were recently found buried in a mass grave in Kosova. I’d presume that these will be transported in the reverse route to Belgrade.

2) A forensic team in Belgium is doing its best to identify a body found in Passchendaele, where for some four months, beginning on 31 July 1917, a fierce battle was fought. It is said that the battlefield was actually a sea of mud, and half a million soldiers lost their lives there, shot or drowned in earth. The corpse was found in a shell hole, in an almost perfect condition, still wearing special anti-gas attire.

Phantom Bodies

Just imagine you wake up one morning, go to the shower, dress, and drive to a huge building where you then find hundreds of lifeless bodies, lying in rows. Imagine you are walking slowly, with a fixed look in your eyes, scrutinising the bluish white look of each corpse in your nth attempt to spot your son, father, brother or sister who you haven’t seen since 1999.

Imagine you are sitting in your kitchen reading the last reports from the front on the newspaper. Imagine you read this title spread in bold letters announcing the end of the war, and in the meantime, His Majesty sends you a personalised message, signed and all, comforting you for the loss of your son, brother or father who went ‘missing in action’. And you spend your whole life hoping that one day this lost loved one appears alive, or even dead! And each year you light a candle on his birthday. And then you grow old and you still cherish his loving memory. And some ninety years after you read about the end of the war, years after you died of a heart attack, someone unearths the man you had spent your life waiting for. And yet they cannot even identify him.

Phantoms

You may start believing the war is over. You may start thinking that the dates you know by heart are now text book stuff for students to study for their exams. You start thinking that once upon a time there was a land called Yugoslavia, but her citizens fought a silly civil war, and killed each other and … well there’s nothing one can do: all that lives is born to die and that’s exactly what happened to Yugoslavia. The people(s) fought, murdered each other but now it is all over. And years go by, and then one day you realise that the phantoms of the war are still haunting you. They have emerged from the paragraphs printed on textbooks, from massive mass graves, to haunt your memory.

And that which you believed to have belonged to a bygone time comes into view, and waits for you to start crying.