Remembering Sarajevo

Prologue: The Dayton Peace Accord that ended the 4-year carnage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia, was entered into at the Wright-Patterson Airbase in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995. It was later signed by the various parties in Paris the following month. The author entered Sarajevo soon after, when some semblence of peace returned to the once beautiful city that at one time even hosted the Winter Olympics. This is his story, minus the politics surrounding the war.

Downtown Sarajevo after the war

AS I sipped the hot, thick and strong Turkish coffee in a warehouse at the Ankara Airport in Turkey early that cold morning, I looked through my little notebook where I had scribbled earlier the route I was to take to get to my final destination, Sarajevo, in the war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina.
 I was not allowed into the airport terminal as the chartared plane was only making a refuelling stop after an eight-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur. But the Ankara airport authority was kind enough to at least allow us off the plane to get some fresh air and for me, time for two cigarettes.
 From Ankara, I was to fly to Zagreb in Croatia where I was booked at the Intercontinental for the night. The following day, another chartered plane, this time a small propeller-driven aircraft, was to fly me to Sarajevo, and at the time, into the unknown.
 I had read substantially about the war and seen images of it on television. As a newsman, this was to me just another war, like many I had followed on the news channels before.
 I was resigned to the fact that atrocities were a by-product of armed conflicts and was prepared to listen to the horrors the Sarajevans had gone through for the previous three years or so.
 Although I felt sick at first, for instance, when I started reading stories about the horrors the ordinary people in Sierra Leone went through during the civil war there, but after hearing of so many people talking about how their limbs were chopped off by Foday Sankoh's militias, I somehow got used to hearing them. But this time it was different.
 For what must have been minutes after the small plane landed in Sarajevo the next afternoon, it slipped my mind that I was in a war-torn country. I was preparing myself or the dismbarkation routine, holding my passport in one hand and a pen in the other. But when I got down on the tarmac, there was no terminal to go to.
 Across the runway, vehicles belonging to the French army stood in guard. Next to it were wreckage of planes rusting in the afternoon sun. What must have once been the terminal was now only a heap of rubble and debris. The place had suffered some of the heaviest bombardments during the seige of the city by the Serb forces.
 There was no bagage handling service too. But there was an earth mover waiting by the plane and our luggage were loaded into its giant scoop to be carried away. I hitched a ride on the machine as well and it took me outside of the airport area where a coaster was waiting.
 On the way to the Holiday Inn Sarajevo, the only hotel left standing and operating, I saw what the war had done to the city. There wasn't a square foot of any wall in the city that has no bullet holes. Even lamposts were riddled with bullets fired mostly from the hills north of the city where the Serbs army laid the nine-month seige from.
 There was no hot water at the Holiday Inn and taking a shower was a challenge. But whatever difficulty I had faced then were nothing when the next day I managed to speak to a group of children in a field at the fringes of the town.
 The next day after a tour of the city I decided to abandon the coaster and walked instead. I thought that way, I would be able to see more of the place. Shortly after, I came across a small group of children playing football in a small field. I sensed that they were particularly interested in a bottle of Coke I had in my hand at the time.
 As I offered them the bottle, one started to describe what happened during the nine-month seige of the city.
 One fateful day, as the family ran out of clean water, his eight-year old younger brother was sent to fetch some from a fire hydrant on a street in front of their apartment. The boy never came back and the family spent the whole afternoon trying to pull his bullet-savaged body from an alley where he was felled by snipers from the hills. As the youth spoke, tears rolled down his cheeks and soon, we were weeping together.
 I was taught never to let emotions cloud my professional judgement. I was only supposed to stand aside and chronicle history as they unfold. But not that time. I felt for those children a lot more than the need to remain professional.
 I walked some more that day, saw a mosque in the middle of town that was not spared the bombardment. Everywhere I looked were bullet holes and on one street, a green but faded Bennetton sign was left hanging by just a single screw in that afternoon chill. Even that sign has a single bullet hole in the middle.
 I left Sarajevo the next day, quietly hoping that never again will something like that befall the otherwise friendly people. But deep inside I had my doubts since as far as I could recall, there has always been wars being fought somwhere.
 The same propeller-driven plane arrived on time to pick me up that afternoon and before nightfall, I landed in Skopje, the capital city of the Republic of Macedonia.

ENDS