Five years on, Sarajevo's scars are still vivid

By Mort Rosenblum

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP): At dawn in the streets of Sarajevo, the car speakers thump with hopeful reggae: "Everything's gonna be all right." By dusk, the tune changes: "This is the road to hell."

You can't kill a place the way you can kill its people, but you can leave it crippled, shaken by a shock that just won't go away. Sarajevo and Bosnia beyond, it seems, are learning this the hard way.

It was all supposed to end five years ago with elaborate plans made in Dayton, Ohio. The guns fell silent. A Muslim-Croat federation took title to 51 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A Serb Republika Srpska got the rest.

With outside help and internal goodwill, people would slowly return to their old homes. In time, according to the plan, wounds would heal.

In those first heady days, Sarajevo pulsed with spirit. Just the sight of new shoes on display behind repaired shop windows attracted crowds. Lovers and friends jammed outdoor cafe tables, laughing again.

International administrators pointed to promising indicators that suggested a return toward something near normal. Elections took place with not too much more trouble than Americans now see back home.

Today, most Bosnians regard any sort of life as better than running desperately each morning across open space in search of water, bread or firewood at the risk of a sniper's bullet.

But the briefest glance around the shattered city reveals something is dreadfully wrong. After a late-night beer, when they loosen up a bit, some Sarajevans say they are nostalgic for the war, because it at least gave them a daily focus.

Quite literally, hearts are breaking. The incidence of cardiovascular and other fatal diseases has risen sharply since 1995. Doctors say that post-traumatic stress, emotional problems and poor diet are main causes.

"During the war, people were healthier because their bodies concentrated forces to fight for survival," explains Svetlana Broz, a cardiologist.

Broz is the granddaughter of Tito, Josip Broz. For the past year, she has crisscrossed Bosnia in search of hopeful stories among the shards of a Yugoslavia that her grandfather built after World War II. She has found some, but it is hard work.

Sarajevo again has an unusual number of funerals, but this time people are killing themselves. Reported suicides run to about a dozen a month. Recently, a 10-year-old boy hanged himself.

Unemployment is estimated at 60 percent but the figure means little. There is hardly any work.

A similar surreality bites elsewhere in Bosnia, whether in parts run jointly by Muslims and Croats or in the Republika Srpska that is marbled in between. Bleeding has stopped, but scars remain fresh.

Routinely, a cow, or a child, trips one of the million mines scattered around in fields that no one has marked, and which will take years to clear.

"People are deeply depressed," Deputy Foreign Minister Husein Zivalj told a reporter at the burial of 41 Muslims found in a mass grave eight years after they were massacred. "Many are lost, broken, without work."

Much of the reason was the collapsed economy that has yet to produce significant employment, he said. Without jobs, people rely on handouts and the indignities attached. Bosnia can use a Marshall Plan.

Even more, Zivalj added, Bosnia needs Nuremberg Trials, which sought out Nazi war criminals. The UN war crimes tribunal in Hague may be a start, but it is merely scratching at the surface, he said.

"You can imagine what Germany would be like if there had not been testimony and judgment so that those responsible were punished and those who suffered had some sense of justice," he concluded.

This theme underlies almost every conversation, from Sarajevo to Srebrenica.

On the road north to Prijedor, in late autumn, mountains are aflame in aspen gold and sugar maple red. It is the sort of heartwarming storybook setting in which the occasional big bad wolf gets what he deserves.

But piles of rubble that used to be houses suggest something different. Near Prijedor, for instance, now in Serb hands, a small group of Muslims has come back to the ruins of old lives.

Husnija Causevic, 81, and his wife, Mina, live in the dank basement that was his carpentry shop. The top floor is gone. Even by doing the work himself, he cannot find the US$2,500 he needs to rebuild it.

Causevic was a soldier under four rulers, from King Peter of Yugoslavia to Hitler. In his waning years, he wants only a little peace without dwelling on the human condition.

"The Serbs have not bothered us," he said, rolling his eyes slightly as if to add the word, yet. He is attached to his birthplace and simply hopes for the best.

"When war started, I saw what was coming and I tried to get my friends to leave," he said. "One Muslim at work told me: 'No, I grew up with my pal, Dusan. He wouldn't hurt me.' The next day, his pal killed him."

Now, Causevic sees the men who brought killing to Prijedor back at their old lives, escaping any punishment. This angers him.

"They just came along and destroyed us," he said, with more wonder than heat. "Why? It will take 100 years before things can be as they were."

In November, a 92-page report by the independent International Crisis Group (ICG) named 75 Serbs as unpunished war criminals who now hold responsible positions. And that, it added, is only a sampling.

Radovan Karadzic, the indicted Serb leader, continues to influence his nationalist party, SDS, from hiding, the report says, adding that his freedom is a clear message that numerous "small fish" can be protected.

Page after page details how Serbs linked by witnesses to mass murder are now ranking policemen, mayors, local commanders and elected members of municipal or Republika Srpska assemblies.

The ICG report notes that by singling out Serbs, it does not mean to suggest that Muslims and Croats were not also guilty of war crimes.

"But," it says, "it is a particular matter of concern that Bosnian Serb authorities -- in contrast to those of other ethnic groups -- have yet to arrest a single Serb war crimes suspect and have extended only minimal cooperation to (the Hague tribunal)."

In Prijedor, for example, witnesses named Zivko Jovic as a principal interrogator at prisoner camps, and they accuse him of repeated atrocities. Today, he is an inspector in the Prijedor police.

Milan Lukic is alleged to have massacred hundreds at Visegrad. Witnesses say he boasted: "Write freely in America and to the entire world that I am the greatest criminal, and no one can do anything to me."

The report says he now has "significant influence on Visegrad local politics." Related to a Serbian general and the chief of Serbian secret police, Lukic is believed to command troops himself, the ICG adds.

The ICG urged a ban on the hard-line SDS. But in November, SDS candidate Mirko Sarovic was elected president of the Serb republic, with 50 percent of votes to 26 percent for pro-Western candidate Milorad Dodik.

Considering the war's ravages, there has been progress across much of Bosnia. Some cities and towns are recovering, helped by refugees who have come home with a little cash to start new small businesses.

Sarajevo now has much that is normal. What used to be Sniper Alley is again just a main road. Its cloverleaf highway interchange is still planted with gravestones, but now bored police target motorists with radar.

Cement and fresh paint mask much of the old damage. Morning traffic jams the old city center, and people out to take the air clog sidewalks until late at night.

But a Sarajevo surreality check adds a larger context.

"Do not be fooled by appearances," warns Alma Berberovic, an office worker who hopes for the best but calls herself pessimistic. "You can see a lot of repaired buildings, but there are broken people inside them."