In the predawn blackness, a chorus of nightingales rises above the eerie whistling of Serbian artillery rounds speeding overhead.
Oddly, the nightmarish shelling doesn`t frighten away the birds as Sarajevo`s peacetime bustle once did. When the thunderous blasts stop reverberating through shattered downtown buildings, they`re still singing.
”They come in war, because there`s no traffic now. They never used to sing at dawn like this,” muses sleepy Sakir Dzirlo, 43, a Muslim citizen arising to pray, as customary, long before sunrise.
In this Balkan slaughterhouse, where cat carcasses rot on sidewalks and packs of scrawny dogs scavenge the streets at first light, the unnatural has become natural as each new day brings new butchery against human beings and animals alike.
”This is a holocaust here,” asserts Dzirlo, whose family risks death by sniper or shellfire just going through the daily routine of scrounging for food and water, visiting relatives and trying to survive.
To outsiders, Bosnia`s war of independence from what is left of Yugoslavia seems like a confusing jumble of interminable fighting, broken cease-fires and ethnic blood feuds. Often lost is the human struggle to eke out a pitiful existence with a semblance of dignity and normalcy amid the barbarity.
For nearly five months, day after apocalyptic day, the Dzirlos and other Sarajevo families have endured lives of agony in a Hades of hatred where death slowly, steadily and randomly picks off friends and neighbors.
Night after murderous night, Serbian nationalists commanding the green hillsides all around have fired artillery, rockets, mortars, tanks and anti-aircraft guns down onto this city`s 400,000 petrified, near-starving residents.
”Every time you hear a crash, a building falls down,” declares Dzirlo, an electrical engineer, listening intently as Serbs shell his city center neighborhood one summer night.
”Every night they fire like this. Every day we lose more friends-15 to 20 dead that we know of, and five of them cousins. We are burying people in parks. Sometimes we can`t have funerals because it`s too dangerous to go outside. Sometimes we go to funerals of people we don`t even know.”
Despite an international peace conference that started Wednesday in London, fighting intensified here as both sides tried to improve their positions before the talks.
The city`s ragtag multicultural citizen army of Muslim Slavs, Catholic Croatians and Orthodox Serbs tried unsuccessfully to break the blockade imposed by surrounding Serb militias, which escalated their bombardment of the historic town that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics.
A medieval city ruled for nearly 500 years by the Ottoman Turks and the Austro-Hungarian empire endures a reign of terror as thousands of residents cram into candlelit basement shelters or huddle in darkened, waterless apartments.
During occasional letups in the fighting, they emerge blinking into the sunlight to search for scarce food and water, fuel and candles, coffee and cigarettes.
Sometimes, buses even venture out to carry them along past windowless shops, rubble-strewn sidewalks and derelict buildings on Marshal Tito Street, the main downtown thoroughfare.
Above, on the picturesque enemy-held slopes of 5,345-foot Mt. Trebevic, death lurks in the green forests and white stone houses with red tile roofs. Below, dashing across the arched stone bridges that span the Miljacka River, people scurry about as if on a dartboard amid the ruined monuments and shrines to their varied faiths and history.
Showing what one woman called a ”civilized scorn for terrorism,” people brave sniper fire to move about, shop, stroll, jog, make repairs or buy one of the newspapers that dogged journalists still crank off crude presses in basements of bombed-out publications, then hawk themselves.
The shelling game
It`s a deadly game with only a few rules.
Pedestrians keep close to the buildings on the south sides of east-west streets, because most of the shells come from the south. They sprint across intersections exposed to hillside snipers, who fire explosive or incendiary anti-aircraft rounds down along the north-south streets. When shelling is intense, people stay inside.
”Living like this is horrible,” says Aleksandar Kravljaca, 39, commercial manager of several public halls demolished by Serb shellfire, including two skating rinks used in the 1984 Olympics.
”During the cease-fires, it`s been like Russian roulette,” adds Kravljaca, who stepped into a government building seconds before one attack along Tito Street claimed 19 lives. ”It`s a desperate situation. We really need help.”
”I live in a building that took a hit yesterday five floors above us,”
he says. ”There are 18 families in this building living in constant second-by-second fear that the next one will hit their flat. It`s getting to the point where people can`t stand it anymore. People are ready to commit suicide.”
Babies are maimed or killed by shrapnel nearly every day. Mortars that approach soundlessly and explode suddenly can wound children playing in the shelter of rubble-strewn alleys.
Mothers give birth in makeshift delivery rooms under mortar attack. Newborns are kept two to a bassinet because of lack of space. Meditails hold off Serbian tanks and troops. Bullet-riddled ambulances and militia vehicles, their windows long since shot out, speed through the streets at speeds approaching 100 miles per hour as a hedge against snipers.
Snipers try to wound victims so they can draw rescuers into their sights as well-then squeeze off more shots to finish the job. City cemeteries where mourners gather to bury the dead have become prime targets, so makeshift graveyards spring up in public parks. Victims are often buried near where they fall.
Typical is Kovaci Park, at the eastern edge of Bascarsija, Sarajevo`s old Muslim quarter. There, the number of new graves doubled, to more than 300, in one two-week period. Dug quickly with a backhoe and strewn with pink and purple flowers, the sad mounds climb ever higher on the hillsides toward the Serb gun positions.
”We are constantly under siege. We are being driven crazy by this. It`s a terrible situation,” complains Hamid Pasic, 76, a ”hungry” professor of medical physics and biophysics who paces daily up and down Tito Street.
”This is where I walk every day,” he says, stopping as usual one afternoon in front of the flower-covered memorial on Vase Miskina Street dedicated to 22 civilians killed and scores injured in the bread-line attack of May 27 that was seen worldwide.
”In memory of the citizens of Sarajevo. They fell from fascist aggression,” reads the marker, placed next to a shell casing from one of the rockets believed fired by Serbs at more than 100 people queuing to buy bread. The sudden explosions dismembered several people and left the street blood-soaked in the warm sunshine. Among the dead were a 13-year-old girl, a 7-year-old boy and an elderly professor who Pasic says was a close friend.
Almost no building unscathed
Unable to remember the last time he bathed or ate, Pasic condemns the near-constant attacks that prevent restoration of city water, food and power supplies. ”I really tried to look for bread today, but I didn`t find any,”
he sighs. ”It`s not so important what you eat, but did you eat, or not.”
Pasic, who once taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was astonished that Serbian gunners even savaged the American Center in the burned-out twin towers of the 20-story UNIS office building, where he used to read scientific literature.
”Look at what happened there,” he says, incredulously pointing at his own turn-of-the-century apartment building. His third-floor windows are blown out, and huge tank-blasted holes gape in the outer walls of the apartments above and below.
Virtually no building has been spared, ranging from bullet-riddled churches and synagogues to rocketed mosques and minarets, mortared museums and schools, shelled stores and apartments.
The human toll is even more appalling. An estimated 40,000 people, mostly Muslim Slavs and Croatians, have been slaughtered, while more than 1.3 million were uprooted since war broke out in Bosnia-Herzegovina in April. It has helped create the biggest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
Most of the dead and displaced were victims of a campaign of ”ethnic cleansing” by Serbian nationalists who have seized two-thirds of Bosnia in an attempt to partition the republic and to rid their territory of non-Serbs.
Fearing persecution in what they saw as a fledgling Islamic state, the Serbian rebels took up arms against the Bosnian government after Muslims and Croatians, who together formed a majority, voted to declare independence earlier this year. The Serbs insist that if Bosnia can secede from Yugoslavia, they, too, have a right to declare independence.
Bosnia`s militant Serbs made up only 31 percent of the republic`s prewar population of about 4.5 million, but they now hold some 70 percent of the territory. They are supported by the republic of Serbia, which dominates the new, smaller Yugoslavia. Critics accuse Serbia of trying to carve a ”Greater Serbia” out of the ruins of Yugoslavia.
”We have to fight a monster like Adolf Hitler,” claims Naza Tanovic, 54, a Muslim mathematician whose Slavic family of Islamic extraction dates back 400 years in Sarajevo. She accuses the Serbs of trying to clean out Muslims who, at 44 percent, were the largest ethnic group in Bosnia before the war.
”They are wild killers because they kill everything in sight in the worst possible way. These people shoot with bombs at hospitals, bread lines and the Red Cross,” she charges.
”How can you be making ethnically clean areas at the close of the 20th Century? How can you try to expel whole towns? All of Europe is trying to unite, and here they are cleansing people and thinking as if it were the 19th Century.”
Tanovic lives in a handsome row house in the old section of town near the Miljacka River, along with her husband, Harry Miller, 53, a Chicago native and mathematician. Miller had Tanovic as a professor, married her and moved here 23 years ago.
Ensconced in their basement shelter, they have survived countless attacks that killed or injured neighbors and friends. Determined not to be terrorized, Miller still goes jogging along the river now and then. Sometimes he hears the shells whiz overhead.
Like other of Sarajevo`s survivors, Miller, who is Jewish, believes its citizens have indeed endured carnage and suffering of a kind the civilized world had vowed would ”never again” be permitted after the savagery of the Nazis` Third Reich.
As mortar rounds explode only a few streets away, Miller spells out what many Sarajevans feel: that the Bosnian capital represents a multiethnic, multireligious dream that was Sarajevo`s trademark.
It was part of the reason Yugoslavia showcased the city for the Olympics, because so many Yugoslavs also considered it the best of the old Yugoslavia.
”This is a city that has a great tradition of people living together,”
Miller remarks. ”There are Muslims and Jews and Catholics and Orthodox, even Protestants, living here, I can`t believe this is happening. It`s animal behavior.”
But an estimated 85,000 Serbs elected to stay in Sarajevo and defend its multiethnic way of life, a centuries-old melting pot of many peoples. These Serbs are fiercely proud of the dream of coexistence their brethren in the hills are so determined to destroy.
”All the world knows what is happening here,” asserts a grim-faced Sakir Dzirlo, whose family has seen its share of horrors during the siege. If the UN will not launch airstrikes against the Serbs, he says, it must give the Bosnians the arms they need. ”What will we do? We haven`t guns. We call on all the world to help us. Must we fight with our fingers?”
Dzirlo has been a kind of Everyman, an archetypal concerned citizen who on his own regularly telephones the UN, the White House, the State Department and countless embassies to demand foreign intervention to stop the bloodshed here and across Bosnia.
`Feeding the dead`
So far, the world has responded to the Bosnian government with what seem like hollow warnings to the Serb aggressors, food shipments to besieged cities like Sarajevo and Gorazde, and a UN-directed humanitarian aid airlift-something Sarajevans contemptuously call ”feeding the dead.”
Quite obviously, Dzirlo fumes, the international community has decided the stakes are far too high to risk intervention in another Balkan blood feud like the one that precipitated the start of World War I with the assasination in Sarajevo of an Austrian archduke by a Bosnian Serb.
In fact, the jaded joke making the rounds among United Nations peacekeeping troops here warns: ”It`s only the odd-numbered world wars that start in Sarajevo.”
But for Dzirlo, this life under the gun is no laughing matter. The family`s five-story building took a direct rooftop hit last month, and he constantly worries about how to stop fires in a city where water is scarce.
Dzirlo`s wife, Amra, 40, an architect, and the couple`s four children endure in the family`s second-floor apartment, saying their Islamic prayers five times a day when the Serb bombardments permit.
They watch with frustration and tears as their beloved city is slowly being reduced to rubble from the shells that slam haphazardly into once-handsome century-old stone buildings with their neo-baroque facades.
Amra Dzirlo keeps her family`s spirits up. She is imaginative and innovative creating different kinds of breads, rolls, cakes and desserts out of dwindling supplies of flour and sugar. ”There is only a little food and bread left,” she tells guests. ”No fruit. No vegetables. No meat.”
She makes jam from roses, cooks over candles and even concocts traditional baklava for the Muslim holiday Kurban Bajram. But there have been no milk or eggs for months, and even her optimism is crushed when a power outage keeps her from properly cooking the baklava. The children cry when intense shelling forces them to miss celebrating the cherished holiday.
The Dzirlos` twin 14-year-old boys, Mahir and Malik, risk their lives to dash out between artillery salvos and gather what little water still drains from fountains at local mosques. The teens are further exposed lugging it home in heavy plastic containers while zigzagging through the cobbled streets.
Their two daughters-Meliha, 16, and Lejla, 10-light candles and practice Bach and Beethoven on the grand piano at night, even when the the bombs fall perilously close to their apartment.
Sitting on their balcony, little Lejla watches lovingly as the dogs run by below. She looks wide-eyed at her mother, and Amra gives her some food scraps to throw down. Lejla, like her siblings, spends virtually all her time at home because there has been no school in this city, known for a well-educated population, since last spring.
For his part, Dzirlo has gone back to his job as an electrical engineer as the Bosnian government struggles to repair and rebuild the city`s shattered power grid.
A broadcast boost
When it works, Radio-Television Bosnia-Herzegovina is a tremendous morale booster.
One rocket-filled summer night, as china rattled in their cupboards and light from a nearby shell-torched building flickered off their apartment windows, the Dzirlo family watched an episode of the American-made mini-series ”War and Remembrance,” based on the Herman Wouk novel.
The episode, repeated several times over a period of days, depicted scenes from World War II and Nazi genocide.
”It`s very hard to watch this, especially for Jews,” Dzirlo says, ”but it`s hard for us who have to live with this situation right now. This is a holocaust here.”
