by Susan Viets
Wine flowed as did talk of the Internet. I listened to his plans for websites, home servers, self-programmed databases, caught up in this wave of enthusiasm, amazed that a subject so different from politics excited me this much.
The next day Sydney called and invited me to the Tower of London. We toured the torture chamber. I wondered about this unusual spot for a first date. More followed in restaurants and cafés. We visited Morocco after Christmas.
“Two colonials who met in the Motherland,” I told Sydney. I wondered if that’s why we had clicked.
One huge problem loomed. I had already signed on with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), through the British Red Cross. A staff member there said employment in Canada might be an option after work overseas. Offers for postings arrived. I stalled for as long as possible. I had to decide whether to quit my job and go or coast along in London.
“Have you ever thought about working overseas?” I asked Sydney one evening.
“I am overseas.”
“I mean really overseas, somewhere completely different. You did call yourself a tumbleweed.”
I had already turned down postings for singles in conflict zones, but this latest one in Sarajevo included sponsorship for a partner.
“Would you be willing to come?” I asked. “I won’t go otherwise.”
“Let me think about it,” Sydney said. A few days passed and we did not discuss Sarajevo again. Then Sydney phoned after work. “I’ve done it,” he said.
“Done what?”
“Told my boss I’m going. He said he’d have me back if I change my mind.”
“Seriously? We’re going to Sarajevo?” I said. When the conversation ended, I lay on my bed and imagined the future. I had never moved countries with someone else before. I felt happy, with one small doubt only. Sydney had lived a quiet life in Australia and England. What if he hated Sarajevo?
The next month passed quickly. We resigned from our jobs, packed our belongings, had medicals and booked our tickets. I would leave first. Sydney was to follow a few weeks later. On an early June day we travelled out to Heathrow and toasted our new life over a drink in the bar. We had already planned a move back to Canada in a year. Boarding time came. We said goodbye. I slung my bag over my shoulder and walked to the departure lounge for my Sarajevo-bound flight, happy at the thought that I would soon meet Sydney at the other end.
11
BOSNIA
Bosnia-Herzegovina, a dramatic, mountainous country endowed with deep gorges and green valleys, showed scars of war on the descent toward Sarajevo. Roofless buildings, timbers black and broken, dotted the landscape. As the airplane swept low, I peered straight into the charred innards of what was once someone’s home.
Military hardware dominated the runways. Helicopters landed, took off, circled or hovered in the air. I thought of Apocalypse Now.
Passengers trudged to the terminal and joined the line for passport control and customs. The line inched forward, but I cleared quickly, with none of the staring contests so typical of encounters with border officials in Ukraine. Two tall men stood out in the crowded arrivals hall. They held signs with the IFRC logo, offered a warm welcome and instant membership in their team.
We left the building and walked over to a car park. I saw yellow hazard tape everywhere. One of my colleagues loaded my luggage in the back. I pulled myself up into the passenger seat of a Land Cruiser designed for much bigger people. As we drove away from the airport, I noticed more areas marked off with hazard tape; my colleagues warned me that one of the most disturbing aspects of day-to-day life in Sarajevo was the mines left scattered through the city.
It was June 1997, eighteen months after Croat, Serb and Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) leaders had signed the Dayton Peace Accord, which ended nearly four years of war. I was reminded once again of rules already drilled in to me at the head office in Geneva – mines still posed a major hazard; paved surfaces were the only safe place to walk.
I had a map of Sarajevo in my luggage. It showed the city surrounded by a ring of small, bright red dots. Each dot represented a minefield. Some of the dots crept down toward the centre; others stood scattered through unlucky neighbourhoods. Exploding yellow stars marked the site of “mine incidents,” most likely where someone had lost a limb, or a life.
As we drove past Dobrinje, one of the worst affected areas, not far from the airport, I found it hard to imagine that life had once existed in this gutted, utterly ravaged, mine-ridden place. We turned onto the main road – sniper alley – that led into the centre of Sarajevo. It took no imagination at all to understand the impact of war on the outskirts. My colleagues told me that the teetering Oslobodjenie tower, which, we passed, was one of the best known landmarks of destruction. In the centre, they pointed out the National Library, shelled and burned along with much of the country’s historical and literary treasures inside.
Low-level buildings in the centre initially seemed remarkably unscathed. However, on closer inspection I could see walls pockmarked with bullet holes and dented sidewalks, mini craters left behind by shells that had exploded. Plastic, the United Nations’ UNHCR logo visible on it, covered many windows whose glass had shattered in the war and still had not been repaired.
We drove to the office, centrally located by a bridge over the Miljacka River, and parked in a lot full of four-wheel-drive Land Cruisers. I met more new colleagues – foreign delegates, most of them from European countries, and local employees, mainly Bosniac. I liked the bustle and sense of purpose in the office. No one sat idle. After introductions and a tour of each division, one colleague drove me to my new home, a ground-floor apartment near a park. The office had planned my arrival so well there seemed little left to do. I unpacked my suitcases and explored the apartment, which was large and dark. A bullet had grazed the living room ceiling, but all the walls remained intact. I had noticed many damaged tower blocks, with plastic sheeting where walls should be.
Across the street, a well-worn path led across a park. People walked along the path, so it seemed safe to follow behind. Soon dogs appeared, only a few at first, then a pack, one Great Dane and several other purebreds and mongrels of different sizes. Charlotte had said that many families turned their pets loose to fend for themselves when food ran short during the war. These dogs wagged their tails and seemed friendly. I wanted to pat them but kept my distance just in case. I heard that some still ran wild and attacked people.
I strolled through the city, past mosques, more parks and cafés. Then I wandered down to the river and along the embankment that led to the old town, which was peaceful and quite prosperous. I was unable to shake old Eastern Bloc travel habits, so my suitcases contained a stock of shampoo, soap, dried food and other basic supplies. But commerce appeared more advanced here just one and a half years since the war than in Ukraine six years after the collapse of Communism.
So much in Sarajevo seemed normal, but I found it impossible to forget the war for long. Hardly any trees remained in the city. I mostly saw stumps. Charlotte had described how people had chopped them down for firewood during the siege. Lost in thought, unable to really imagine siege-time Sarajevo, I wandered into a narrow alley, drawn by the mellifluous call to prayer that echoed off buildings and the soft light of a soon-to-set sun. Then I saw graffiti, the words scrawled in English on two walls: “Welcome to Hell” and “Paradise Lost.”
The next morning when I arrived at work, I saw one of my new colleagues from the press office, Senad, on a sofa in the hallway, the morning papers spread before him. He was slightly younger than me and wore jeans and a blue blazer. Old World manners prevailed. He rose with a formal greeting, invited me to join him for coffee, returned with two cups of espresso and sank back into the sofa. I sat down beside him.
I glanced at the papers and noticed some printed in Cyrillic and others in the Roman alphabet.
“Our language split during the war,” Senad told me. “We used to all speak Serbo-Croat.
Now the Serbs speak Serb.” He pointed to the paper printed in Cyrillic. “The Croats speak Croatian and we speak Bosnian. They’re really all the same language, just a few different words in each, like dialects. But some people get upset if you say that.”
“Were you born in Sarajevo?” I asked.
“I was. This beautiful city is my home.” I told Senad about my walk the day before, my early impressions of the city and asked how long he had worked in the press office.
“I’ve been here the longest,” he told me. I was surprised by his answer. Our three other colleagues were older and I had assumed that age translated into more years’ service.
“Drago used to be on TV,” Senad said. “Everyone remembers him from before the war. They love him because he reminds them of happier times. He can travel wherever he likes.” As we talked more, Senad told me that even though the Dayton Peace Accord technically unified Bosnia and Herzegovina, a boundary line – an unofficial border – still existed between the Serb part of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Republika Srpksa) and the Muslim-Croat part (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), which included Sarajevo.
“Sooosan, I must tell you something,” Senad said. “I will never cross that line.” An awkward moment – I did not know what to say. Part of our job was to help promote unity by crossing that line as if it did not exist, to work with local offices across the country, helping people, especially the elderly whose families had emigrated during the war while they remained behind either because they could not or would not go.
“Drago will go with you when you visit the other side.” As Senad drank his coffee, I could not help but notice that his hand shook.
During my first week in Sarajevo, few people that I met wanted to talk about the war. When information about their personal lives slipped out, I understood why. One woman saw her fiancé shot on the street by a sniper. Another took the garbage out one morning and found dead people stuffed in the bins. These images lingered during days when I was otherwise occupied with practical tasks. I took fieldwork tests for driver safety and radio operation. I learned the language of Alpha, Tango, Bravo, which was used for transmitting messages over the Land Cruiser radio and hovered somewhere between peace and conflict, never allowed to travel alone on the roads, always tethered to headquarters through mandatory radio contact at points along designated travel routes. Failure to check in could mean dispatch of a search crew.
“Never step off paved surfaces,” my instructor said. I lost count of the number of times I had received this warning.
Having always been responsible for my own security and well-being before, I chafed under these rules but also craved them. In some part of my brain, I kept track of risks I had taken in the past in Chechnya, Moldova and Tajikistan and had begun to fear that my luck would soon run out. With rules like these in place in Sarajevo, that seemed unlikely. But when I learned all delegates had to request permission for leave outside the city on time off, I began to feel as though I had joined an army and signed my freedom away.
Sarajevo bristled with international peacekeepers and their hardware. Even a four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser seemed dwarfed by the large armoured vehicles that pulled up alongside at traffic lights. This military presence was so orderly – a world away from bullets fired in the air in Chechnya, Cossacks and their vodka in Trans Dniestria, and all those Kalashnikov-toting citizens. I saw none of that here. Rather I saw people going about their day-to-day business, cafés, full and shops, busy. Even if people were still armed, and rumours persisted of a country awash in guns, they kept their weapons out of sight.
I tried to describe these early impressions of Sarajevo to Sydney during our evening phone calls.
“So you mean there are guns and we could be shot?” he asked me one night.
“No, we’ll be fine. It’s perfectly safe here,” I replied.
As Sydney’s departure date for Sarajevo drew closer, he had trouble sleeping. I thrived in environments like this but wondered how he would adapt.
Just as Sydney was about to depart for Sarajevo, the arrests of people charged with war crimes began. Peacekeepers, SFOR (the NATO-led Stabilization Force), acted on two sealed indictments from the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. Indictments were kept secret – the number of them and when and how they would be acted on, all confidential information. I spent no time on political analysis. I only thought of complications to my personal life. Why did this have to happen now, so soon before Sydney would board his flight?
The arrests – both men lived in Republika Srpska – did not go well. Peacekeepers successfully captured one man but killed the other. Our security division pulled all foreign staff out of Republika Srpska and curtailed travel to minimize the risk of a retaliatory attack. I wrestled uncomfortably with the realization that even though as aid workers we were meant to be neutral, few perceived us this way.
The security division billeted a German delegate from Republika Srpska with me.
“They’re throwing rocks at some foreigners,” she told me over dinner that night.
“Sometimes they just shake their fists when we drive by. It’ll pass, but it’s not comfortable for us there now.”
After dinner we listened to the news. The Sarajevo airport, where Sydney was supposed to land, had been closed. The Americans worried about the possibility of a rocket-launcher attack. All this was reported on the BBC. Sydney must know by now. I did not think he would take the news as calmly as the German delegate, with a shrug that this would all pass. I braced myself when the phone rang.
“My computer?” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant and wondered why he hadn’t asked about the airport.
“Your computer?”
“I’m bringing it. It might be hard to get a good one there. Will I have trouble at customs? Can you arrange the paperwork?” We discussed the pros and cons of shipping one in. I promised to double-check with our office administrator. We chit-chatted about friends and Sydney’s goodbye party in London. He told me he felt nervous and still couldn’t sleep. I realized that Sydney didn’t know about the airport closure and decided it was best not to contribute to his jitters. I kept quiet and felt consumed by guilt after we said goodbye.
Early the next day, Sydney called from Vienna to say that his connecting flight to Sarajevo had been cancelled.
“It’s apparently really foggy at the Sarajevo airport and the plane can’t land,” he explained. I looked out the window and saw blue sky and sunshine. I said nothing.
A few hours later, we received a bulletin from security that the airport had re-opened. Not long after Sydney called.
“The fog’s lifted,” he said. “We’ll board in a few minutes.” He sounded excited, as was I.
A colleague helped shepherd Sydney’s computer through customs. He beamed when it arrived in the passenger lounge. Our colleague drove us home via a back route, past neighbourhoods she knew well, apartment blocks with back halves sheared off, debris still visible from corridors that opened to the sky. These buildings lay along the wartime front line. She told us that some families had escaped before Serb paramilitary units arrived but some didn’t. We drove by a gas pump still cordoned off with mine tape and veered around large potholes. We saw few people on the street. Sydney recorded these scenes on his video camera. Before we reached home, I told him why the airport had been closed. Safely here, now secure, he shrugged it off.
Sydney and I often explored Sarajevo on foot. We wandered up steep hills and looked down on the valley below. The city centre stretched out along the banks of the Miljacka River. Minarets poked high above sloping terracotta-tiled roofs against a backdrop of rounded mountaintops. On other days we wandered through former front-line neighbourhoods, properties still strewn with rubble, mine tape everywhere.
So many people had been internally displaced during the war. Serbs in Sarajevo went to Republika Srpska; Muslims from Serb areas flocked into the city and other nearby towns; many Croats settled in Croatia. We passed by semi-collapse
d apartment blocks now occupied by refugees and saw small mountains of garbage piled up outside the buildings. The occupants tossed empty food tins, potato peelings and glass bottles out the windows. Worried there might be rats in the garbage, we stood far away. These piles concealed another potential danger. Mines sometimes lay in land underneath. The garbage made it hard for crews to find the mines and clear the land.
We both grew accustomed to security alerts, but I remained wary of mines. I acquired facts about them through work. There were about a million scattered around Bosnia-Herzegovina, not as many as in Cambodia and Afghanistan, but the situation here was uniquely perilous, because cities were mined.
One afternoon we walked through the outskirts of Sarajevo past whitewashed houses with rust-coloured roofs so steeply sloped they looked like ski chalets. Children stood on wrought-iron balconies. They called out to us and we waved back. Gardens grew larger, and space between the houses, more spacious. We passed piles of bricks, not rubble, but neat collections and soon saw the source: stripped structures, once houses. All that remained of one was cement pillars – a few bricks still clung in small arches where the pillars joined the base of the house, perhaps for extra reinforcement so the structure did not collapse – and a cement frame that showed how the rooms had been divided. Next door stood a one-storey wreck, somewhat less looted. Beside that, an elderly couple loitered in front of a well-preserved house separated from the sidewalk by reams of mine tape. The woman looked wistfully at the front door.
We stopped to chat in pidgin Bosnian and learned that the elderly couple stood in front of their own home.
“The house is mined,” the man said. “We don’t know when they’ll be able to clear it.”
“Where do you live now?” I asked.
“In the garage,” the man said. “It wasn’t mined, but it’ll be cold in there in the winter. We have no heat.” He explained some of this through mime.