Snipers Silenced, as Is Heart of Sarajevo

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina — The man on the flaming rooftop now chuckles at the memory. The woman with the laundry is destitute but alive. The kid on Gypsy Hill is gone forever.

And on Albania Street, where people dashed through the open to play Sarajevo roulette with Serb snipers, Neven Luledzija recognizes a returning photographer and a reporter and brings them up to date.

“Like always, war was good for some people and bad for most everybody else,” he says, with classic understatement.

As a series of updates shows, for most, the war was very, very bad.

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Bajro Besic, now 14, spends empty days atop Gypsy Hill where he was pictured with his pal, Hajrudin Sejdic, peering happily through binoculars at the first NATO airstrike on Serbs at Pale.

That was in May 1995. By the end of the year, a multinational force brought peace, but Hajrudin did not see it.

That September, 9-year-old Hajrudin was lined up for water, a daily ritual, and the Egyptian army truck with a U.N. flag showed up on schedule. It ran over Hajrudin, killing him almost instantly.

“His brother saw it, but I wasn’t there,” Bajro says, face blank and voice dull. When it happened, Bajro had just left the hospital after two months’ treatment for wounds inflicted by an artillery shell.

Jusuf Sejdic, tough-looking with bristling black mustache and tattoos, weeps softly at the photo of his son Hajrudin, full of life and humor. He was at the front when the boy died.

Just days after the death, another son was born. Sejdic and his wife have six kids in a tiny borrowed house. He has no job and no access to $30,000 in Bosnian army payments that exist only on paper.

“We had little before the war, and we have nothing now,” he says. “Nothing to eat, no prospects. Fifty families lived on this hill. Now there are 10. Up here, we are completely forgotten.”

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Nihad Vrago, 35, made the news that same May, a lone figure leaping into flames engulfing a two-story house on a verdant slope above Sarajevo. No one knew who he was, or what he was after.

“I was after our little fortune, money and gold,” he explains now, with a rumbling laugh. “I don’t want to say how much burned up in that damned fire. It hurt.”

He had just spent $60,000 fixing up the cozy stone house, with spectacular views from its balconies, that he shared with his new wife, his brother’s family and his mother.

A phosphorus round from across the valley set it afire.

“I think it was my former Serb friends, who knew the house,” Vrago says. But who knows? The jagged front line was just down the road, and the hillside is an “Apocalypse Now” shambles.

The house is a roofless wreck, its tiles smashed and plumbing ripped out. Inside, there is only trash: human filth, a torn shoe, a few smashed tapes the Sarajevo Videoklub will never see again.

Vrago’s mother, Aisa, sobbing in an old photo, now lives with her son in a rented apartment in a neighborhood that was held by Serbs. At 63, she has a weak heart but is getting along.

And Vrago has high hopes for his brand new restaurant, opened with the little bit of money he scraped together after the war. It is called “San,” which means “dream” in Bosnian.

*

Sema Jusufovic is alarmed when two foreigners show her a photo of a young woman hanging laundry on a bombed-out balcony. It shows her daughter, Mujesira, and she wants no more bad news.

The family of nine fled Foca a step ahead of the Serbs and spent weeks in the forest before squatting in a Sarajevo apartment. No one had extra clothes, and Mujesira did a lot of washing.

Mujesira takes some finding.

The photographer recognizes her old apartment on the Miljacka River: the same gaping holes, the same weird-shaped shards of window, and what seems like the same wash hanging in the ruins. He knocks.

“Oh, her,” says Alma Campara, a displaced person with a different story, whose husband had reclaimed the apartment. “She now lives over in Mojmilo.” Campara scribbles an address.

Mujesira is home. So is her husband, Bego. He lost one eye in the war, but he has a job--a rarity here--as a night watchman. So far, so good.

But the one-year papers issued to refugees after the Dayton peace accord have run out. They might end up in the street again. Mujesira left behind her school diploma when she fled Foca, so she can’t find work.

As she talks, she draws deeply on yet another cigarette. Lung cancer is the least of her worries. “At least we’re alive,” she says. “Thank God for that.”

*

New vignettes suggest only faint hope and promise nothing.

An AK-47 assault rifle still guards a hillside public water fountain, but it is Day-Glo orange and yellow plastic and is wielded by a 6-year-old.

A Dobrinja apartment building has been shot to a stone skeleton with patient precision, as though mad sculptors worked it with chisels. But a woman in blue trudges up an exposed inside stairway, moving in.

*

And everywhere the past intrudes on the present, raising doubts about the future.

On a bleak day in 1993, the photographer and correspondent raced across the front line to Lukavica, on the Serb side, for the burial of “Romeo” and “Juliet.”

Admira Ismic and Bosko Brkic fell in love in Sarajevo. Bosko, a Serb, and Admira, a Muslim, decided to find someplace to live in peace.

Before dawn, they raced toward safety, across the Vrbanja Bridge over no man’s land, and they nearly made it. Someone opened fire. Bosko died instantly. Ismic, mortally wounded, crawled into his embrace.

It was a week before Serbs recovered the bodies. The couple seeking peace was given a military burial under an Orthodox cross.

After the war, Admira’s father brought the remains back to the city in which they loved. Their grave is not far from the old stone lion that until 1992 guarded a small, wooded cemetery.

Today, Romeo and Juliet lie among thousands of graves in Lion Cemetery, which stretches down the hill to Soccer Stadium Cemetery, where Hajrudin Sejdic is buried.

Perhaps more than any other symbol, the lovers’ simple separate wooden markers, joined to form a “V,” remind Sarajevans of their very, very bad war.

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When the Sarajevo siege was at its worst, Associated Press photographer Jerome Delay noted in his diary:

“Amazing how this town falls back and forth from total chaos and genuine fear to a semblance of normalcy, which fools no one but gives all a well-deserved mental rest. Or does it?”

Now that’s all over. Or is it? Delay returned to Sarajevo with AP Special Correspondent Mort Rosenblum to visit their old haunts and find out.