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Sarajevo,
Spring 1997
A Motor Trip With Friends from Prague to Sarajevo, Just
as the War Ended in 1997
We're having a minor argument about the route, whether
or not the bridge is blown, if the scribbled directions are actually correct.
The road is narrow, but not the described narrow and we're backed up behind
a farm tractor, its rear end sagging under the load of a huge wire-caged
pig. The pig's head is down, swaying from side to side in the knowledge
its throat will soon be cut, aware that time is running the wrong direction
for pigs and it's a sobering metaphor for our entry into Bosnia. We
swing 'round, retrace to an identifiable point in the scribbling.
These word-of-mouth directions for the best route, perhaps the only route
in from the north change from week to week, no matter the war's been over
a year and a half.
I am no war-correspondent, not wise and hardened to the ways of ravaged
countries and the aftermath of their ravagement, not steeled to the ironies
of neighbor slaughtering neighbor, just an American headed to Sarajevo to
visit a friend who's opened a pub and colored his life in the shades
of Humphrey Bogart's Casablanca. Such an American thing, to visit
a war-zone, to take in the bullet-holes like points of interest in a tour
guide. Jason was right to insist upon our turning back, the scribbled
directions becoming reality now as the road narrows to two lanes, the promised
gas-station on the right and a measured kilometer beyond, the sharp right
turn to unmarked gravel.
It's late afternoon and been raining intermittently all day as the
four of us, two Czechs, a Brit and I drove hard down out of Prague, across
the low mountains of eastern Austria into Slovenia, then across Croatia
and finally to this battered gravel and its promised entry into Bosnia.
The rain's let up for the moment, but potholes slosh to the brim and the
little Peugeot rattles like a can full of marbles. There's been no
sign of war as yet, Slovenia opted out early and showed us a peacefully
agricultural face, a sort of agrarian prosperity. The motorway across
Croatia might just as well have been I-80 across Iowa, the only strangeness
is its lack of traffic. Zagreb to Belgrade and no one goes to Belgrade
anymore. A motorway to nowhere, a yellow-brick-road with no Oz.
We bump and splash our way past a thin, dark-bearded man on a thin bicycle
and he shouts at us, not in an unfriendly way, but in the way of early-evening
drunks on their way home. The road bends sharp right through a woods
and yellow ribbons appear tree to tree, warning of mines, the first we've
seen, although this side of the river is Croatia. A small white concrete-block
building marks the Croatian exit border and there's some momentary problem
over my passport and the supposed need of an entry visa, then finally a
shrug and we are waved through, falling in line among a trail of the rich,
the poor and the Ichabod Crane bicyclist, all backed against the muddy bank
to await the ferry to Bosnia. It edges towards us from the bank opposite,
cabled against the strong coffee-colored current and shoved from the side
by a small, churning tugboat. Its ramp squidges against the muddy
departure point, a dozen old cars offload, a dozen as old scurry aboard,
ourselves among them. We surge and chug our way across the three hundred
yards that divide identical shorelines and such diverse environments.
Clearing the border checkpoint, we pay our 6DM ferry fee and sputter our
potholed way into another world, a land of shelled villages, bullet-marked,
shattered and burned-out. Fruit trees are in bloom and abandoned farm
fields show the voluntary early spring green of grazing land, a backdrop
of fertility against the smoke-smudged blank eyes of gutted cottages.
Nothing seems at first to have escaped and yet there are occasional untouched
houses, saved by dumb luck or the politics of ownership, it's impossible
to tell. Can it have been worth it? Is it ever worth it after
the bluster of imagined hatreds have been replaced by the actuality of such
massive neighborhood death?
The well-known words of a radio announcer flash across my mind, his
voice breaking with emotion at the description of the exploding Hindenburg
at Lakehurst New Jersey a half-century and more ago: "Oh God, the
humanity, the terrible loss of humanity," he wails at the dying thirty-five.
How singularly subjective I am in my remembrances, here each tiny village
is a Hindenburg. Yet man is a tenacious weed and sprouts here and
there in the lower floors of this deconstruction, working his way slowly
upward. We drive through yet another village and I catch freeze-frame,
a pretty young girl, her smiling face turned back in greeting to a friend
and am at once saddened and encouraged. Laughter and beauty and hope
persist. It's near full dark now, the rain has begun again in earnest
and our Peugeot sheets water, a light showing here and there and then a
cluster of lights, the pain pulled back behind darkness.
 Quite
suddenly and without warning, the road is blocked and we are absorbed into
a glare of floodlights, razor-wire, sandbagged bunkers and soldiers standing
across the road in full battle-dress, submachine guns strapped across their
chests. SFOR, an acronym for Stabilization Forces, the NATO peacekeepers
who are are in control of the temporary bridge that separates Serb and Muslim
areas, the very reason our entry from the north has been so seductively
secretive. Yet that route saved us eight hours of driving and has
shown us a side of this devastation not so often seen. The NATO troops
are Italian, businesslike, friendly, cold, wet and determined. A sign
blocking our path in three languages announces "this bridge has been deemed
mission imperative and will be defended with whatever means necessary."
The first language is English, which pretty much tells me who has "deemed"
it anything at all.
Another eighty kilometers of hard rain, then clear roads, then rain again
and we finally approach Sarajevo, tired to the point that minor discomforts
have become major and I ask Mira to "turn off the damned radio" when the
techno-blast has finally broken my patience. Nighttime entry into
the city is other-worldly, traffic and traffic-lights absolutely as normal
as Chicago, the streets alive with well-dressed late-night pedestrians and
yet every third building is gutted by shelling. Whole walls gone,
windows shot out next door to the gleaming night-lighted storefront of a
glitzy Bennetton's. We're tired, beyond tired and it will surely all
make more sense in the morning. I realize we've only had one meal
in thirty hours, it's eleven-thirty at night and the thirty will stretch
to forty, but at least we'll sleep.
From an arrangement of beds and sleeping-bags thrown across floors at Morgan's
flat, we awaken to a drizzly Sarajevo, refreshed but sobered by yesterday's
drive. The streets are a tribute, not to the end of war because no
one knows if it is ended, but to the triumph of entreprenurialism over destruction.
Every building is pock-marked by bullets, grenade fragments and artillery,
yet the streets are alive with traffic, pedestrians are businesslike and
the visitor, the observer is unable to get a handle on what it must have
meant to be under siege, to understand as a daily matter of survival, the
importance of lines of fire.
I cannot help but structure what I am seeing and feeling in terms
of my own experience. Never before an exponent of the arming of America,
not an NRA supporter, I wonder if the framers of our constitution had in
mind the likes of Bosnia when they guaranteed their citizens' right to arms.
Had they seen too much of what I have seen too little? Would farm
villages be less the victims of power-blocs if they were individually armed,
or would they merely have come more quickly to the slaughter of their
neighbor? I don't know. I try to know, but I don't know and
therein lies the problem, because no one knows, not the UN, not NATO, not
the forced negotiators in Dayton, not even the man on the street.
But the UN has seen fit to level the playing-field by bringing the Muslim
armaments and training up to parity with the Serbs, rather than bringing
the Serbs down. It's easier to do and far more profitable. Why
is everyone surprised when we arm and arm and arm and then someone shoots?
The Turkish market here is selling artillery shells scavenged from the surrounding
hills as souvenirs. They pour them full of lead, then hand tool
intricate designs, remove the lead and the result is quite beautiful when
highly polished. Brass is apparently brass, no matter the source.
I have to think about that.
We begin a day-trip to Mostar, about two and a half hours southwest in the
direction of Dubrovnik and on the way out of town, find Sarajevo to have
been only badly damaged compared to the outskirts near the airport.
Yes, the downtown everywhere is splattered with rifle and artillery fire.
Yes, there have been deaths, in some cases such as the central-market massacre,
many and multiple deaths. But on the way out of town, whole twenty-story
apartment and office buildings are shattered, gaunt remains of twisted metal
and collapsed concrete, some still miraculously standing, but who knows
if they are structurally rebuildable? Not a few blocks, but miles
of such buildings, with the occasional tower untouched but for a few blown-out
windows.
The road opens into countryside, steep-sloped pastures fading quickly to
mountains. Farm villages dot the route, all of them heavily and methodically
damaged, most with nothing left at all save a few partially standing walls.
These houses were constructed of stone, then plastered over and they died
hard and unwillingly. Small flocks of sheep and goats graze what's
left to graze, but there are few planted crops, this is subsistence grazing-country
and lives here were wrenched from the land by gnarled hands. How many
generations of lives lived at the edge of such poverty will it take to rebuild?
And why such total destruction? I'm told that historically the
Serbs and Croats each wanted the Bosnian lands. And both had it in
for the Muslims. So when the haters and revenge-takers came calling
at your village, you had to be someone and someone was enough to lose all
you had. The hyphenated ethnic mix of this war has made it incomprehensible
to the western world and perhaps to the participants themselves. How
often can you read of the changing battle-lines of Bosnian-Serbs, Serbian-Muslims,
Croats and the reverse of all these ethnicity's before eyes glaze over and
one's hands are thrown up in confusion? War is expected to be waged
among facing armies, the civilian population only brought under fire by
occasional logistical accidents, but not this war. This war has been
a determined house-to-house conflagration of civilian assets. This
war has been a "you got mine, I'll get yours" eye for an eye vendetta against
the innocents and not-so-innocents. There seems to have been no such
thing as a strategic target, except perhaps for bridges. Even some of them
were destroyed for spite. The ancient and historic bridge at Mostar
fell and it was a national treasure, not even capable of carrying a vehicle.
 We
park the car near the old historic center of Mostar and I quickly snap a
picture of an SFOR armored personnel carrier. We've passed such vehicles
regularly on the way down, but too quickly for photographs. Mostar
is bullet-riddled and shelled, but it's a small town and showing signs of
reconstruction. A blessing of these plastered stone buildings, that
most of the old and worthwhile can be brought back, but where one wonders
will the money come from to rebuild a whole country? When a nation
commits suicide, is it the duty of the outside world to pay for the funeral
and compensate the relatives? Bosnia seems to think so. Sarajevo
is money-mad, drunk on the cheap wine of UN, European Union and International
Monetary Fund money. The lingua franca of Bosnia has become the Deutschmark
and repair work is sky-high, grumpy and unreliable. A condition that
stands in stark contrast to the old man we see on the bank of the river
in Mostar, pulling at the rubble of his home with a rake. Impossibly
hopeful, improbably human. The blue-green water of the river swirls,
cascades and then evens its way out through the center of this once-lovely
city. It was the same breathtaking blue-green before war came to its
banks, during the worst of the fighting and will be yet, ten centuries from
now.
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An old historic photo of the original bridge
in Mostar |
The complete destruction of this non-strategic
bridge as we saw it on our trip |
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