Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
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of the recently deceased. The connection through two hundred years of the experience of the plague with the experience of the siege was simultaneously terrifying and tranquilizing. From the perspective of shared human experience, personal mortality lost its significance. Art was the form through which this awareness could be expressed. When the authorities renamed a part of Titova Road for Mula Mustafa Bašeskije, the notion of sharing the war experience beyond the limits of their own time and their own mortality effectively became incorporated into the body of the town.
It was only when the immediate danger to their own lives had diminished that Sarajevans were able to see the destruction and let it affect their feelings. In 1996, after the Dayton Peace Accords, a new graffito appeared saying “kad se saberem—oduzmem se” (when I pull myself together—I fall apart). A young woman’s account of the effects of the first relatively long ceasefire in 1994 is characteristic: “For me it was much more difficult when the situation got better…. I felt terrible! The shooting ceased, but the town was very ugly looking. I mean, until then I didn’t pay very much attention. All is so destroyed … Only the skeletons of the stores, so much garbage in the town. A lot of concrete, cement, glass, everything.” In 1996, the situation was even more appalling, since along with the material destruction the destruction of the social, cultural, and moral fabric of the city became visible. The Dayton Peace Accords, cheered in 1995 because they stopped the shooting, were now understood for what they really were: an official and international formalization of the division of the country and people into three political and territorial entities, based on the different ethnoreligious backgrounds of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Until that moment, many Sarajevans had hoped that those divisions would end with the war. This story of Sarajevo shows that this division was destructive in a way that residents found impossible to comprehend; it felt like more than Sarajevans could take—so they “fell apart.”
To Know, Yet Not to Know
Entering Sarajevo for the first time, I was aware of the dangers awaiting me as I moved about in the town. I was fairly cautious and took every opportunity to learn the places where sniper fire and shelling were most likely. The most dangerous places in the center, I learned, were the crossroads around the Holiday Inn, as well as Hrasno and “Sniper Alley,” parts of town bordering Grbavica, which was under Serbian control. This undertaking was of limited usefulness, since the danger was omnipresent and hovering over us. Looking toward the surrounding mountains, everyone could clearly see where the military positions were. It was almost a rule that wherever there were no trees, the territory was under the government’s control; the trees had been cut by Sarajevans during the previous winters. In the forests you could see a blue UN flag here and there, which meant that on one side was the ABiH and on the other the Serbian Bosnian forces. The town was practically surrounded by Serbian positions. You could assume that almost every spot in the town from which you could see the mountains was a place where a sniper could see you.
As far as the shelling was concerned, the most dangerous places were around the Presidency Building in the center of the town, the public water pipes where long queues formed during the water shortages, and any other place where people gathered, such as marketplaces and bread lines. During the periods I spent in the town, there was not much shelling. Only once, in September 1994, as the ceasefire was coming to an end, did I experience random shooting and shelling of the town during the daytime. In March 1995, too, the city center was shelled at night. As people were used to much worse periods, I never spent long hours in a cellar. During lighter or intermittent shelling people hurried home, listened to the explosions in order to judge whether it was incoming or outgoing fire, estimated how far away the explosions were, and decided whether it would be necessary to leave the apartment for the cellar.
I became aware of the constant calculus of danger one evening during my first stay in Sarajevo, sitting on Kovači and chatting with a young Sarajevan woman I had met some days earlier, with whom I developed a friendship during the war years. We were waiting for Staffan, my Swedish colleague, to finish taking photographs of the newly extended cemetery. It was a pleasant September evening, sunny and quiet, and so was our mood. Suddenly she said agitatedly: “Now what is he doing? Does he think that he’s on holiday on Hawaii?!” I was surprised, and suddenly became aware of the mountains and forests surrounding us. We could have hardly been more exposed. I felt nervous, but there was really nothing to do. I asked her whether I should fetch my colleague, but we saw him coming so we just got up and continued our walk.
This episode taught me that even when people did not show it, they were always subliminally aware of their exposure, and some half-conscious meter in them constantly measured the necessity of an errand against the odds of being shot at. Sitting on Kovači was a necessary exposure, since we were there to see the town and document local life. But the meter in my new friend at one point indicated to her that we had been there for too long.
How did she know when it started to be too dangerous? The answer is: she did not. And this was one of the basic arts you had to learn in Sarajevo during the war. You had to be aware of the dangers and at the same time ignore them because there was not much that could be done about them. During my second stay in Sarajevo I heard a joke that captured the incomprehensibility and irrationality of Sarajevans’ situation, in which Sarajevans found some sort of shared logic that guided their lives: An American team of psychologists came to study Sarajevans. They went around the town asking people, “What is 3 times 3?” The first person answered “Tuesday.” The second person answered “365.” The third person said “9.” “Well, how did you come to that answer?” the psychologists asked the third person. “Well, it is simple,” the research subject responded: “Tuesday minus 365 is 9!”
As an example of stupid behavior, I was told about an ignorant foreign humanitarian worker who tied her shoes in the middle of the Holiday Inn crossroads. While the privileged foreigner was condemned for being unaware of the dangers, the ignorance of Sarajevans at the beginning of the war was described rather as childlike. A young woman explained:
For instance, when there was shooting, I could peep through the window. My dad told me: “Hide yourself, you see that there is shooting!” And I hid behind the blinds, and I was supposedly safe there because I didn’t see the street any more. Or in the bus, or in the tram…. If at Marindvor you could hear a sniper, people might raise up their hand, so as not to see the side from where it was shooting…. Someone could put up newspapers, women their bags, they covered the children…. Or, if there was shelling you could hear it whizzing. You knew that it would fall somewhere near or that it had already fallen, and then everyone ran and pulled their heads between their shoulders. As if you pull your head in a bit, and you’ve escaped the shell.
Figure 6. Gathering in front of the Catholic cathedral in central Sarajevo. Sarajevans used to linger there after mass even though they were directly exposed to shooting from the surrounding mountains. Sarajevo, October 1995. Photo by author.
I remember my own reaction to my first air-raid alarm in Zagreb in September 1991. I was alone in my great-aunt’s apartment on the fifth floor of a building near the center of the town. As I heard the sirens, I decided to go downstairs and see what the others would do. I took the staircase, having learned during earthquakes in my childhood not to take the elevator in such situations. I had also been told not to panic and rush, because many people had been trampled in the subways during the Blitz in London. I found people gathered on the ground floor. Some tried to convince children to go to the basement, but most of us went out to see what was going on. It was very quiet, unusual for a city with nearly a million inhabitants. We could only hear an occasional car speeding along the empty streets. We were looking at the skies in order to spot airplanes. The only problem was that the entrance of the building where we were standing faced north, and the military air base from which the planes were coming was to the south. But none of us seemed aware of that fact. We just stood there, watching in the wrong direction and exposing ourselves completely unnecessarily, with the feeling that we somehow were in control of the situation!
Afterward, when I thought about it, I remembered what a soldier told me in Nova Gradiška, a town on the front line toward Serb-controlled territories in Slavonia. “It is the first bomb that kills. Because that