They were doctors or fighters without experience. Their existence changed forever when the siege of Sarajevo occurred. Cross portraits.
Dragan Stevanovic
From intern to war doctor
When the siege of Sarajevo began in the spring of 1992, Dragan Stevanovic was working as an intern at the military hospital in the Bosnian capital. The establishment where he was employed, located not far from the front line, was emptied of a large part of its medical staff, like the 2,500 doctors who had fled the city at the start of the war. He, a Serb by nationality, but a Sarajevian at heart, has chosen to stay.
“A red cross had been placed in front of the hospital, but the attacker did not care,” says the man with the hollow voice, now retired and member of the Sarajevo city council. The beds, piling up in the corridors or the improvised operating rooms, were filling up at breakneck speed. The siege of Sarajevo resulted in a total of no less than 50,000 injuries, including Dr. Stevanovic himself: leg prosthesis and lame foot, he walks around today with what he humorously calls a “rooster gait”.
At the hospital, there was a lack of everything — antibiotics and electricity — but certainly no solidarity between colleagues. “The sterilization of medical instruments consisted, in the early days of the siege, in boiling them. And at the end of 1992, we were doing homemade infusions at the hospital. It’s lucky no one got gangrene…”
Aged 36 at the time, Dragan Stevanovic, who had done his military service during the time of Yugoslavia, was then dispatched as a war doctor in the Bosnian army, closer to the front and blood. “I also trained, on the job, medical students barely leaving school. Sometimes you had to try to save seriously injured young men whose comrades were expecting a miracle, which sometimes didn’t come…” Then, when it comes to telling the story of a little girl who almost gave up her ghost, his eyes mist up. “She became a lawyer and has since lived abroad. »
Edina and Alija Suvalija
United, from peace to war
They were both in their early twenties, with life ahead of them. Edina and Alija Suvalija had just married on February 15, 1992. One morning in March, on her way to work, Alija noticed in awe that Chetniks, followers of the Serbian ultra-nationalist movement, had erected barricades not far away. “Instead of going to work, I went to buy a gun to stand guard in front of my house. »
War broke out in Sarajevo in earnest a few weeks later, on April 5. At “22 and a half years old”, Alija then enlisted in the 105e motorized brigade of the Bosnian army. “The civilians have organized themselves, to defend themselves. But the fear of knowing that our family lived not far from the front, when we were there, was greater than that of fighting. During a mission, we had learned that a pregnant woman had just been killed in my neighborhood. The news came soon after: she was the wife of a unit mate. A strange mixture of relief and grief then overtook Alija. His wife was also pregnant.
At home, life was no better for Edina, who recalls the harsh winters against a background of water and electricity deprivation. “We had a garden that allowed us to harvest some fruit. We drew our water from springs, and harvested rainwater for toilets and dishes. And everything we found, we put it on the fire”, say Edina and Alija Suvalija. The first of their two children, Benjamin, was born on October 9, 1995, the day electricity returned to Sarajevo.
Emir Zlatar
Fighting in spite of himself
He speaks with a hint of melancholy in his voice. “Even telling this period to my children is hard…” Emir Zlatar was 17 years old, in 1992, when the Serbian forces launched the assault on Sarajevo. Before that, for several weeks already, he watched “from time to time the news on TV. It was impossible to look away from the images unfolding in Visegrad.” War was already raging in eastern Bosnia, against the backdrop of a referendum on the country’s independence.
“One day, in the old town of Sarajevo, I saw my friends, the same ones with whom I played sports, carrying guns and saying: ‘It’s war in Bosnia, we have to defend ourselves.’ “Without having ever done military service, Emir engages in his turn in the territorial defense, made up of civil volunteers, “by instinct of survival”. Of the 25 members of his original group of young fighters, half were decimated. Including his best friend. “That’s when I said to myself, naively, that one could die. You then get used to these sudden deaths,” says the man in his forties, who is now the secretary of the Congress of Bosnian Intellectuals. “The population of Sarajevo has changed, many have left, others have since settled there. But this living together survived, and with my Serbian and Croat friends who stayed here, relations remained as good as before. »
With Ermina Aljicevic
This report was funded with support from the Transat-Le Devoir International Journalism Fund.