Welcome to Sarajevo

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A trip to Sarajevo had to come eventually and like buses two came all at once. The first was for a G1 conference similar to that due to have happened at Mrkonjic Grad and for this I enlisted a helicopter in order to avoid road carnage and delay. I was accompanied by C*** S****, the RAO, who as holder of the purse strings would be berated about the whereabouts of the welfare cheques which he swore blind had been sent out and had definitely not been “resting in his account”. Still, what can you expect from a man who was backtermed and Y-Listed so often at Sandhurst that he was the first Officer Cadet to win the Long Service and Good Conduct medal while going through the Factory. The flight was entertaining with the scenery as spectacular as expected and it was hard to look nonchalant and unexcited in front of the other passengers who seemed to be rather blasé about the whole flying business as if it was a bit like taking the Underground to work. Mind you perhaps they would be excited by using the Tube, but somehow I doubt it. The conference passed without incident and we then indulged in some retail therapy in the various PXs where the SFOR badge can be found on every item that the heart desires and quite a few which it doesn’t. The services available are such that the photography shop develops pictures in thirty minutes and the Italian PX sells more varieties of pasta than I have seen outside, well, Italy; although the branch of Burger King has a Balkan approach to fast food and when we placed our order it seemed that the meal was prepared from scratch including peeling the potatoes for the chips. Rumours of a mooing and a shot from outside are overstated.

A short siesta later we went to sample the best of the bars and restaurants of Butmir Camp although as irony would have it we didn’t get any further than the Café Royale because Chris settled in to discuss paperclips and the intricacies of Pay 2000 with some AGC cronies. This is a pity as Butmir rivals some small towns for eating and drinking establishments. It is to those from outside like some sort of luxury Butlin’s, complete with helpful DPM Coats in the shape of the International Military Police. To add insult to injury to those from the outstations there is a very relaxed walking out policy in force (unarmed and in pairs) and those feeling ennui with the options on camp are allowed to visit the town whenever off duty and even have a quiet beer as long as they do not return obviously intoxicated. Indeed the American walking out policy seems to allow the wearing of civilian clothes judging by the plethora of plaid shorts, baseball caps, large cameras and larger voices witnessed in the city centre later (or there was a coach party in, but as the hairstyles ran more to crewcuts than blue rinses I suspect the tourists were US Forces). When set against HMP Banja Luka where going out requires at least a week’s notice for security clearance and deconfliction to ensure that no more than one group is visiting the five establishments in bounds, two armed escorts per eight on parole, a dry evening and funny looks from the locals at the foreigners in combat kit (and even funnier looks at the idiot RSIGNALS (Yeomanry) Officer, who will remain anonymous, who managed to drop his pistol from his pocket onto the restaurant floor with a fearful clatter) this place really does show that Operations are hell. A sizeable part of the IMP contingent is made up of Irish MPs (by which I don’t mean moonlighting members of the Dail Eirenann). One Officer from Banja Luka, a Military Policemen himself and a staunch Northern Irish Protestant from Belfast, had come to Sarajevo for a meeting but could not find the camp and therefore followed the shuttle bus that runs to and from the City. The armed escort on the bus, one of these Irish MPs, noticed that it was being followed and stopped to investigate whom was doing the shadowing. Our Ulsterman expressed some disbelief and hilarity that he saw the day when he was stopped and questioned by a Republican: a bit of an inversion from his days working in the Province. Later that evening I was invited to share a drink with the Irishmen and to my delight one only seemed to wake up to shout “MORE DRINK” before draining his glass and returning to his reverie. Unfortunately his name was Christy, not Jack, and no nuns, girls, gobshites or curtains hove into view for comment.

My next trip came the following week when C**** and I were offered the chance to go on the Sarajevo battlefield tour. Thank God for his contacts in the AGC. Our travelling companions were the cream of Mrkonjic Grad, including local civilians, and apart from Chris and myself the party consisted of one male officer and five girls. After travelling down (again by the good agencies of the Fleet Air Arm who are making dark comments about issuing me air miles) we had lunch. The Food in Banja Luka is pretty good, but it’s a surprise that those living here are not all obese judging by the quality of this repast. With food to suit each nationality on camp (and believe me there’s a large variety of them: it’s like the United Nations. Doh ! It is the United Nations) the serving counters stretched about as far as the eye can see. The icing on the cake (and there were cakes) was the freezer full of ice-creams and lollipops. With raspberry flavoured goo round our mouths we boarded the coach for the School Trip. Sarajevo is uncannily reminiscent of a sort of Balkan Seoul, being built on a series of hills carrying roads high above the city. The roads pass through many tunnels (which were used as shelters during the siege) and afford a glorious view to the tourist, sniper or artillery observer.

If seeing the effects of the war on the countryside and small towns had been creepy, this city was the whole nine yards. A rude awakening occurred when we were delayed in a traffic jam and then had to make a detour to avoid a demining operation conducted by some serious looking Scandinavians with all manner of armoured bulldozers. The suburb of Dobrinja was my first view of the city from the ground. This was a predominantly Muslim area at the start of the siege and accordingly took a devil of a battering from mortars, shells and rockets. It Shows. The architecture is a bit like that of a Club Med or Spanish Costa that now has big chunks bitten out. Some blocks are part destroyed but have flats that are still inhabited and show a brave display of window boxes and patio furniture. In an example of nature making good, I saw house martins (or similar birds) flying in and out of the nests that they had built in the cracks and holes left by the bombardment. One flat had an ECHOS umbrella, but I suspect this had been “liberated” from the camp rather than signifying a branch opening up for the convenience of SFOR troops out and about. This part of town had one end of the Sarajevo tunnel, and we went to the other side of the airfield to visit the museum at what was once the end that led to safety. A small industry (not based around washing cars or selling petrol, CDs and melons) has sprung up here and we were shown around by the one of the family whose house had been used as cover for the entrance to the tunnel which, hand dug, had run 800m under the airfield to the city and allowed the transport in of food, munitions and personnel. In three months the tunnelers excavated 2,800 cubic metres of earth and shored up the tunnel with wood and metal and installed lighting and later a railway and fuel pipe. During the siege an average of 4,000 people a day transited the tunnel each carrying loads of around 50kg, a journey which was quite a strain as the average dimensions of the shaft were 1.5x1m and the passage could take two hours. The endeavours were necessary, however, as supplies ran so low that the citizens of Sarajevo had been reduced to eating soup made from grass, or for the really lucky ones vegetable peelings. The descriptions given were truly bloodcurdling and one should remember that the winning side writes history, although it should be questioned if anyone did win at all: in any case the victory was Pyrrhic. Because of the high water table the tunnel frequently flooded and with the kind of disdain for personal safety exhibited on the roads, citizens of Sarajevo still used it despite the heady mix of water and high voltage electricity cable, pausing only to light cigarettes next to the petrol line. Still, it had to be safer than above ground, if only just.

Next, after the obligatory happy snaps inside and outside the preserved section of tunnel we moved to the centre of the city. Our route in was the infamous Snipers’ Alley, which proved more to be Snipers’ Four Lane Inner Approach Road, but no less scary a place to have been shot at for being a wide thoroughfare. We passed the Rainbow Hotel, formerly an old peoples’ home, which had been shelled almost to bits and was now covered in rubbish and filth. It came as quite a shock to see that this derelict building has now become home to a population of Gypsies, people who seemed to have nothing but the (cracked) roof over their heads. Also visible from Snipers’ Alley are the Parliament building and Oslobodenje Newspaper tower, both heavily shelled and still not in use as they are so full of booby traps and unexploded ordnance as to be unsafe to enter. Where heavier ordnance had not done its damage, around the windows of most buildings is a rash of bullet holes from the battles between snipers. During our tour we also passed the “Romeo and Juliet” bridge where a Muslim-Serb couple were shot by a sniper and the bodies could not be retrieved for several days because of the battle (the lovers were later buried in the same grave), saw the cemetery which covers an entire hillside where bodies were eventually interred after being taken from their temporary graves in back gardens and parks which were the only safe resting places for the burial parties to do their work until the shelling stopped, and were unfortunately about five years late for the U2 gig at the stadium.

The old centre of town provided a change of scene from the scabrous, pockmarked, diseased grey concrete of the newer outskirts. Here disrepair was more attributable to age than warfare, although munition splinter holes can be seen about the place. It is here that the bridge over which Archduke Ferdinand was passing when Gavrilo Princip shot him can be seen, the assassin becoming a Serb national hero and triggering the First World War although Princip’s statue has been removed as have the brass footprints that marked the spot where he stood. It is also here that the Moorish-Byzantine inspired library stands, although this too fell victim to a bombardment that resulted in a fire and the destruction of the books inside. The library has been reconstructed and restocked by the Netherlands and the exterior is still a riot of arabesques and intricate stonework. Behind the library is the district of Bascarsija, a maze of winding alleys filled with craftsmen’s shops which sell exquisite jewellery for a fraction of the price to be fetched in Western Europe, exotic sweets and nuts and souvenirs hammered out from brass bullet and shell casings. Over the top of the roofs point the minarets of various mosques, and round corners can be found shady courtyards and fountains. We settled in a café to watch the world go by and keep an eye out for the fauna I didn’t get a chance to examine in Zagreb. As we moved back to the bus a storm started. Similes from war novels often liken the sound of the guns to that of thunder: here in Sarajevo it was all too easy to reverse that and imagine the thunder as the guns. Almost simultaneously the muezzins began the call to prayer from the minarets, and their eerie cry filled the streets.

Sarajevo was summed up for me in two ways: one that caused great sadness and one that inspired hope. The first was the UNIS towers. These are two skyscrapers that dominate the city and are nicknamed Momo and Uzeir after local comic characters. Before the war one tower housed Muslims, the other Serbs. During the siege the Serb Gunners shelled both as they were not sure which was occupied by which ethnic group. Appalling actions can take place between sides in civil wars, but here the hatred was such that the besiegers risked killing their own people with artillery to avoid allowing their enemies to escape. The second symbol is the “100 Roses of Sarajevo”. As a memorial to the dead of the siege 100 shell-holes were filled with red concrete by a group of the city’s artists, marking just some of the places where people were killed. The roses, as they have become known, look like a splash of maroon ink dropped on the light grey paper pavement. They are poignant as the concrete is now a little dusty and faded and only visitors really look for them or take much notice of them: the people of the city pass by quickly as they get on with their normal lives. Hope springs that this return to normal business is not just a façade, but a genuine new start.

Unfortunately I was on duty that evening and the following day so I waved C**** goodbye and left him to enjoy the bars and restaurants of Butmir Camp (and the company of five of the most attractive women in theatre as mentioned earlier). Chris tells me he was given some really evil looks by male soldiers for sitting surrounded by the girls (and having a grin on his face similar to the Colonel’s when briefing waitresses) and ended up being invited to a party with the Carabinieri until the early hours. I imagine the female presence had as much to do with the party invitation as C****’s good humour and company !

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