We Built Them - We Can Demolish Them

Whilst looking at photographs of Sarajevo, straining to recognize amongst the ruins a once loved, favorite spot, one inevitably begins to wonder on the insane characters in the surrounding hills who coldly load their cannons and howitzers, convinced that by transforming this city to a corpse and pulverizing everything that is down there, they are carrying out the most honorable and sublime national task.

When mindless politicians and uneducated soldiers concluded

the Vukovar affair, it was revealed that in the course of several-months fighting, about 80,000 shells were fired at the city. Afterwards, still more facts were unveiled for which this "liberation" will surely find its place in the history of human infamy and military stupidity. At the time, cynics made an official plan for the transformation of Vukovar into an "experimental ecological town", although experts say that all the sand from the Danube would not be enough for reconstruction to begin. No lesser cynics began organizing day trips to Vukovar for sight-seeing tours of the ruins and souvenir hunting for tiles, bricks or left-over bullet shells amongst the debris, as everything else has been taken long ago.

With the same political and military logic in mind, ("we were the ones that built, if its necessary, we'll be the ones to demolish"), Dubrovnik, Osijek and Karlovac were shelled, then it was the turn of Sarajevo, Mostar, Foca. In both of these wars, "eruptions of primitivism", something that can never be rebuilt has been destroyed, and is disappearing at this very moment -monuments of world significance, environs, the spiritual and cultural inheritance of the people who inhabited these parts. Many vital installations without which modern cities cannot exist and which war-torn economies will for decades be unable to rebuild, have been razed to the ground. If this business goes on with the same intensity and systematic devotion as up to now, nearly half of the former Yugoslavia will become a waste land.

The history of all wars records many city-carcasses, wounded cities and martyred cities, and the excruciating therapeutic

pains undertaken in order to rebuild them. What will surely go down in all the histories of warring from these parts of the world will be, as the architect Bogdan Bogdanovic recently said, "the ritual murder of cities" and a military doctrine which has for one of its first and most important goals the total demolition of cities. In the course of this, Bogdanovic notes, cities of symbolic beauty are usually chosen and the assailant resembles "a lunatic throwing hydrochloric acid in the face of a beautiful woman and promises her a new, more beautiful one".

Dubrovnik's attackers, for example, assured that they would

build a "more lovely and even older Dubrovnik" than this one, while the baroque town of Vukovar was promised a reconstruction in the yet to be seen Serbo-Byzantine-ecological style.

Only recently, one could hear and read the lament of one of Bosnia's national saviors, how his boys, being insufficiently trained and inexperienced, sometimes aim for one mark in Sarajevo, but accidentally hit another. Increasingly, high-ranking officers openly regret that an example wasn't set in Ljubljana and Zagreb by punitive bombing and serious destruction after which nobody would ever dream of secessionism.

Eye-witnesses say that the very beautiful town of Mostar has been sacrificed by both Serbian and Croatian sides since neither needs it. Both sides shell it since they want nothing which could in any way, even if symbolically, bind them together. Not even the famous bridge on the Neretva. In any case, years are spent on dreaming about bridges, years on their construction, but they are destroyed in the blink of an eye.

To the list of these "normal abnormalities", one should add the destruction and burning down of many Slavonian villages, deserted long before the arrival of the various "liberators" with knives in hand.

The beginning of the barbaric demolition of cities and the fear that the executers' guilt will never be washed away in the presence of the wakeful eye of history, has led many well-known architects to give their views on the pages of BORBA. The dispute began with Janez Kobe, an architect from Ljubljana, who implored all the winners of the BORBA's Prize for Architecture to speak up against the destruction of towns and historical monuments in Croatia. For example, the architect Slobodan Lazarevic felt that this destruction will go down as one of the biggest disgraces in Serbian history. His colleague, Aleksandar Saletic, responded to the same appeal with the words: "What kind of an appeal? Every trace of them must be wiped out. What do they think? That we should look after their monuments while they

butcher our children...?" Brana Mitrovic, an architect from

Belgrade, in a letter addressed to BORBA daily, explained that he, as a humanist and builder is against every murder and destruction, however, he pointed out that holy shrines, hospitals and cultural objects are often abused in this war, leaving us with the dilemma as to whether a church full of machine guns is still a church or something quite different.

Zlatko Trenk, from Sarajevo, who was the President of the Sarajevo Union of Architects, and a key town-planner, found himself in Belgrade with 10 kg of belongings he managed to pack with the help of a torch. According to him, all of the most important buildings in Sarajevo, those that gave the town its spirit and specific atmosphere, have either been destroyed or damaged. When asked who destroyed the city and everything in it of any value, Zlatko Trenk answered - "idiots". "I don't know and am not interested who is less or more to blame. I just know that we should have screamed at the top of our voices much louder and much earlier. When the people gathered around the Parliament, I still believed there was some hope, but those that led Bosnia downhill didn't allow that hope to survive. Everything that has happened had nothing to do with the inhabitants of Sarajevo. The city is being destroyed by scum, Mafias of all nationalities who someone is paying. They are primitive, with no respect for the achievements of civilization, monuments, buildings; all they are interested in is more space, plots, public registers. Whoever takes over that city will in the end have only an army plot and nothing more. They obviously have no other need for it, because what's the use of "victory" and the "liberation" of a city without the vital installations, communications and modern systems they have destroyed?"

Since the beginning of the war in B&H, when world opinion, in particular that of politicians, started pointing their fingers at Belgrade, accusing it of being the main perpetrator, stories about a sort of military intervention or a "Belgrade storm" have once more come into vogue. Prof. Bogdan Bogdanovic thinks that the demolition of Belgrade has already begun from the inside. There is no need for someone to come from the outside. It's enough for the defeated conquerors of Croatian cities and defenders of Serbian villages to start to clean up the "nation's refuse" in the city, to purify it racially, and Belgrade will be wrecked from within.

Zlatko Trenk, the architect from Sarajevo, believes that

all is not lost for Belgrade. "The story of Sarajevo is over", he said, "but it should be told for the sake of Belgrade and other cities which haven't yet been destroyed. To begin with, the nationalist parties won in Sarajevo, then lawlessness moved in, followed by corruption, a war profiteering economy, and then a shady class of people appeared and the executors of this policy started claiming the plots and kiosks that were promised them. The end began when cars started driving through Bas Carsija [a pedestrian precinct in the old part of town]. When you see somebody driving through Knez Mihailova Street [also a pedestrian precinct in Belgrade], pack your bags and run", Zlatko

Trenk advised.