Recently, me and a mad group of international misfits from Prague took a bus to Sarajevo for Craig Allen West's art show/event, "Bringing in the Light".
This was to be an action combining DJs, live music and art in the former war zone. As I try to think of ways to describe what I saw and experience, I felt the the fotos say so much more, as does this passage from Michael Ignatieff's excellent book, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism.
"This is the heart of what was once the most complex multi-ethnic communities in Europe, shared between Croatians, Serbians, Muslim Bosnians and several other groups - Germans, Italians, and Hungarians - besides. The 1991 war tore it all apart, and now the peoples are divided into Croatian, Serbian and Bosnia sectors, with UN checkpoints inbetween.
On all the roads that lead into Sarajvo, there is a continuous swath of destruction wherever you look: roofless houses, with a cascade of roof tiles and roof beams strewn about the deserted, weed-filled rooms; fire-edged window and door frames, brick walls pierced with tire-sized artillery blasts.
Some houses have been raked by so much automatic-weapons fire that the plaster has been completely torn away, leaving only the pitted brick, the tree trunks outside the houses wearing a glittering jacket of metal slugs. In the ditches and back alleys lie small Yugoslav Zastava cars, riddled with bullet fire or twisted into rusted sculpture by a tank's treads.
At first the destruction appears to have no rhyme or reason. In some places, not a wall has been left unsprayed with bullets, while in others, scarely a building has been touched. After a while, you begin to work like an archaeologist, sifting through the clues to discern a pattern to what must have happened. There appears to be three typical forms of destruction.
The most surgical form is dynamiting: the houses are collapsed in neat piles, with minimal damage to the buildings next door. Families were driven out by their neigbors or by paramilitary militias and their homes were blown up. Many of these dynamited piles appear to have once been large, recently constructed buildings, and it makes you wonder how many years of a man's or woman's life as a Gasterbeiter in a German automobile factory went into this, only to see it fall like a pack of cards.
The second type of destruction, and the one that Sarajvo suffered the most from, appears to have been accomplised by artillery fire, From the Yugoslav National Army guns that punched round, tire-sized holes in the walls. The third type of destruction is firebombing, which leaves fire marks on all the windows, and which would have been the work of marauding paramilitaries on all sides. I spent hours in these ruins, the dust in my throat, the sound of broken glass under my feet, deciphering the clues to the shape of catastrophe. The war zones leave behind an unforgetable impression of historical retrogression.
Graveyards where Jews and Ruthenes, Germans, Croats, Muslims and Serbs once were buried side by side now lie desecrated by the bombing. Elegant episcopal palaces and monasteries, delicately arcaded squares left behind by the Austro-Hungarians, lie in ruins. Time has slid back through five centuries here. One of the richest and most civilized parts of Europe has returned to the barbarism of the late Middle Ages."
The people of Sarajvo want to return to a normal life, such as it can ever be normal again, with foriegn military vehicles and the omnipresence of aid vehicles. The people, you can see in their eyes that they are glad to be alive, and there is hope that the future can be had, without more war, with the normal days to day that so many of us take for granted.
If you can, you should see Sarajvo today, before all the landmines are cleared, and the ruins destroyed, before the holes are patched and the reminders are lost, and talk to the people, some of the most friendliest I've ever met, and let them know that they are not forgotten. It will be an experience you never forget.
