After three months of bombardment by Serb forces, the 300,000 or so people who remain in Sarajevo received a helping hand last week. More than 100 cargo planes landed at Sarajevo’s airport, carrying almost 1,200 tons of food and medicine. At a conference on European security in Helsinki, George Bush said supplies must get through, “no matter what it takes.” The United States and several West European countries sent warships to monitor a blockade that aims to pressure the Serbian-dominated government of Yugoslavia into easing up on newly independent Bosnia. But so far, residents of the city feel no sense of relief; if anything, many are more desperate than ever. Despite the presence of 1,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops, dusk still brings the gut-wrenching thud of artillery and the crackle of sniper fire. People still have to sleep in cellars for safety and go without baths or clean clothes. “We are living like underground rats,” says Gordana Knezevic, an editor at the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje.
Like the British during the blitz, Sarajevans have learned to cope. Knezevic and her colleagues manage to print 10,000 copies a day of Oslobodjenje, even though the newspaper’s headquarters have been blown up. At Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn, where a third of the rooms have been destroyed, managers “kindly request” that guests (at this point, only foreign journalists) keep their drapes closed to avoid sniping. As mortar and tank fire rocked the hotel one evening last week, waiters in tuxedos continued to serve flak-jacketed patrons, while the piano player launched into a mordant rendition of “Killing Me Softly.”
Doctors warn that the siege of Sarajevo is causing a mental-health catastrophe. “People are suffering from anxiety, depression, hopelessness and helplessness,” says psychiatrist Dusan Kesmanovic, who works at the city’s main psychiatric hospital, where the telephones haven’t functioned for weeks and the clinic has run out of tranquilizers. Children adjust to the violence in disturbing ways. On “calm” days, when there is only routine gunfire, they scamper among the rusted automobile carcasses that line the streets, playing “sniper” and setting up mock roadblocks. The siege brings gunmen, victims and impotent peacekeepers into explosively close contact with each other. Starving residents of the suburb of Dobrinja are separated from the food-filled warehouses at the airport by a single road. Serbs in the hills above have turned the road into “Sniper Alley,” preventing relief trucks from entering Dobrinja. “At this point, the one thing people need more than food,” says Kesmanovic, " is a social and political solution to this evil we are living in."
The new prime minister of Yugoslavia, a naturalized U.S. citizen named Milan Panic, says he intends to make peace, and last week he issued a warning to the bellicose president of the Serbian republic, Slobodan Milosevic. Said Panic: “God help him if he gets in my way.” It remains to be seen whether Panic will have enough political support or military clout to end the fighting. Most Bosnians are skeptical about a negotiated peace. The warring parties, they say, cannot easily be separated, since Bosnia is a patchwork of Croats, Serbs and Muslims. Bosnians argue that without intervention by foreign military forces, the Serbs will not back off. Protecting the relief operation is not enough, they say; foreign troops must also protect them.
As the civil war goes on, the people of Sarajevo have lost nearly all their sources of solace. Even church is unsafe. Father Thomislav Jozic, a Roman Catholic priest, recently told his parishioners to stop coming. “A crowded church would be a perfect target,” he says. When worshipers show up anyway, he celebrates what he calls an “express mass,” the duration of which is “a military secret,” he says with a sad smile. Last week parishioners were sent back out onto the dangerous streets with a fitting message: “Hope dies last.” But unless the siege is lifted, hope will die quickly.
title: “Life Among The Ruins” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-10” author: “Lewis Kisler”
In the weeks to come, a force of 14,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops will move into the land once known as Europe’s “powder keg.” They will meet devastation not seen in Europe since World War II: rubble-strewn streets and backyards with mass graves; the bare, ruined choirs of bombed-out churches; apartment blocks ruptured as if by earthquake. In houses where soldiers raked the walls with indiscriminate gunfire they will find the impoverished survivors-only the latest victims of what Yugoslavs call “our cursed geography.”
The conflict has deep roots in Balkan history. As a region strategically located, it has been the object of repeated imperial ambitions, from the Ottomans to the Hapsburgs. Over the centuries, the struggle against outsiders would create a veneer of unity among the many tribes and cultures. Then, with the foreigner defeated, that accord would collapse. The end of the common Soviet threat started the cycle of violence again. “The inherited fear and hatred of feuding clans was stronger than fear and hatred of the enemy,” as Milovan Djilas once wrote. “Generation after generation, and the bloody chain was not broken.”
title: “Life Among The Ruins” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-22” author: “Dorothy Rodrigues”
In the weeks to come, a force of 14,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops will move into the land once known as Europe’s “powder keg.” They will meet devastation not seen in Europe since World War II: rubble-strewn streets and backyards with mass graves; the bare, ruined choirs of bombed-out churches; apartment blocks ruptured as if by earthquake. In houses where soldiers raked the walls with indiscriminate gunfire they will find the impoverished survivors-only the latest victims of what Yugoslavs call “our cursed geography.”
The conflict has deep roots in Balkan history. As a region strategically located, it has been the object of repeated imperial ambitions, from the Ottomans to the Hapsburgs. Over the centuries, the struggle against outsiders would create a veneer of unity among the many tribes and cultures. Then, with the foreigner defeated, that accord would collapse. The end of the common Soviet threat started the cycle of violence again. “The inherited fear and hatred of feuding clans was stronger than fear and hatred of the enemy,” as Milovan Djilas once wrote. “Generation after generation, and the bloody chain was not broken.”
