The Good People of Sarajevo

It’s difficult to describe the mood of this Eastern European city, where the architecture wears the scars of recent, modern conflict on its face — from partially restored, Austro-Hungarian monuments and palaces, to blazing white mosques with mirrored pinnacles and ornate orthodox churches, to modern, boxy, concrete communist block style apartment buildings – many still bullet-ridden & mortar-blasted, many with graffitti scrawled throughout, all in various stages of cleaning, patching, rebuilding, or just resting. The sounds of this city, now, are the sounds of diesel trucks rolling over the cobblestones; the tick-tock of the mechanical crosswalk signals; the murmured slavic conversation over cava, pivo, and cigarettes; Euro 2008 football crowds and replays on the ubiquitous outdoor flat screens in every outdoor cafe; the call to prayer reverberating over the hills and river; and slow, painstaking reconstruction, in pockets, everywhere.

Sarajevo, rather than erasing or denying its recent memories, has kneaded the fortitude and strength that its citizens exhibited through that siege into the bricks and mortar of a complex current day survival and struggle for economic rebirth. I can’t tell whether the citizens of Sarajevo have completed the stages of grieving; they don’t deny, they don’t seem to be angry; they cannot forget; they haven’t forgiven; perhaps they choose to accept; that the pain of this history is inevitable, and fated, and inherent to life amongst richly textured, centuries-old cultures. One of the stores in Old Town has a T-shirt that says on the back, “fuck war criminals, fuck war profiteers, fuck the carpetbaggers, fuck cultural imperialists, fuck the people who left Bosnia and speak ill of it, fuck Bosniaks, fuck Croats, fuck Serbs, fuck all the bad people” — in so many words, as translated by the salesperson. She said “some people say ‘how can we say this on a T-shirt?’ But it is true, and we are not saying that all Bosnians are bad”. They’ve identified those who are to blame for their pain and difficulties, but after 10 years, they are just beginning to celebrate and understand what’s left, their strengths, and what might be possible with what they have.

In an earlier post, (“Welcome to Sarajevo”) I briefly tried to describe the most recent Balkans conflict; a few lines could not begin to describe the complexities of the ethnic conflicts, the civil wars, the international involvement, and the pain and the horror. From photos and film, the sounds of the siege of Sarajevo, from 1992-1996, were the sounds of artillery fire, mortar blasts, and aircraft overhead; the buildings weren’t that crisp Austro-Hungarian pale yellow with off-white trim, but drab grey, with pops of dirty white and blue from the UN vehicles and aid drops, and the flags of the Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, bullet-ridden black, against a 90’s overwashed denim sky, and finally, with an olive green military fatigue jacket slung over Sarajevo’s spectacularly beautiful and land-mined hills.

In 1992, the Serbian army surrounded Sarajevo; with the city and the rest of the Bosnian Territory separated by the UN-held airport. The United Nations did not want to appear to favor a side; so they split all the aid shipments, 50/50, between the Serbian forces and the Bosnian citizens of Sarajevo, and remained neutral, resulting in the deaths of over 11,000 men, women and children in Sarajevo. In late 1992, the forces inside Sarajevo decided to try to construct a tunnel, under the airport, to get access to the the Bosnian territories; 400 people or so were killed by Serbian snipers when trying to cross over the UN-held airstrip. In mid-1993, the tunnel was completed, with Bosnians digging from both sides and meeting in the middle; at 800m long, 1.5meter tall and 1 meter wide, the tunnel provided a vital lifeline of food, fuel, medical supplies, military supplies, and Bosnians, through the blockade of over a thousand days.

A quote from Nietzsche appears on the opening pages of the Tourist Association pamphlet on the “Sarajevski Tunel”:

Da, ja znam poreklo svoje!
Nezasito kao plam
gorim, zgaram sebe sam.
Sto god darnuh svetlost posta,
sto ostavih ugljen osta,
sigurno je da sam plam.

Unfortunately, there’s no English translation.

We left for the Tunnel Tour from a beautiful park on the side of the river in Sarajevo; with couples and friends in the cafe; and children playing on the miniature train and playground. We drove down Sniper Alley, past the Holiday Inn that was built for the 1984 Olympics held in Sarajevo, and served as the home, and “safe house” for foreign journalists and international diplomats in Sarajevo, shuttled by UN vehicles. The tunnel was built, on the Sarajevo side, by the side of a family’s house; it’s been cleaned up for tourism, and there are two big flat-screen TV’s, one outside, one inside, for tour groups to sit and watch a video before the tour begins. I was apprehensive about the video; but there were few words, only some titles, and powerful, painful film of the shelling and attacks in Sarajevo. Men, women, and children, dodging sniper bullets; buildings destroyed in a moment. The footage of the tunnel being built showed men smiling, digging, wheelbarrows filled with dirt pushed through and out; and finally, the tunnel in use – a man with a goat, soldiers, military leaders, food supplies coming in, and families walking out, to safety, perhaps.

According to the pamphlet (exact, the tourism office’s English), “That a town with more hundreds of 1,000 of inhabitants is able to survive 1,000 days of the total blockade has proved Sarajevo and its inhabitants. With courage, devotion and exipitional ingenuity and along with great sacrifices Sarajevo has remind a free town, and the ways of surviving, offering resistance and supplying the town will stay in the history recorded with big letters as the obligatory text that the future generations will study for a long time….The tunnel has become a symbol of the resistance of the unarmed people to one of the most powerful armies in Europe. Let leave a memory on the way of life, the way of salvation and bravery.”

I think about where I was, in 1992-1995; my son was just born when the siege started; I had a great job in finance, a happy family, was living in Boston, and Melbourne Australia, and a suburb of New York City. I didn’t like the landlord much, who owned the house we were renting in New Jersey (we had rats and water damage and he wouldn’t take care of it); but we got along very well with our neighbors in Australia, who were couples from New Zealand and from Tasmania, and a young artist from Brisbane. I’m sure I had a pair of jeans, pegged, like the ones I saw on a woman dodging sniper fire on a film they showed at the tunnel; I know I held my daughter, just as tight, when I crossed the street, as the woman I saw running with a toddler on her hips, while mortars exploded around her.

I have trouble with monuments of war; I don’t like to see sadness and pain relived, I don’t like to see man’s inhumanity, weaknesses or greed celebrated or sensationalized, or hollow victories captured and individual lives aggregated and marginalized into statistics and anecdotal representations. I understand the need for us, as humans and within each of our cultures, to honor great sacrifice and celebrate our triumphs; I understand the necessity to warn against evil; and I understand the desire to try as best we can to commemorate collective, as well as individual, effort and valor. I’m a very big fan, though, of the Olympics; and I almost always shed a few tears, for skill, talent, perseverance, and pride, at every medal ceremony I watch on TV, whichever country’s children stand on the podium.

But this tunnel, this tunnel museum, is not about the Olympics of 1984 or the Olympic slalom runs you can see from the airport strip and the tunnel entrance, and all its heros. It’s about the good people of Sarajevo, the good Bosnians, and those Bosnian heros who helped them survive. And none of us cried, in the van ride on the way back to the park, or in the small, cleaned-up rooms of the former home, converted into a lifeline, with photos and memorabilia from the tunnel and the war. Instead, we reflected – on the photos of John “McKaine”, Fred Thompson, Richard Gere and Daniel Craig, shaking Bosnian hands; and on the letters from the British and American ambassadors, honoring the people of Sarajevo and those that sacrificed for the tunnel; and on the photos from inside the tunnel, and the people and goods coming through. We were quiet, when coming back through Sniper Alley, back to the cafes and the playgrounds and the river, and the bullet-ridden buildings and refaced quaint alleys of Sarajevo.

We paid and thanked our guide, a young man who was here through the war, and stopped for ice cream, on the way back to the hotel.

~ by mimi on June 25, 2008.