Every age has a city whose predicament defines its times, like Berlin in the 1950s or Saigon in the ’70s or Beirut in the ’80s. Sarajevo, whose airlift has outlasted Berlin’s and whose casualties outnumber Beirut’s. is the symbol for the ’90s. The cold war is over, the world united against an ethnic aggressor whose acts have made it universally loathsome, but still the international community proves unable to act. Once again last week NATO repeated its threats of airstrikes against the Serbs if they don’t let up. The Serbs continued a bombardment heavier than any in the war so far. “Sarajevans will not be counting the dead,” Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic cawed in a speech to his rump parliament last week. “They will be counting the living.” President Clinton tried to sound tough, while acknowledging how many times the allies had already backed off: “We should not say things that we do not intend to do.” No one under the guns was convinced. “Airstrikes are fairy tales we tell our children,” says a Bosnian soldier.
Sarajevo isn’t a rough place like some of its metaphoric predecessors; it has a European familiarity they lacked. Urbane and well-educated, Sarajevans keep producing culture in nights illuminated by the candles we distribute, heated by the crude wood stoves we pass out. Our capitals parade the fruits of an enduring intellectual life: a film series in New York, a new play in London, a children’s art exhibit at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. “Ale heap kudos on its still-publishing newspaper, Oslobodjenje, and hail its 13-year-old diarist Zlata Filipovic as a modern-day Anne Frank.
For a while, such attention inspired hope; now a war-weary cynicism replaces it. “Somewhere there is always a show for the world to watch,” says Dr. Bakir Nakas, director of the city’s State Hospital. Last Thursday two rockets blasted his hospital’s 10-story facade; the evidence could scarcely be discerned among 500 other shell holes. “Some years it is Palestine, some years it is Iraq. This year it is here,” Nakas says. VIP visits and solidarity meetings begin to wear thin: the motivation behind them, transparent. “They do it only to clear their consciences,” says theater producer Aida Cengic.
All the admiration in the world can’t change the quotidian reality on Sarajevo’s streets. The sun comes out, the kids go out to play, the Serb gunners target playgrounds. Their intentions are clear, their marksmanship honed by 21 months of practice–more than half the children shot by snipers are wounded in the head. “If the war continues for another 20 months. at the present rate, everyone in Sarajevo will have been wounded at least once,” says pediatric surgeon Salahudin Dizdarevic. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much; some 60,000 have now been wounded out of 300,000 remaining residents. Aida Smailhodzic, a 30-year-old gymnastics coach for the Bosnian national team, was blown off her feet by a shell that hit in front of her building last Tuesday. “I can’t bear it anymore,” she said from her hospital ward. “It’s driving me crazy. It would be easier if they said, ‘We will kill them all at once,’ rather than like this, slowly.”
The U.N. Protection Force has done little to help, less to protect. Recently a NEWSWEEK reporter happened across a group of six badly wounded civilians. They had dragged one another into an alleyway for shelter after a shell exploded among them as they walked home from their jobs at mid-afternoon. The reporter watched as two French armored personnel carriers came by, paused to look and sped away. One of the wounded men had already lost a leg from an earlier shelling. Elsewhere, U.N. armored vehicles escort trash crews and distribute big white U.N. bins for the shell debris; lately, heavily guarded U.N. engineers have been repairing the city’s trolley line, which runs right up the middle of the perilous Snipers Alley. Sarajevans, who rarely hide their contempt for the United Nations, don’t even bother to laugh at such efforts any longer.
The international community can only grasp at improbable solutions. The International Rescue Committee, an American aid group, is building a water-treatment plant inside a secret mountain tunnel to protect it from Serb shells. The International Committee of the Red Cross’s soup kitchens for the elderly offer take-home service. so that concentrations of hungry diners won’t attract a mortar attack. A French group, Solidarites, is planning a mobile books-and-crafts project, to keep kids occupied and off the streets; it will feature the world’s first armored bookmobile. “Maybe we should provide all the kids with helmets and flak jackets, as well,” says Solidarites official Dianne Cullinane, only half joking.
Writer Zlatko Dizdarevic calls Sarajevo “a city that refuses to die.” This is no longer an optimism widely shared. “Every day the pool gets smaller, every day the odds get worse,” says theater producer Cengic. “It’s like bingo,” says Lejla Came, a 22-year-old law student whose boyfriend was recently killed. “Everyone has a number–“B 37,’ and you’re dead.” Ten dead, 42 wounded last Wednesday; 11 dead, 62 wounded Thursday; 3 dead, 16 wounded Friday; and so on. Unless something changes, Sarajevo will be remembered as the place where the world just watched as number after number came up on the board.
