“I collected with my bare hands the body parts of my two little sons. What mother must do that? One shell of the aggressors blew them apart. Within a second, my life was destroyed forever.” The woman spoke quietly. Her third son, a boy of about eight, stood at her side and, from time to time, wiped the tears from her cheek. The well-turned out woman, her hair collected in a pink kerchief, well dressed, was self-controlled but full of restrained hatred for the “aggressors” — the Serbs — who had caused her tragedy. A big wreath and the photos of the boys at the entrance of the home silently commemorated the 15th anniversary of the disaster — the first day of the siege of Sarajevo.
From the moment we — Rachel and I — arrived at the airport, Sarajevo threw us into a cauldron of emotions, which we could not escape for a moment. In Sarajevo, one simply cannot be indifferent. Walls pockmarked by bullets, ruins that once were homes, people carrying with them blood-curdling stories as if they had happened but yesterday. A city that warms your heart and breaks your heart.
For a total of four years, Sarajevo was under siege. It is hard to believe — and it happened only ten years ago. The capital city of a European state, surrounded on all sides, stricken, starved, shelled, tortured — with Europe looking on.
The capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina is a beautiful town — and its very beauty became its disaster. It lies in a valley, surrounded by high hills on all sides. Green, wooded hills, in many places dotted with red roofs. There is almost no spot in the city where one does not see the beautiful hills. But since all the hilltops were occupied by the Serbian army that beleaguered the city, there was practically no spot in the city that was not exposed to snipers. Not for a day, a week, a month. For four long years.
Sarajevo is a town of graves — dozens of graveyards are dispersed across it, small, large and very large. Thousands of white tombstones blind the eyes, mostly of uniform dimensions and with simple inscriptions, fresh wreaths at their feet. Twelve thousand of the town’s inhabitants were killed during the siege, 1,500 of them children under 14. The entire city is still suffering from this trauma.
And in spite of that — a vibrant city. Traffic jams, old, clattering cars, roads and sidewalks scarred. The city tries to recover: Many of the square houses have been redecorated in brown, green and mustard colors, and between them are fruit trees and small garden plots with huge rosebushes.
In the center of the town — a Turkish palace, built, of all people, by the Austrians when they were ruling Bosnia. It housed the state library, one of the most important in the world. It was completed destroyed by fire during the siege. Behind the imposing front, everything is burned out.
A former commander, with gray hair and a sunburned, plowed face, showed us the battle sites and recounted the annals of the siege. I felt as if I had been there myself. Every word reminded me of my own experiences in the war of 1948.
At the time, I followed the Bosnian war with the feeling that it very much resembled our own war. It was an ethnic war, a war marked by what since then is known as “ethnic cleansing”.
I was invited to Sarajevo to speak about precisely this subject, in an international conference of the “New Agora”, which is based in Poland and whose aim is to gather intellectuals from different countries to discuss the future of the world. (In ancient Greece, the Agora was the market square where the population could assemble to discuss public matters.)
An “ethnic war”, in my understanding, is different from any other war. A “normal” war takes place between states, mostly for a piece of land on the border between them. Thus, Germany and France fought for centuries over Alsace. But ethnic wars are fought by two peoples over a country that both consider their homeland. In such a war, each side strives not only to conquer as much territory as possible, but also — and mainly — to drive the other people out. That’s why it is always especially cruel.
The Bosnian war was similar to the Israeli-Palestinian war — except that instead of two sides, as in our war, there were three: Bosniaks (Muslim), Serbs (Orthodox Christian) and Croats (Catholic Christian). Each of the three sides fought against the other two. Terrible massacres became almost routine. As a sad Bosniak told us: “Every day a farmer plowing his field discovers a new mass grave.”
As in Palestine before the 1948 war, the different populations lived in Bosnia interspersed with each other. The towns were mixed (like Jerusalem and Haifa), the villages lived beside each other — villages with soaring minarets, villages with Catholic church towers, villages with the domes of Orthodox churches.
Therefore, people used to think, before it happened, “it can’t happen in Sarajevo.” Serbs and Croats were already butchering each other in the other states of the disintegrating Yugoslavia, but in Bosnia? After all, there everybody had married everybody. There is hardly a person in Bosnia in whose veins there does not flow all three kinds of blood together. In the towns, they lived door to door.
In Sarajevo there was — and still is — a large majority of Muslims, side by side with minorities of Croats, Serbs and Jews, in that order. The general who explained the battles to us, Jovan Divjak, the former deputy commander of the Bosnian Army, is a Serb. He left the Yugoslav (Serbian) Army in order to defend Sarajevo.
The photographer who took my picture for a local magazine found it hard to explain his family tree. One grandfather, a Muslim, had married a Croat woman. The other one was himself half Serb, half Montenegrin, while his wife was Muslim. “We must all live together,” he said repeatedly, “After all, there is no real difference between us!”
And indeed — that is one big difference between our war and the Bosnian one. There, all three sides, who butchered each other with such relish, speak the same language. All three are the descendants of the same Slavic tribes that conquered this country in the 7th century. In the street, one cannot distinguish between a Muslim, a Croat and a Serb.
Sarajevo was — and remains, in spite of everything — a model of tolerance. On one square in the center of the town there stand, next to each other, a mosque, a Catholic church, an Orthodox church and a synagogue. It is hard to believe that 10 years ago there was a terrible war raging in this country.
Now, 92 years later, the Austrian soldiers have returned to Bosnia, and the inhabitants are glad to see them there. True, many people in Bosnia believe that another war is impossible: “It can’t happen again. We have learned our lesson!” But a young woman of 20, who is still carrying within her the trauma of the siege, told us: “Have no doubt — if the international soldiers leave, everything will start again!”
It is possible that the ethnic war in Bosnia, like the ethnic war in our country, is not yet over.
