DATELINE: Sarajevo, Bosnia    

Author: Natalie      

Normally I am not so into guided tours, but yesterday�s was amazing - thanks to Andy for setting it up. Our guide, Mustapha, was a 28-year-old Bosnian Muslim whose family survived the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995. The tour really helped me to get a better sense of what went on during the war. We started at the tunnel museum, visited a portion of the front line, proceeded to the hilltop Jewish cemetery for a view of the city, and culminated at the old Ottoman fortress for an even better view of the city. With that perspective, it was much easier to see how Serb forces completely surrounded the city and terrorized the civilians with shells and sniper fire. The first victims were two young female medical students who were shot while crossing the Vrbanje bridge in April of 1992. During the nearly-four-year war, over 11,000 people were killed, 70% of them civilians. That figure includes 1600 children under the age of 12. The only area not controlled by the Serbs was the airport, a small strip of land in the Eastern region of the city. The airport was under the supervision of U.N. forces and was used to deliver humanitarian aid. Our guide was not so impressed with the quality of the aid provided - canned goods from 1972, he said - nor with the support of the U.N. who essentially did nothing to curb the violence against civilians. The Bosnian forces, with help from civilians, dug an 800-meter-long tunnel beneath the air strip to connect Sarajevo with the free Bosnian territory in the hills far beyond. Anecdotes from survivors suggest that the tunnel was mainly used for delivering weapons from the city to the soldiers fighting in the hills, and especially for bringing supplies in to the city from outside. It also contained an oil pipeline and an electric line, making it particularly dangerous due to frequent flooding. Our own guide was twelve during the war, and he vividly recalls receiving food packages from his father, a soldier. He said that he himself wanted to fight but was too young. He told us that for the first six months of the war, his family lived in a bunker with 80 other families - so, about 400 people total - beneath a municipal building in the center of the city. He recounted how he left his house with his mother and sister just five minutes before it was bombed. The siege caught the population of Sarajevo quite off guard. �One day,� our guide recalled, �My Serb neighbors just disappeared. They had been tipped off that the Bosnian Serbs were planning an attack against we Muslims, and they fled for safety.� The tanks and militia began amassing in the hills surrounding Sarajevo soon after that, but the army told the Sarajevans that they were merely there for military maneuvers and practice drills. Then the shelling began, and did not let up for over three years. In all, some five million shells were dropped on the city of Sarajevo. With the belated diplomatic intervention of U.S. President Bill Clinton, the war ended in November of 1995 with the signing of peace accords in Dayton, Ohio. After the tour, Andy, Sam and I went to lunch and ate a truly obscene amount of bread.