13 years after the end of the war, Sarajevo in 2008 is a modern city with new high-rise buildings, embassies, cafés and restaurants. The capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina is again hosting international events like the Sarajevo Film Festival. In such moments the town reminds visitors of the days when the city hosted the Winter Olympics back in 1984.
The signs of war are disappearing step by step or have become part of the city's heritage. City tours have long included the bridge where the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28 1914 and set off the First World War; the Old Town, with its mosques and the Ottoman era shopping quarter which has been carefully restored; the national library that used to serve as city hall during Austro-Hungarian times, which remains partly destroyed. Now the "must-see" sights include also the tunnel near the airport which was used during the siege of Sarajevo.
Prison photo of Gavrilo Princip - Robert Donia
"Common life" is the term that Robert Donia prefers to describe the city's multi-ethnic character in his "Sarajevo: A Biography". He says:
"In the book I have used the Sarajevans' preferred pre-1990 term, 'common life', to capture the values that bind Sarajevans together. Common life took different forms in each of the city's historical epochs and mutated over time, but it was belief in common life that enabled its citizens to mould the city's unique character".
Sarajevo's common life was never more tested than during the siege of the city. In April 1992 the Bosnian Serb army captured key positions in and around the town and sealed it off. A city in the heart of Europe was turned into a war zone, shelled from the surrounding hills and cut off from the rest of the world. In August 1992 the City's National Library was destroyed in 3 days of Serb shelling. 1.5 million books were reduced to ashes. The Librarian, Kemal Bakarsic, described the wanton destruction:
"All over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of gray ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow".
Destruction of the National Library 25 August 1992. Photo: flickr/ highly tasteless
War-damaged building Central Sarajevo. Photo: flickr/KnownColor
A detailed count has shown that 10,615 people lost their lives during the siege three quarters of them in 1992 the most terrible year in the city's modern history. Three times as many inhabitants were injured. All this happened despite the presence of UN peacekeepers, under the eyes of the world's media. During the siege the population lived without electricity, running water and with little food. It was a "struggle for mere survival, but also for the defense of human dignity," as the historian and Sarajevo resident Dzevad Juzbasic has characterised that awful period.
Muslim graveyard in Sarajevo. Photo:flickr/mblomqvist
Today, the city's cemeteries and the dates on their tombstones remind visitors of the harsh reality of the siege. Robert Donia has written:
"No resident of Sarajevo passed those wartime years without mourning the loss of one or several family member, close friends, or neighbors. Grief was deepened by survivor's guilt, the awareness that the sniper might just as well have selected the prior passer-by or the artillery shell might have landed a few feet away or a few minutes earlier or later".
(Robert Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography, 2005, p. 320)
In 1993, the people of Sarajevo the Sarajlija dug a 700 metre long tunnel under the frontline airport to link the city of Sarajevo with the outside world. The tunnel was one of the main ways of by-passing the international arms embargo and providing the city's defenders with weaponry, as well as being one of the main conduits for food supplies. What it was like to crawl through the tunnel at night has been described by Tim Lister, one of the few outsiders allowed to use it:
"Once we entered the air changed, the smell changed, as did our state of consciousness from the very first steps. The walls hugged our elbows and we literally had to bend in half to walk, or more like waddle, through the 700m corridor. The iron reinforcements above dripped with moisture and the muddied floors were covered with wooden planks…Sweat dripped from our foreheads, and muscles in our backs began to reject our unnatural position."
(Tom Lister, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bradt, 2007, p. 121.)
Entrance to the Sarajevo tunnel. Photo: flickr/Fiasco NY
War came to Sarajevo three times in the last century; in two World Wars and in 1992. But the war in the 1990's was unmatched in the destruction it brought to the city. At the peak of the massive bombardments in 1992, not even the most inspired optimist in the city could believe that Sarajevo would manage to resist but it did.
Nevertheless the war has changed the city. Croats had left in great numbers. Most Serb residents have not returned. Numerous Bosniaks who fled during the war had found a better life elsewhere. The very large number of ethnically mixed families has been sharply reduced.
Robert Donia has described the city's dilemma:
"The city's common life did not die during the war, nor has it perished in the difficult postwar era. However, Sarajevans face many difficult choices in the post-socialist and postwar era, and the future of the city's common life is among them…
Most of them reject national exclusivity in principle, yet they have repeatedly opted to put nationalist political leaders in office. With the city still living in the long shadow of ruinous war and its citizens holding contradictory social values, Sarajevans have yet to discover or invent a full spectrum of cultural, political, and educational institutions that are free from both communist and nationalist authoritarianism. As they endeavor to do so, the future of the city's common life hangs in the balance".
Watching Sarajevo. Photo: flickr/Semih Hazar