In the spring of 1992, Serbian forces began to besiege the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The duty went to meet Sarajevans who survived this four-year siege, the longest siege in modern history. They tell of a city which, thirty years later, has not lost the pre-war spirit that animated it. Reportage.
They entrenched themselves up there, in the surrounding mountains, ready to fire on the slightest figure moving in their sights. Targets as random as they are defenseless: civilians, pregnant women, teenagers, old people, infants. In besieged Sarajevo, reigning terror was terrifyingly simple for Serbian snipers. Going to get water from the nearest source or queuing to get a loaf of bread could become the last trip made. The Bosnian capital, like a basin, was trapped in its mountains.
In Sarajevo, resistance quickly became obvious. When the siege began on April 5, 1992, a month after the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, they enlisted by the thousands, heads down, to defend their city. They were called the “jeans fighters”: mostly young men in their early twenties and often without military experience, enlisting in a fledgling army. With an arsenal made of old rifles, revolvers or improvised weapons, sometimes from gutter pipes. The Sarajéviens were certainly numerically superior to the thousands of Chetniks who besieged their city, these ultranationalists who dreamed of a “Greater Serbia”. But, left to itself, the martyred city was no match for the firepower of the Bosnian Serb forces, strong in the military equipment of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) monopolized by Belgrade.
The defense of Sarajevo consisted in disarming the enemy, from barracks to barracks, from hill to hill. Dangerous operations in which Alija, barely 21 years old when he became a soldier, took part in the very first days of the war. “During the battles, there were often not enough guns for the number of men. It was the heart that spoke, we did not want to let ourselves be buried alive, “says the man met by The duty, who wishes to give only his first name to preserve his identity. This Sarajevian by adoption, born in Prijedor, in western Bosnia, does not regret “not a second spent in the defense of this country”. Death, omnipresent, became almost banal; mourning was the time for a pat on the shoulder.
The “sniper nest”
Black cap screwed on the head, the fifty-year-old with the round face wishes to return to the scene of one of these battles which marked him. To do this, you have to climb the road that goes up through the Sedrenik district, in the north of Sarajevo, to the top of the “pointed rock”. There, on this steep and rocky side, there is an unobstructed view of Sarajevo, its countless red tiled roofs and its minarets rising towards the sky. So the place was ideal for snipers, who held Sarajevo like in the palm of a hand from their “nest in snipers “. Here and there you can make out remains of trenches, now buried by vegetation that has reasserted itself.
The counter-offensive had been launched at dawn, on September 18, 1994. Carpeted and armed with a few guns, “we climbed the mountains like goats”, recalls Alija. The objective of the “Black Swans”, the elite unit to which he belonged: to take the Serbian forces hiding behind the “pointed rock” by surprise. Two of his comrades fell in battle that morning. The pine forest that runs along the ridge, sporadically sparse in places, today bears the imprint of the bombardments. The action was successful, but brief. Less than twenty-four hours later, with a large reinforcement of armored tanks, the Serbian forces retook this key position.
For many, the idea of a war in Sarajevo seemed absurd. And yet… The 1er March 1992, when Bosnia and Herzegovina voted massively for its independence, despite the broad boycott of the Bosnian Serbs, war was already brewing in neighboring Croatia. Opposed to the centralizing policy of the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav Republic had seceded from Belgrade a year earlier. Yugoslavia imploded against the background of the awakening of nationalisms, soon dragging the multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina into its bloodshed.
From April 1992 until the formal end of the siege in February 1996, the Sarajéviens lived to the rhythm of humanitarian aid delivered in dribs and drabs. The black market reigned supreme, and food was an ordeal. The besieger had cut off water, gas, electricity, and in winter, the mercury could drop to -20°C. Every day it rained on Sarajevo an average of more than 300 shells. The bullets of the snipers whistled both from the Jewish cemetery, perched on the left bank of the Miljacka, and from the tops of the buildings in the suburb of Grbavica, under Serbian control. More than 11,500 people were killed during these 1,425 days of siege, including 1,601 children.
Resist through culture
It was a question of “driving the inhabitants mad”, by “pounding them incessantly”, as Ratko Mladic, the general of the Serb forces in Bosnia, had ordered his troops. But, in a snub to the guns pointed at them, many Sarajevans went to the theater, to improvised concerts in sometimes devastated buildings. Cultural life, even under siege, never died out during these four years.
Jasna Diklic, a native of Sarajevo, took an active part in this front of artistic resistance. The actress, in her forties at the time, gives us an appointment in a modest room, equipped with a discreet black curtain, in the basement of the Sarajevo Youth Theater. It was there, on September 7, 1992, that the first performance of the play took place. Sklonist (“The Shelter”), in which Mme Diklic played a role. “Theatre was then an absolute necessity in Sarajevo to give an illusion of normality. A lady, one day, had expressed it in these terms: “Thank you for having spared us the madness””, says the woman of the theater, for whom art constituted a “weapon against barbarism”.
But the reality of the war kept coming back, and sometimes without warning. On February 5, 1994, Jasna Diklic saw, horrified, a truck transporting shredded human bodies. The Markale market had just been targeted by a Serbian mortar, killing 68 and wounding 144. “It was as if Guernica, Picasso’s painting, came to life,” says Jasna Diklic, still shaken by the memory. Today, in the middle of the vegetable stalls of this same market, the shrapnel of the shell remains etched in the ground, like a scar.
Beyond the dramas, the siege of Sarajevo also contained stories of solidarity. Like that of the center of the Jewish community of the city which offered, during the war, a soup kitchen and emergency medical aid. Three pharmacies were also able to see the light of day in Sarajevo, under the impetus of La Benevolencija, a Jewish association dating from the end of the 19e century transformed into a humanitarian organization. At its head, Jakob Finci, now 78, had participated in the organization of dozens of evacuation convoys, after crossing countless military checkpoints. “On the way back, once the buses were emptied, we brought medicine and food to Sarajevo,” he says in his hushed office at the Jewish community center, which adjoins the city’s Ashkenazi synagogue. He estimates that about “3,000 people” were able to be evacuated, including “1,000 Jews”. Because, says this lawyer by training, neither these convoys nor the aid offered in town were dependent on any denominational affiliation.
Sarajevo, the “Jerusalem of Europe”?
But what remains, thirty years later, of this living together which made all the identity of Sarajevo, this “Jerusalem of Europe” where, in a harmonious mosaic, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Jews and Bosnian Muslims? “Sarajevo is slowly returning to its pre-war values,” said actress Jasna Diklic. Sarajevo has indeed been rebuilt while preserving its sweetness of life, its Orthodox and Catholic bell towers blending in with the calls of the muezzins resounding throughout the city.
At the crossroads of empires, from East to West, its unique architectural style, a mixture of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian influences, has not disappeared either. But Sarajevo, in thirty years, has seen its population change. Of the half-million people who populated the city in 1991, less than 400,000 remain. Many have chosen exile for good. As for the nearly 160,000 Serbs in Sarajevo before the war, tens of thousands settled in Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity, created in the wake of the Dayton peace accords in December 1995.
In any case, in a country where everyone speaks the same language, except for a few words, where religion is often only a cultural affair and where, “in the streets, we cannot distinguish who is who”, difficult to find source of discord, will say Sarajevans like Jakob Finci. “The genetic code of Sarajevo, which shone with this multi-ethnic fire, this understanding and tolerance of difference, has not disappeared,” believes Miro Lazovic, a Serb from Sarajevo who fervently opposed Belgrade’s policies during the war. Even if today the city is 90% populated by Bosnians, Sarajevo is the ability to bring together several nationalities under one roof. It is also the image of a city, indivisible, which takes the opposite view of a Bosnia-Herzegovina still torn by nationalist rhetoric.
With Ermina Aljicevic
This report was funded with support from the Transat-Le Devoir International Journalism Fund.