I glanced at the papers and noticed some printed in Cyrillic and others in the Roman alphabet.
“Our language split during the war,” Senad told me. “We used to all speak Serbo-Croat. Now the Serbs speak Serb.” He pointed to the paper printed in Cyrillic. “The Croats speak Croatian and we speak Bosnian. They’re really all the same language, just a few different words in each, like dialects. But some people get upset if you say that.”
“Were you born in Sarajevo?” I asked.
“I was. This beautiful city is my home.” I told Senad about my walk the day before, my early impressions of the city and asked how long he had worked in the press office.
“I’ve been here the longest,” he told me. I was surprised by his answer. Our three other colleagues were older and I had assumed that age translated into more years’ service.
“Drago used to be on TV,” Senad said. “Everyone remembers him from before the war. They love him because he reminds them of happier times. He can travel wherever he likes.” As we talked more, Senad told me that even though the Dayton Peace Accord technically unified Bosnia and Herzegovina, a boundary line — an unofficial border — still existed between the Serb part of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Republika Srpksa) and the Muslim-Croat part (the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), which included Sarajevo.
“Sooosan, I must tell you something,” Senad said. “I will never cross that line.” An awkward moment — I did not know what to say. Part of our job was to help promote unity by crossing that line as if it did not exist, to work with local offices across the country, helping people, especially the elderly whose families had emigrated during the war while they remained behind either because they could not or would not go.
“Drago will go with you when you visit the other side.” As Senad drank his coffee, I could not help but notice that his hand shook.
During my first week in Sarajevo, few people that I met wanted to talk about the war. When information about their personal lives slipped out, I understood why. One woman saw her fiancé shot on the street by a sniper. Another took the garbage out one morning and found dead people stuffed in the bins. These images lingered during days when I was otherwise occupied with practical tasks. I took fieldwork tests for driver safety and radio operation. I learned the language of Alpha, Tango, Bravo, which was used for transmitting messages over the Land Cruiser radio and hovered somewhere between peace and conflict, never allowed to travel alone on the roads, always tethered to headquarters through mandatory radio contact at points along designated travel routes. Failure to check in could mean dispatch of a search crew.
“Never step off paved surfaces,” my instructor said. I lost count of the number of times I had received this warning.
Having always been responsible for my own security and well-being before, I chafed under these rules but also craved them. In some part of my brain, I kept track of risks I had taken in the past in Chechnya, Moldova and Tajikistan and had begun to fear that my luck would soon run out. With rules like these in place in Sarajevo, that seemed unlikely. But when I learned all delegates had to request permission for leave outside the city on time off, I began to feel as though I had joined an army and signed my freedom away.
Sarajevo bristled with international peacekeepers and their hardware. Even a four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser seemed dwarfed by the large armoured vehicles that pulled up alongside at traffic lights. This military presence was so orderly — a world away from bullets fired in the air in Chechnya, Cossacks and their vodka in Trans Dniestria, and all those Kalashnikov-toting citizens. I saw none of that here. Rather I saw people going about their day-to-day business, cafés, full and shops, busy. Even if people were still armed, and rumours persisted of a country awash in guns, they kept their weapons out of sight.
I tried to describe these early impressions of Sarajevo to Sydney during our evening phone calls.
“So you mean there are guns and we could be shot?” he asked me one night.
“No, we’ll be fine. It’s perfectly safe here,” I replied.
As Sydney’s departure date for Sarajevo drew closer, he had trouble sleeping. I thrived in environments like this but wondered how he would adapt.
Just as Sydney was about to depart for Sarajevo, the arrests of people charged with war crimes began. Peacekeepers, SFOR (the NATO-led Stabilization Force), acted on two sealed indictments from the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. Indictments were kept secret — the number of them and when and how they would be acted on, all confidential information. I spent no time on political analysis. I only thought of complications to my personal life. Why did this have to happen now, so soon before Sydney would board his flight?
The arrests — both men lived in Republika Srpska — did not go well. Peacekeepers successfully captured one man but killed the other. Our security division pulled all foreign staff out of Republika Srpska and curtailed travel to minimize the risk of a retaliatory attack. I wrestled uncomfortably with the realization that even though as aid workers we were meant to be neutral, few perceived us this way.
The security division billeted a German delegate from Republika Srpska with me.
“They’re throwing rocks at some foreigners,” she told me over dinner that night.
“Sometimes they just shake their fists when we drive by. It’ll pass, but it’s not comfortable for us there now.”
After dinner we listened to the news. The Sarajevo airport, where Sydney was supposed to land, had been closed. The Americans worried about the possibility of a rocket-launcher attack. All this was reported on the BBC. Sydney must know by now. I did not think he would take the news as calmly as the German delegate, with a shrug that this would all pass. I braced myself when the phone rang.
“My computer?” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant and wondered why he hadn’t asked about the airport.
“Your computer?”
“I’m bringing it. It might be hard to get a good one there. Will I have trouble at customs? Can you arrange the paperwork?” We discussed the pros and cons of shipping one in. I promised to double-check with our office administrator. We chit-chatted about friends and Sydney’s goodbye party in London. He told me he felt nervous and still couldn’t sleep. I realized that Sydney didn’t know about the airport closure and decided it was best not to contribute to his jitters. I kept quiet and felt consumed by guilt after we said goodbye.
Early the next day, Sydney called from Vienna to say that his connecting flight to Sarajevo had been cancelled.
“It’s apparently really foggy at the Sarajevo airport and the plane can’t land,” he explained. I looked out the window and saw blue sky and sunshine. I said nothing.
A few hours later, we received a bulletin from security that the airport had re-opened. Not long after Sydney called.
“The fog’s lifted,” he said. “We’ll board in a few minutes.” He sounded excited, as was I.
A colleague helped shepherd Sydney’s computer through customs. He beamed when it arrived in the passenger lounge. Our colleague drove us home via a back route, past neighbourhoods she knew well, apartment blocks with back halves sheared off, debris still visible from corridors that opened to the sky. These buildings lay along the wartime front line. She told us that some families had escaped before Serb paramilitary units arrived but some didn’t. We drove by a gas pump still cordoned off with mine tape and veered around large potholes. We saw few people on the street. Sydney recorded these scenes on his video camera. Before we reached home, I told him why the airport had been closed. Safely here, now secure, he shrugged it off.