In 1992, a european country was destroyed while the rest of the world watched. Its nucleus,
however, resisted, fought back and survived three years of siege and bombardment. By
1995 over 170,000 people had been killed and several times that many injured. It was
Bosnia and Sarajevo, and a war that substituted for my childhood. The Serbs blockaded
Sarajevo that april: their snipers took positions on high buildings in the suburbs, killing
at random. as Sarajevo is in a bowl-like valley, within days their artillery occupied
the hills surrounding us and aimed down. Soon, the Serbs turned off the electricity, the
freezers begun to defrost and everyone was cooking so the food wouldn’t be wasted.
Simultaneously the bombing started and we began spending nights in the basement of our
apartment building with our neighbours eating all this food, like some strange nocturnal
underground picnic. For a child, it seemed we were in some crazy festival, like the circus had come to town, and
at the end there would be a big meal and the children would play while the adults talked
about how bizarre it had all been. But then water and gas pipes were switched off, the food
ran out and the bombing intensified. The maternity hospital was bombed, pictures of
people shot dead in the city filled the newspapers and from the look in my parents’ eyes I
realised it was time to be scared. The men in the building took turns to guard the entrance
at night, armed with semi-automatic rifles. Bosnia had no real army because the
Yugoslavian army was mostly made up of Serbs, so the government released from prison
and armed some powerful gangsters who formed militias to defend the city. They
essentially saved Sarajevo from falling in the first weeks, before an organised army was set
up. as children we sang songs celebrating their bravery. I still regard them as heroes,
despite their crimes. At home, we abandoned all rooms with windows, leaving us with only
the hall to live, and cook and sometimes sleep in. But most nights we slept in the
basement, sometimes staying there for days. Water was brought from a nearby pump.
Food was scarce and monotonous and before long we were down to one daily meal of rice,
beans or pasta. By the time we left Sarajevo I had forgotten what ice cream was, and whether oranges had
to be peeled. It was all the more surreal because I couldn’t understand what was going on
or why. On the radio, I heard ‘ethnic conflicts’ mentioned, but this seemed like an answer to
a different question, one I didn’t ask. My father is Muslim, my mother roman Catholic, my
best friend Orthodox Christian and my nanny was Jewish. But, as a family we celebrated
the Orthodox Christian festivals with our Orthodox Christian friends,the Jewish ones with
Jewish friends and so on, and probably took them as seriously as they did. Religion served
not to preach, but to bring friends and family together, secure theseties and carry on
traditions passed down to us. How ironic it was then that which had helped unite us
was now being used to divide and kill us. Most Muslims in Sarajevo don’t go to the mosque, don’t know arabic or how to pray, smoke
like chimneys and drink alcohol like the best of them, so the idea that they could suddenly
go on a jihad to establish a fundamentalist Muslim state seemed incredulous even to a
child. However, that’s what the Serb politicians claimed, what they convinced many of their
people was happening and what some in the outside world seemed to (want to?) think.
In reality, I later understood, it was a genocidal, nationalist war, initiated by Milosevic,
Karadzic, and some Bosnian Serbs to make a ‘Greater Serbia’. Bosnia was to be annexed
and the Muslims living there killed or removed. My parents decided to stay in Sarajevo,
partly because they are doctors and most doctors had left. Five anaesthetists served a city
of 350,000 during the war, my mother being one of them. But also because it was Sarajevo:
a city where four religions, the east, the West, capitalism and communism, met to
create an energy that so many thought was worth fighting for. The city was all it was
because it was multicultural and multiethnic, and we wanted it that way.
Perhaps I idealise ante bellum life in Sarajevo. The privileged life that I led there, of
nannies, ballet lessons, winters skiing in the mountains and summers on the coast,
wasn’t a life that many had. There were many problems that didn’t affect us but, still,
there was something unique about Sarajevo, something that made everyone proud to
live there and made so many stay to fight for her. Peter Maas, a Washington Post
correspondent who spent 1993 in Bosnia, wrote “Sarajevo was a temptress,
and it was hard to know which was more seductive, the half-mad look in her eyes, or
the scarlet drops of blood on her extended hand. Temptresses have different allures with
which they entice their victims, and the oddest thing about Sarajevo’s allure was that the
more ghastly she appeared to the outside world, the more her buildings were destroyed
and the more starved her residents looked, the more seductive she was. Sarajevo was
violence and passion.” It was the longest siege in modern times, but for the
residents there was never the option of surrender. Just a sense of defiance, a sense that
in Sarajevo we were right and just had to hold out until the world realised that too. I remember the night when the Serbs set the national Library on fire. My parents took us up
to the roof during the bombardment to see what the cowards with their tanks on the hills
were doing. and camera crews filmed this and the aftermath of massacres and broadcast
the unedited footage on TV, to show the world what was happening. and it saw, but when
the Un Secretary General Boutros-Ghali visited, he just said, “I can give you a list of ten
places where you have more problems than in Sarajevo.” Meanwhile, my parents went out
to work separately, so that a single grenade couldn’t kill them both. But, on Christmas eve
1992, dad and I were leaving the house and he was shot as we walked down the street.
Fortunately he was only wounded while many others we knew were killed. Lucky, everyone
said, that it wasn’t me. The strange thing was how quickly this stopped upsetting us:
by the time they started burying people in football stadiums, death had lost its novelty value.
In war, you see things you don’t want to see. You live through things you don’t want to. You
lose people you love. as a child, you grow up quickly. There are no ‘boogie monsters’ under
the bed, trying to ‘get you’, because you know of real monsters, with real guns, who wake
up every morning with the aim of killing people like you. There is no school because they
bombed it, but it would have been too dangerous to go there anyway. You stay indoors for
months and, when you can go out, you play ‘street wars’ with kids on your street, throwing
rocks and glass at the other neighbourhood kids because you can’t remember the games
you played before the war. After three years my parents decided they had done enough. With the help of some British
friends mum went to england for a job interview and returned. One night, through a secret
tunnel dug underneath the airport and over a mountain, she took my brother and me out of
Sarajevo and to england. aged ten, I had my first day at school, she worked as an
anaesthetist and a year on dad came to join us – a happy ending. But I don’t know whether I
should be happy I lived to tell the tale or resentful that I have such a tale to tell. Probably it’s
the former. I feel privileged to have experienced man at his best and at his worst, risking life
to commit good or evil. But, there is anger that it was allowed to go on: perhaps because
Muslims were being killed, perhaps because Bosnia had no oil, perhaps because even
when Clinton intervened (after 9,000 Muslims were killed in two days in Srebrenica,
a town declared a ‘safe area’ by naTO) it was principally to salvage his image. Politics-
wise, I’m a cynic. But maybe I just can’t believe that mediaeval sieges of cities would be
tolerated in 20th century europe, that the attempted genocide of a people was tolerated
for years only fifty years after they said ‘never again’. I now realise what they meant was
‘should never happen again.’ not quite the same, but how naively we hoped otherwise.ARCHIVE: 4th week MT 2005
Arms and my childhood
