By Galal Nassar As the captain announced our approach to the airport, the scene from the air was horrifying. The fragmented limbs of streets and bombed out corpses of buildings stretched in all directions. On the ground, the wreckage and desolation hit one with the immediacy of the most violent war in Europe since the end of World War II. It is immediately apparent that Sarajevo has yet to find peace. This one-time cultural capital of Europe, which saw an unfathomable scale of slaughter and destruction, is now prey to the war of starvation, degradation and devastation. On the way from the airport to the city, the tragedy continued to unfold with every bomb crater, every abandoned sandbag now sprouting grass, and every somber figure that appeared fleetingly in the ghostly, dimly-lit streets. Tents and makeshift hovels are clustered on the sites of former parks and playgrounds. In the skeletons of homes, one can still discern an old-world elegance, particularly in areas facing the mountains, where homes made easy targets for the missiles of the besieging army. In the city, people rushed to catch the metro, a motley assembly of cars of different colours and sizes. I learned that the metro cars were donated by several European and Islamic countries, each with their own particular make and design. Most of the pedestrians were women. I soon learned that the ratio of women to men was six to one -- another testimony to the toll claimed by the war. International forces are stationed throughout the city, providing a rare link with the outside world. Here one can find a panoply of consumer goods and luxury items that are the envy of the people of Sarajevo. A soldier in the international forces earns between $3,000 and $4,000 a month, while the minimum wage in Bosnia is DM100 ($66). Unemployment is rampant and inflation is high. The divisions of Bosnia-Herzegovina are clearly demarcated on the map that Al-Ahram Weekly bought from a local bookshop: Serbian areas are yellow and those belonging to the Bosnian-Croatian union are blue. The Serbian area extends south to north along the borders of Monte Negro and Serbia to the east, and in the south it occupies the region adjacent to the northern Croatian border. The Serbs have destroyed all the homes in their area that belong to Muslims and Croatians. They have also destroyed more than a thousand mosques. The divisions between the communities are all too apparent: there are no traces of Islamic heritage in the Serbian areas, while in other areas there is abundant evidence of ethnic and religious heterogeneity. The map, printed in Zagreb in 1996 on the occasion of the Pope's visit to Bosnia, shows the republics of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It includes signs indicating various landmarks such as airports, monuments and churches, but there is not a single sign showing the presence of a mosque -- another indicator of what is being planned for the Balkans. In a bookshop on one of the main streets, I learned that Bosnia had some 400 forms of print and audio-visual media. Yet, despite this abundance, the state of the press has deteriorated and several newspapers have lost nearly 85 per cent of their readership since the war. A journalist's salary rarely exceeds US$150 a month. A new generation of journalists has grown up during the war, yet the press has been unable to acquire professional formation. In the shop window are dozens of books about the war. One such, The Cry of Bosnia, caught my eye. It appears to capture the past and the future that awaits this land of red-tiled roofs. It is the memoirs of a young Muslim woman married to a Serb, who, in the spring of 1992, suddenly finds herself in the midst of the horror of ethnic cleansing. Covering the first nine months of the war, the author relates her growing sense of apprehension as the behaviour of the people she has known for many years begins to change. A lifelong neighbour and friend leaves the village without saying goodbye. Women and children quit the neighbourhood in the middle of the night. Wild rumours circulate about troop movements. Escalating tensions force even the most stalwart optimists to panic. Soon, people begin to talk about "them" and "us", as invisible lines begin to be drawn separating Serbs from Muslims. Suddenly, the woman finds that she belongs to the creed of the enemy. The author recalls the vicious media campaign that preceded the conflagration: against images of guns and knives, a television report conveys the message that they belong to Muslim youths bent on slaughtering Serbian women and children. The woman and her husband go to stay with Serbian friends of his, who treat her well. On the day the friends' son returns home wearing a military uniform and carrying a cassette with recordings of dance songs sung by a Serbian military unit notorious for the ethnic cleansing committed during WWII, she asks herself: had Tito not united the country? Has sectarian strife remained latent, passed on from parent to child only to resurface after all these years? She recalls the anthems of her school days that told stories of the army protecting sleeping children. But that army fell apart and bequeathed to the Serbs the largest force with which to strike at the children of other ethnic groups. The woman's growing alienation is exacerbated by the uncertainty of what the next day might bring. She would hear Muslims say about the Serbs, "They've always hated us," and she would ask herself, "Has my life been a lie? Have my childhood friends, my friends as a young woman, my closest neighbours all been an illusion?" When the woman is forced to flee the village, her route was a hurdle of armed barriers separating Serbian village from Bosnian village from Croatian village. Villages that once appeared to be nestled in the hills were now severed by hatred. In his introduction to The Cry of Bosnia, former BBC journalist Martin Bell, who covered the war, expressed the sense of shame that overwhelms him every time he recalls how Western governments did not intervene quickly enough to spare the lives of innocent people. The UN forces and foreign journalists, he wrote, were at best war tourists. They had their own means of transportation and their own forms of personal protection. They had everything they needed, even cigarettes. But how much has the situation changed for the people of Bosnia since the opening months of the war, as described by the book? The Weekly, in its tour of the Bosnian Union, found discrimination from one region to the next in security control, the provision of vital supplies, reconstruction and the resettlement of refugees -- or at least the restoration of families to the areas they were forced to leave. Political fears are worse now than they were when panic and violence drove people out of their homes. Peace has entrenched the consequences of the war, and it appears that the international community is unwilling or incapable of altering the sectarian equations which brought an end to the unity of the state and society. Bosnian Prime Minister Haris Siladivic, commenting on the current situation, said: "I am not totally satisfied with the situation as it stands in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It is possible to say that there has been some progress, although it has been very slow. The forces that were behind the armed aggression on Bosnia-Herzegovina are still alive and lurking in wait. They are fascist forces. Therefore, it is very difficult to make solid and rapid progress. Yet, let me affirm that at the time in which we are continuing our defence and struggle to secure the unity of Bosnia-Herzegovina and to protect its autonomous sovereignty, the main objective of the regime in Belgrade is still to destroy the unity of our territory, our autonomy and our sovereignty. But our struggle to achieve our goals will continue regardless of the fact that military operations have ceased because the attempts to dismember Bosnia-Herzegovina or to put it under the sovereignty of neighboring countries are still ongoing." Siladivic was referring to the fact that Belgrade has refused to establish diplomatic relations with Bosnia-Herzegovina. Commenting on the situation in the wake of the Dayton Agreement, which ended the war, Sheikh Mustafa, head of the Bosnian Ulema (Islamic scholars), said the Bosnian people still feel that international and Islamic support is lacking. "I can appreciate the difficulties facing the Islamic world. In spite of these difficulties, the Muslim peoples have done more than it has been in their power to help us. We are aware of their current weakness and the pressures exerted upon them by Europe, the US and Russia." Sheikh Mustafa stressed that the revival of peaceful coexistence between the Bosnian religious denominations depends on European efforts. Bosnia-Herzegovina is the mirror of Europe. If religious and cultural tolerance cannot be preserved here, it will not be preserved in Europe. If cultural and religious coexistence cannot be sustained in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the danger will spread throughout Europe and elsewhere.
