139. Balkan Tour (6)

6. Sarajevo

Now in the morning we hear from Mohammed Dzihic, 32, from north Bosnia, with a Hungarian MA in European Studies.  Within 300 meters of the hotel he is speaking in, he tells us, are a mosque, a Roman Catholic Church, an Orthodox church, and a synagogue.  Sarajevo was very mixed, with much intermarriage.  There was friendship. 

He goes on with a Wikipedia-type report: Before 1992 Sarajevo was 30% RC and Orthodox, 60% Muslim.  Before WWII there were 43,000 Jews.  War sliced them up.  Eleven thousand killed, more than a thousand of them children, between 1991 and 1995.

Where's the money coming from to rebuild?  The IMF, says Mohammed, and it will have to be paid back. Where's the money coming from to hold life together?  Most families have somebody working abroad, sending money home.  His sister, working in Germany, supported his family of six through the whole war.

 And then the partiality starts seeping in.  The Bosnian Serbs killed children under five and women over 80.  He takes up more and more Serb myths, arguing.  "It's not true that Bosnian Muslims are Serbs who converted to Islam under the Turks just for advantage.  They already had a religion, Bogomil, in which they prayed five times a day and purified themselves with water beforehand.  Islam was natural.  It's not true that Muslims expelled others." and so on.  When he gets to describing the various Muslim sects he says things we want to question.  Are the Shiites really expelling Sunnis in Iraq. as he says?  (Checked Wiki back at the hotel, though, and saw that a lot of what he said is true; the Serbs are responsible for most of, and the ghastliest of,  the atrocities.)

In the afternoon we went on a bus tour led by a striking, passionately patriotic Muslim woman named Senirah.  For people old enough (many in our group) she is the spitting image of La Pasionaria, the female Che Guevara of the Spanish Civil War.  She showed us the bridge where the first two women were killed by Serb snipers.  She took us to maps showing where the Serbs lines ran, just above town.  In between she talked about the great job Sarajevo had done in hosting the 1984 Olympics.  She quoted the writers who called it "the best organized up to that time."  City pride.

Then she took us out past the airport to the Tunnel Museum, which is really only the house that served as terminus to the 800-meter tunnel (960-meter in Wikipedia) the Muslims dug to get ammunition and food into the city and the wounded out.  It's what let them hold on for four years.  What did she do?  She was a surgical nurse in the city and worked with the wounded.  Operations without anesthetic.

"They say we were 'miserable' in the city.  We women were not miserable.  We did not want to look miserable.  We put on our best clothes and earrings and make-up and were happy.  For our men who were fighting."  Forty-three of her relatives died in the fighting, she said.

In the basement, sitting on ammunition boxes, we saw a movie about the tunnel and the siege.  Then we went down into the tunnel and, bent low, walked about 25 meters.  (I, 5' 7", hit my head twice, hard, on beams; the men here average 6" and were carrying 75 lbs. on their backs.) As we were leaving, a group of girls from a madras (Muslim school) were coming in.

After that a walking tour of the Old Town, ending at the corner where the Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand.  He's apparently still a hero here, since they preserved the markers of where his feet had been planted and, during the siege, moved them inside so Serb shells wouldn't damage them.

Had dinner in a good restaurant in the Turkish quarter (Bosnian cuisine), then joined the Saturday night promenade on the main pedestrian street.  Montpellier, even Barcelona, could hardly have been gayer, or more with it.  Streams of handsome young people, some in high fashion, flowed past us, all looking happy and full of life.

We bed down thinking mainly of the two Muslims who spoke.  What a preparation for tomorrow, when we go to the heart of Serbia and start hearing from the Great Enemy!

Note: For background on what I have been reporting you might check the following Wikipedia entries, all of which have passed their neutrality test: Siege of Dubrovnik, Siege of Mostar, Siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian War, Rape in the Bosnian War.  Wikipedia has apparently not been able to find anybody with a sufficiently neutral point of view to write the general article, Yugoslav Wars.