The Spiritual State Of Siege

When Sarajevo is without electricity, water or gas - or all three, as it was ten days ago - one is fully aware that that situation could easily be permanent. Despite the everyday calm and relaxation that one sees on the streets and in homes, when one sits down and does a little thinking they can feel an apocalypse present. That is why it is not a good thing to think at an unfavorable moment, when there is no electricity, water or gas, for example; that is when Sarajevans become furious and gloomy. Namely, no one can understand "those merrymakers from the mountains": in two and a half years they have been unable to either take Sarajevo or gain any benefit from the bombardment and siege of the city. In Sarajevo they say, "When Karadzic becomes angry with Milosevic he turns off our electricity". Sarajevo views the siege as mistreatment purely at whim, revenge by "primitive mountain people with no sense of humor" and a senseless crime. For example, there is a mosque in the Bistrik neighborhood which they unsuccessfully targeted for months (it is still standing); they say that at one moment an old lady cried out: "Come on kids! Let's knock down that minaret by ourselves!".

The war is slowly heading toward a point where the rules of the game might change, notwithstanding Sir Michael Rose's thoughts about it. This entire summer, shooting on the critical front lines (the Jewish cemetary, Alipasa's field, Dobrinja, etc.) came from both sides. The much-heralded UNPROFOR anti-sniper patrols have achieved absolutely nothing: the excellently equipped French soldiers, whose technical and firepower are impressive, hang around armored transporters, look through their binoculars, count the number of shots fired and document them. All attempts at intervention have failed for the simple reason that UNPROFOR does not have the authority to use force (except in self-defense) or to arrest violators of the agreement to suspend sniper fire. Here is one instance of how this works:

One day at the end of August your reporter noticed how a few young people in uniforms were examining various types of sniper guns in front of a cafe; they soon sat in a Volkswagon Golf riddled with bulletholes and drove off. "Now open your ears", said someone in the cafe and before long shooting was heard from the Marijindvor neighborhood (near the Holiday Inn hotel). By the time your reporter reached the spot the incident had already ended: a crowd of nervous Frenchmen was discussing the matter with Sarajevo policemen who did not look the least bit impressed. It turned out that some young men snuck into the battered Bosnia-Herzegovina Parliament building andfired upon the Jewish cemetary, where the main Serbian sniper positions are located. The French soldiers called for reinforcements, surrounded the building, and asked the Bosnian police to arrest the snipers; the police arrived too late, because the young men had escaped and disappeared. The police most likely started out for the building only after they had received the message that everything was alright over their radio. Those same young men appeared in the same cafe a half hour later as if nothing had happened. That evening your reporter asked an assistant to the minister for internal security why that incident was necessary; he was told that that is the only way to alleviate the sniper activities. However, no particular alleviation was noticeable: the average losses from sniper fire in Sarajevo remain at at least two wounded daily.

The increase in the number of incidents is a consequence of two factors: less military-political, more psychological. The desire of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina to let Karadzic know that things have changed everywhere, even in the Sarajevo zone, is noticeable. Moderate pressure on the Army of the Bosnian Serb Republic (VRS) positions has become constant along most of the front lines around Sarajevo. Karadzic's side retaliates with sniper fire and rockets from hand-held throwers and grenade launchers, but mostly by firing upon the Igman road above Hrasnica, the key route for that small amount of supplies that reach the city through the tunnel.

The psychological factor is more important: siege is a spiritual state which is difficult for an outsider to understand. Everything has its limits, including the patience of Sarajevo. That patience has worn rather thin after two winters of war. More and more often one hears the rumor going around the city that the price for taking the suburb of Ilidza is two million DEM; The residents of the city say "Come on, let's gather those two million and have this end". However, the shutting off of electricity, water and gas is not related to the armed incidents around the city; it is instead Karadzic's manner of conversing with his main opponents - the so-called international community and Slobodan Milosevic. "Irresponsible elements turn off the gas in Kasindol (suburb near Ilidza), we turn it back on, they turn it back off, and this keeps repeating", says the officer in charge of relations between the VRS and the UN at the airport; the Bosnian side does not believe that interpretation. They are convinced that these are the desperate and malicious actions of someone who is on the road to losing the war and is now looking to at least make them pay in any possible way. This makes them more irritated, and the ever larger number of weapons that are getting to them through various forms of smuggling make them more self-confident. When we add to this the fear of winter, since Sarajevo can only heat itself by electricity or gas, it seems that the critical mass needed for an explosion has been almost reached. By playing with the siege, Karadzic - according to Sarajevans and some outside observers - is playing with fire by making it impossible to exit a situation which is not in the least favorable to him.

Sarajevo is already described as a pressure-cooker in which 350,000 inhabitants are simmering. The siege has brought things to the point where Sarajevo is described as "a diagnosis, not a city". Because of their favorable position in former Yugoslavia, Sarajevans had gotten used to going to Mostar, the Adriatic coast, skiing, Belgrade, abroad - when they felt like it and when they had money. The siege has brought claustrophobia: "Come on, at least take me to Sokolovic (Sarajevo suburb), so I can see the world", says Sejla (19 years old) to her boyfriend. The larger portion of evening conversations in homes concern previous summer vacations and travels. In order to get out of Sarajevo now - at least to Fojnica (suburb) - it is necessary to have a pile of permits and papers, "stela" (connections) and friends. Stories from the scariest periods, when people risked their lives for a handful of eggs from Hrasnica, are told. An outsider quickly senses the claustrophobia: at everyintersection one cautiously looksleft or right; you immediately discover that Trebevic and other mountains around Sarajevo are somehow too close.

The siege has also had its comic moments: an intoxicated VRS soldier crossed from Grbavica to Sarajevo unnoticed one night and was caught there. He explained that when he gets drunk he only knows that he must go to tram number three; so that is what he did. One of the main sources of entertainment is the curfew: every resident of Sarajevo has acquired the sense of time and distance of an experienced marathon runner. As a matter of principle, the police tolerate five to seven minutes tardiness and then take violators to the station, where they must remain until five o'clock in the morning. One policeman told your reporter a story about a man who lives off of the curfew: the man fills his pockets with cigarettes and positions himself for arrest every evening, careful to regularly change districts and shifts; when they take him to the station he sits down and waits for someone to utter, "People, does anyone have a cigarette?", takes out a pack and sells it for five DEM (the street price is nine packs for ten DEM). Davorin Popovic, the singer fromthe group "Indeksi" is the champion at getting out of being arrested when caught: he either yells at the policemen who bother him at night instead of defending their homeland or - when they catch him at two o'clock in the morning without his driver'slicense, his identity card or any documents, and in an automobile for which he does not know who the owner is ("I took the first one that was in front of the house") - he asks them "Is there something wrong?", in a perfectly calm and collected manner.

It was noticed long ago that the war has only one good side: people learn to differentiate between the essential and the unessential. Sarajevans have thoroughly mastered this lesson. For example: a man is walking through the park behing the Bosnia-Herzegovina Presidency building during a strong wind before an imminent storm; the wind knocks a branch off of a tree and the branch falls in front of the man; he jumps away, swears and moves on; everyone in the cafe across the street jumps up and yells: "Take the branch and bring it home, sucker!". It is similar with all other essentials: rationing of water, food and all energy sources, enjoyment of every peaceful moment. One of the more significant aspects of life in Sarajevo is the preservation of the civic spirit and the orderly assimilation and integration of the refugee population. Every true Sarajevan is more afraid of the provincialization of Sarajevo than of mortars. In this regard, Sarajevo is in a more favorable position than Zagreb or Belgrade: it is smaller and it has a stronger local spirit and order. Discipline and civilization (the original meaning of the word: being fit to live in an urban environment) have a strong presence. For example: the tram arrives in the Marijindvor neighborhood and someone yells "Skenderija!" (sports center downtown); half of the passengers exit and the other half die of laughter. Another example: two men are standing and talking in the middle of Miss Irby street (fairly busy) and the locals sit in a cafe and get upset: "Look at the suckers! You can tell by their faces that they are from Rogatica; they stand in the middle of the street and don't give a fuck that automobiles have to go around them", etc. At one moment the driver of a French armored transporter - a polite man - is passing around those two men by climbing onto the sidewalk; a man in the cafe can no longer stand it and gets up and yells at them: "Hey, you two suckers! What are you doing standing in the middle of the street? This isn't Rogatica. Your conversation is neverending. Go over there into the park. It is the same as in Rogatica over there. This is Sarajevo. The locals carry on here. Would you look at them!". The two men sink their heads into their shoulders and move toward thepark. The general impression is that Sarajevo will succeed in conquering and integrating that which General Jovo Divjak calls "the new partisans": various local commanders who have established fiefdoms in Sarajevo, Muslims from Sandzak who play the same role in Sarajevo as the Herzegovinians do in Zagreb and the Montenegrins and Serbs west of the Drina River in Belgrade (they greet one another with a "What's up, commander?" and four raised fingers which signify a four-bedroom apartment), political careerists who quickly went from being diehard Communists to diehard Muslim nationalists and constantly yell "Es selam aleikum!" and "Alah emanet!" until their throats are hoarse, and similar rabble (including those who - as one well-known television journalist - after 35 years of marriage remarried their legal wife, but in front of a Muslim priest).

By definition, when a city is under siege it is very hard to enter it and even harder to leave it. Passage through the famous tunnel under the airport runway is denied to those who are not citizens of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A foreigner is left to the mercy of the transport capabilities of the United Nations and their agencies, which live up to the image found in the popular Sarajevan curse: "May God grant that the Serbs take care of you, the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) defend you, Merhamet feed you and UNPROFOR transport you". The charm of travelling with the UN is its unpredictability; their airline company is not called "Maybe Airlines" without reason. The first qualification for flying with the UN is to have some kind of legitimation from that organization. Individuals who work for UNPROFOR have primacy; holders of UNHCR identity cards (there are a myriad of these individuals since a legion of NGO's under UNHCR auspices have created a pacifist-humanitarian industry in Sarajevo; to various degrees of effectiveness, to be fair) are next on the top-list: everyone will transport them unless someone with larger priority is present (there are three classes of priority; the UNHCR is usually second or third). From the point of view of the UN, the lowest lifeform (somewhere at the level of the cockroach) are accredited journalists in general, but especially journalists from the former Yugoslavia (those with yellow "Local Press" cards): the Americans - who have the most planes in use - do not transport journalists at all (they once had to physically remove Christianne Amanpour because, counting upon the almightiness of CNN, she would not leave the plane. Journalists, if they are notpilgrims from some powerful media enterprise with good connections, have third class priority and count upon the good will of the personnel, which can be found more often than one would think. For UN flights it is good to have a bulletproof vest and a helmet handy, even when they are not required: the rules change all of the time; some will fly you without any protective gear, some require a bullet-proof vest and others a helmet in addition. Borrowing helmets at the Sarajevo and Ancona airports is a common practice and the crews on the "Hercules" andthe "Transals" will kindly return your borrowed helmet to its owner without making a mistake. Witty directions and warnings to passengers are posted at all UN airports ("the food: suspicious"; "the Cabin personnel: unfriendly", etc.). The quality of the service at "Maybe Airlines" ranges from the elegant Belgrade-Zagreb UNHCR flight, with its unbelievably friendly pilots, to the adventurous landing in Sarajevo in a "Hercules C-130", which, in order to avoid the firing on the ground, the German pilot maneuvered in such a manner as to cause his own crew manager to throw up. The crew members are without exception friendly and attentive - once one actually gets onto a plane. Booking is done throughan interesting company called NORMOVCON (Norwegian Movement Control) whose employees are very polite Norwegians. Passport, customs and security control are under the jurisdiction of UNCIVPOL (the UN Civilian Police), who are mostly Portuguese, capable and intelligent people who are ready to turn a blind eye if need be. For someone who wants to go to Sarajevo from Belgrade and also has some UN legitimation, the most secure, and the most expensive, route is via Ancona. It is a one hour flight from there to Sarajevo; in Sarajevo, the Bosnian government is not concerned about who has entered the country if they have passed through the UNCIVPOL controls. Other ways to get there - the less expensive ones - are complicated and dangerous. If you are a foreigner, you can get to Sarajevo by automobile only if the government of the RS has nothing against foreigners in general or you in particular at that moment (that moment could be very short, as many foreign correspondents expelled from the RS well know). You can also take a UN flight to Zagreb and then take a UNPROFOR flight to Sarajevo - if you are a magician or if you have a good connection at the UNPROFOR command in Zagreb. If not, you can fly from Zagreb to Split and then to Sarajevo on "Maybe Airlines". In both cases, the main problem is the Croatian transit visa, which is very hard for those who possess SRJ passports to obtain. Two examples: with possession of a telegram from the Bureau of the Republic of Croatia in Belgrade, your reporter obtained a transit visa at the Zagreb airport without a problem; a telegram from the Republic of Croatia's Embassy in Sarajevo meant nothing to the police at the Split airport, so that your reporter was neatly sent back to Sarajevo (that evening a friendly policeman explained to him that he was unlucky: if men from Split had been working the shift instead of Herzegovinians, he would have passed through). Sarajevans (even those with UN legitimation) have even more horrible stories and refer to Split as "Livno (Croatian ultranationalist stronghold in western Herzegovina) on the sea". Travelling through the former Yugoslavia continues to be something right out of a novel such as "Wild Kurdistan" or out of the early works of Graham Greene.

If those possessing UN identity cards have such experiences, you can imagine howthings are foryour average Sarajevan.Sarajevans nevertheless do travel: either to get out for good or to leave and later return (that is the epitome of Sarajevan heroism). After a two-month tour of six European countries with their exhibit, Bojan and Dalida Hadzihalilovic (two-thirds of the group "Trio" that did the graphic design for "Vreme"), told your reporter, when we ran into one another at the Butmir airport, that normal people live only in Sarajevo. How did they manage to stay normal? The answer is given by a young man in a conversation with Gordana Vesovic; aftera story about the war and suffering, he summarizes this with the following words: "If we were not human, we would not have stayed normal" - and that is the essence of the story of Sarajevo, as absurd as it may sound to you.