Sarajevo, a once happily diverse city, has not managed to recover in the 20 years since the start of the Bosnian war. "Sarejevo used to be a joyful city," recalls Amina Delic, a 46-year-old music teacher. On Friday, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina will mark the 20th anniversary of the war that began in the first week of April, 1992.
The event will be marked with a concert, titled The Red Line of Sarajevo and featuring songs composed during the city's 3.5-year siege, to be staged on Tito Avenue. The street became known as "sniper alley," after the Serb gunmen who terrorised Sarajevans for nearly four years. The musicians will perform before 11,541 empty chairs, in memory of those who fell to Serbian bullets or missiles, hunger or disease.
There is an "obligation to remember our fellow citizens," in order to "prevent those atrocities from happening again," said the mayor, Alija Behmen. Correspondents who informed the world about the tragedy will also gather in Sarajevo. About 100 veteran journalists were on their way to the capital, according to organizer Remy Ourdan from French daily Le Monde. They will meet at a Holiday Inn hotel that was shot at.
Did the siege and "daily dangers" help Sarajevo residents become better people?, asks the local Dani newspaper. The war was about defeating "the beastly impulses" that it awakened in each and every one, concludes Vedrana Seksan, the author of the article.
She pays tribute to the solidarity that emerged during that difficult time.
Ingenuity, pride and idealism made up the so-called spirit of Sarajevo, allowing people to defy shelling, the cold, thirst and hunger with style. Cellist Vedran Smajlovic, for instance, played his instrument in front of a burning library. Inela Nogic was elected Miss Sarajevo Under Siege, and images of local beauties displaying placards saying "Do not kill us" filled the world's television screens.
International artists and intellectuals also came in a show of solidarity, including Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sontag, Bernard-Henri Levy and Juan Goytisolo. "I wrapped my soul in a concrete block ... to become a Sarajevo rose," sang Sting. The most recent celebrity to join the cause is Angelina Jolie, who has made a movie about the Bosnian war.
"Sarajevo will not count its dead - it will count the living," threatened Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader - promising that the dead would outnumber the survivors. Karadzic is now on a genocide trial at the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The destruction his forces left behind is visible in the ethnic composition of the formerly multi-ethnic inner city, now estimated to be almost entirely Muslim. The Serbs moved out - partly out of fear for revenge by Muslims and partly to escape Serb mortars.
"It is no longer the mixed city it was before the war," says retired general Jovan Divjak, a Serb who remained loyal to Sarajevo. Delic, the music teacher, still remembers a joyful and carefree Sarajevo. But now, sadness and fatigue are palpable in the cafe where she meets her friends.
They lament about problems ranging from corrupt politicians to prohibitive property prices and the indifference of the European Union toward their country. But apart from the economic woes, they are mostly concerned by the trend for strongmen and nationalists to persistently keep hold of the reins. That works against the idea that Muslim, Serbs and Croats could still learn to live together.
"The biggest evil of 20th-century Europe was created by nationalism," writer Miljenko Jergovic says. Jergovic, who wrote his much-praised Sarajevo Marlboro after escaping the siege, is not optimistic about the future. "Southern Slavs carry grudges and always settle their accounts," he told dpa. "Yesterday's debts will be paid in 50 years' time, like debts dating back 50 years were paid in the 1990s."
Europeans were "happy about having defeated fascism" in other countries, but "we have not yet defeated it in ourselves," he said. Aleksandar Hemon left Sarajevo young and became a writer in Chicago. On his return, he wandered around the city for 18 months, listening to his grandmother's stories as he struggled to reconcile his memories with Sarajevo as it was now.
"It was fantastically similar, but fantastically different - partly destroyed," the writer - who recorded his experiences in the novel Mapping Home - told dpa. "Maybe in 20 years' time, Sarajevo will be a wonderful place to live," said former expatriate Avdo Prolic.
Comments
Comments are closed.