Fuck War Lets Dance: a serious road trip

Drew Hemment. Published in Herb Garden, 1996.

I arrived in war-torn Tuzla with the Desert Storm free party sound system on 31st December 1995. The plan had been to set up in a venue arranged for New Year’s Eve, but this was cancelled due to fear of bombing. Undeterred Desert Storm decided that if the people couldn’t come to the music the music would have to go to the people, and set up the PA and lights on the back of an open-top 17-ton truck. The sound system was still warming up when the management from Hotel Tuzla, which hides UN and EU personnel in decadent splendour away from the grim realities of life in the city, came out to complain. But when the music was turned down the police intervened in a way that was to set the tone for the night, waving their guns to indicate the volume be returned to full blast.

With lasers and strobe mixing with tracer fire in the misty snow-bound night and underground house pumping out the truck set off for the centre of town (we were later told the gun fire was from celebration not combat). Still no-one knew how this invasion without deadly intent would be received, but smiles and waves from windows soon gave way to a presence on otherwise deserted streets. The mobile party played Pied Piper to the people of Tuzla, young and old, as it wound its way through the town - some following behind, others climbing on board to check out the sound system or claim a tutorial on the decks.

The first stop was made outside the town hall in the cobbled old town, where the flashing blue light of a police car added to the lights as the driver jumped out and joined in. Next was a high rise housing estate where a crowd of hundreds gathered within minutes. The smoke machine was switched on and the square was converted into a pulsating orb of colour with figures disappearing in and out of the smoke, and lights cutting through the winter sky, in a scene that stood in stark contrast to the austere housing all around. A Bosnian soldier silhouetted against the light held his AK47 above his head and fired a New Year’s greeting into the air, a different kind of friendly fire.

The sound system had set out to show solidarity with all those dodging the snow and bullets. It had travelled to Tuzla as a part of a Worker’s Aid for Bosnia convoy, laden with food and blankets. Clapped out trucks that were home for the arduous 13 day over-land journey were begged and borrowed from any available source. The snow and ice of the Balkan winter and the twisting and ravaged mountain roads were negotiated by a mixture of improvisation and luck, a truck with no brakes nosing the one in front when it needed to slow down, one with no lights groping though the dark winter nights. No UN soldiers offered protection from the drunk and traumatised off-duty soldiers encountered in market places and service stations, and it was left to unofficial guides to instruct us when to relax and when to turn lights off and put the foot down because we were passing through a combat zone in sight of the guns. Christmas Day was spent in a car park in Split where a DIY nightclub was constructed and a party provided for refugees, NGO personnel and a handful of ‘absent without leave’ UN soldiers.

The convoy was unconventional in every sense. Mixing with the radicalism of the Free Party movement and the diesel fumes was the combination of anarcho-syndicalism and Old Left unionism of Worker’s Aid, a group frowned upon by the larger charities and forced to operate outside of official channels due to its partisan stance. Born out of a relationship with the minors of Tuzla that dated back to their support for the 1980s minors’ strike against the government of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Worker’s Aid had openly sided with the people of multi-ethnic Tuzla and supported their stand against the nationalism all around it - a stand in which the local union movement had played a part - that made Tuzla one of the only cities in the region not to have been torn apart by ethnic hatred.

Long before the US military dreamt of embedding journalists in military convoys, cultural projects were already visiting war zones mixed in amongst the convoys of blankets and food aid. The visit by Desert Storm was possibly the first to the war-torn people in the ex-Yugoslavian republic of Boznia-Herzegovina. Speaking to the people of Tuzla living two weeks in every month on the front line, and travelling back through the decimated city of Mostar where endless rows of fresh gravestones covered the hills above, the horrors of war were clear, as were wounds that a free party could never begin to heal. But Desert Storm’s journey was not just conflict tourism, it led to lasting contacts, new lines of communication, and galvanised future action back home. At a time when the UK government, the UN and most charities were standing by and watching, Desert Storm and Workers’ Aid showed how people working at grass roots level can break through official inaction and deliver a small taste of another life.