Remembering the Sarajevan Cellist

So the other day someone wrote to me through my John F. Burns website and requested “the 1992 article on vedran smailovic – the cellist of Sarajevo”.

Back in the olden days, before Times Select, before all you needed was a home delivery subscription to the Times to have complete access to their archive going back to 1851, I found it necessary to collect and republish on the free web as many John F. Burns stories as I could get a hold of. Because they are important.

Anyway I also placed this note on the site:

This is an archive of links to John F. Burns articles on the New York
Times website. These links (click on the title of any article) do not
require registration on the NYT site and are impervious to linkrot. If
you are interested in obtaining the complete text of John F. Burns
articles going back over the last couple of years, send an email noting the nature of your request (fair use, personal consumption, etc.) and I’ll see if the text is available.

I’ve gotten maybe 2 requests in 3 years. But this one reminded me of a big one. The story that I’ll never forget reading, the one when I realized how horrible things were in Sarajevo, home of the Olympics.

The Death of a City: Elegy for Sarajevo — A special report.; A People Under Artillery Fire Manage to Retain Humanity
By JOHN F. BURNS
June 8, 1992

As the 155-millimeter howitzer shells whistled down on this crumbling city today, exploding thunderously into buildings all around, a disheveled, stubble-bearded man in formal evening attire unfolded a plastic chair in the middle of Vase Miskina Street. He lifted his cello from its case and began playing Albinoni’s Adagio.

There were only two people to hear him, and both fled, dodging from doorway to doorway, before the performance ended.

Each day at 4 P.M., the cellist, Vedran Smailovic, walks to the same spot on the pedestrian mall for a concert in honor of Sarajevo’s dead.

The spot he has chosen is outside the bakery where several high-explosive rounds struck a bread line 12 days ago, killing 22 people and wounding more than 100. If he holds to his plan, there will be 22 performances before his gesture has run its course.

Two months into a civil war that turns more murderous by the day, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, is a skeleton of the thriving, accomplished city it was. It is a wasteland of blasted mosques, churches and museums; of fire-gutted office towers, hotels and sports stadiums, and of hospitals, music schools and libraries punctured by rockets, mortars and artillery shells.

Parks have been pressed into service as emergency cemeteries, and the pathetic lines of graves march ever farther up the hillsides toward the gun emplacements.

What is happening here, in a European city that escaped two World Wars with only minor damage, is hard to grasp for many of those enduring it.

It is a disaster of such magnitude, and of such seeming
disconnectedness from any achievable military or political goals, that
those who take shelter for days in basement bunkers, emerging briefly
into daylight for fresh supplies of bread and water, exhaust themselves
trying to make sense of it.

Many, like Mr. Smailovic, who played the cello for the Sarajevo Opera,
reach for an anchor amid the chaos by doing something, however small,
that carries them back to the stable, reasoned life they led before.

Mr. Smailovic, 36 years old, spoke over the blasts of the shells that
have poured down on the city unremittingly for the last 48 hours. The
barrages by the Serbian forces seem to be a paroxysm of fury at their
failure to capture the city after weeks of dumping thousands of tons of
high explosives from the hillsides.

He could have been speaking for all the survivors trapped here, in
defiance of the Serbian nationalists’ insistence that only the ethnic
partitioning of the city, and of the republic, can bring them security.

“My mother is a Muslim and my father is a Muslim,” Mr. Smailovic said,
“but I don’t care. I am a Sarajevan, I am a cosmopolitan, I am a
pacifist.” Then he added: “I am nothing special, I am a musician, I am
part of the town. Like everyone else, I do what I can.”

In Sarajevo, as in many cities, towns and villages across this former
Yugoslav republic, Serbs, Muslims and Croats, the third major ethnic
group in the population of 4.4 million, have lived for centuries side
by side, so much so that their cultures, families and life styles have
grown into each other — creating a society of striking depth and
variety. Symbol of Civility Now Symbol of Pain

They have done so in a landscape that is one of the most beautiful in
Europe, a place of Alpine mountains and blue-green rivers, of terra
cotta-roofed houses that cling to precipitous hillsides, of white stone
mosques with green copper domes and pencil-slim minarets.

Sarajevo, in a narrow valley bordered on all sides by mountains, has
long been the symbol of this richly textured life, enchanting
generations of travelers since the present city was established by a
Turkish sultan in 1462.

Now it is a symbol of another kind — of a place where Muslims, Serbs,
Croats, and other religious and ethnic minorities, including Albanians
and a tiny population of Jews, suffer together. They endure the gunfire
of Serbian nationalists who believe that the independent nation of
Bosnia and Herzegovina proclaimed on March 2, and led by Muslims and
Croats, will dominate and eventually persecute Serbs.

From this conviction — met with increasing ferocity in many parts of
the republic by Muslims and Croats, some of whom have adopted tactics
as brutal as those of the Serbs — has grown the war that is draining
the life from Sarajevo.

The conflict here had small beginnings early in April, when decisions
by the European Community and the United States to recognize the new
nation led to barricades being thrown up around the city by rival
ethnic militias.

Early in May, it got out of control after Alija Izetbegovic, the Muslim
who is President of the new republic, was kidnapped by the Serbian
forces, and Muslim and Croatian troops retaliated by ambushing a convoy
of the Serbian-led Yugoslav Army as it evacuated an army headquarters
in the city.

The President, who was released in exchange for guarantees of safe
passage for the convoy, was out on Marshal Tito Street in the center of
Sarajevo this afternoon. He walked gingerly around piles of broken
glass and rubble from the shattered facades of apartment buildings
built during the time before World War I when Sarajevo was an outpost
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The 67-year-old leader, a lawyer and economist who spent nearly 10
years in prison under Yugoslavia’s Communist rulers for his writings on
Muslim beliefs, sought to reassure scattered groups of people he met
along the way. But he made no effort to hide his own anxiety after
weeks of heavy shelling.

“Are you scared?” he asked a group of militiamen standing guard with
Kalashnikov automatic rifles under an archway leading into the Solomon
Palace, a six-story apartment building that was once home to some of
the city’s leading Jews, many of whom died in the Nazi terror.

“A little,” one militiaman replied, shifting nervously in a denim
jacket embroidered with the fleur-de-lis badge that is the emblem of
the new republic.

“I am afraid too,” replied Mr. Izetbegovic, who has spent long periods
in a basement bunker in a nearby Government building. “But we must hold
out.”

For many here, that has become a prospect of appalling bleakness.
Although the United Nations on Friday reached the outline of an
agreement to take control of Butmir Airport, on the city’s outskirts,
from the Serbian forces and to open a corridor into town, there is
little confidence here that the Serbs will carry it out.

By lifting the siege, the Serbs would effectively acknowledge that they
have lost the city, many in Saravejo believe. Already, all but a few of
Sarajevo’s suburbs are controlled by Bosnian territorial forces made up
of Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

But if relief supplies do not arrive soon, desperation may turn to
catastrophe. Only a handful of Government services still operate, and
those in skeletal state. No one seems to know how many people remain,
but it appears to be at least half the city’s prewar population of
560,000 — possibly many more. Food and Hope Are Running Low

The Serbian nationalist forces allow no food to pass through their
roadblocks on the periphery of town, and supplies that have been
sneaked past their gun positions on the hills have been minimal. Most
families have only loaves of bread baked by the single bakery that
continues to function, using reserve supplies of flour from silos that
are in a part of town under Mr. Izetbegovic’s control.

To this, some families have added a thin gruel made of water and
nettles taken from the lower slopes of the surrounding hills. With
inventive cooking, and private supplies of flour, Sarajevans produce
the likes of French bread and a sugared Turkish cake called kevlici.

But no one outside the Government knows how long the flour supplies
might hold out, and fear of starvation is widespread. When two Western
reporters entered the city on Friday, one of the first people they
encountered was a professor of biophysics from the medical faculty of
Sarajevo University, Dr. Hamid Pasic.

“I am hungry!” he said. “I am 76 years old, I am a professor, and I am hungry!”

Those who venture out for food do so at great risk. Although some of
the gunnery appears to be aimed at military targets, most of the rounds
land in densely populated parts of the city. The sections of town
taking the worst punishment include the central district and
Bascarsija, an old quarter of mosques, narrow alleyways and
wooden-front workshops and boutiques.

The toll has risen rapidly, particularly this weekend, when the Serbian
gunners began their most merciless barrage. Every minute or two, with
only a few pauses, shells slammed into apartment buildings and the
remnants of commercial districts, each volley hitting with a blast that
could be heard miles away.

At night, the skyline was a facsimile of Baghdad during the gulf war —
with gunners’ flares lighting the high-rises of the city center in
silhouette, and tracer fire skipping across the sky.

From a vantage point in the old town, fires blazed at every point of
the compass, some of them huge conflagrations that burned for hours.
Wisdom and Tears Of a Barkeeper

The number of dead and wounded was another unknown, but gravediggers
were hard pressed to keep up with the new bodies arriving by the hour.

At Kovlaci Park above Bascarsija, 185 new graves, each with a
coffin-shaped wooden marker bearing the Muslim emblems of a star and a
crescent moon, lay row upon row on the hillside. The graves were piles
of freshly turned earth beneath clusters of wild roses, carnations and
violets.

Shells hitting the hillside drove a steam-shovel operator who was
digging the graves into the cover of a ridge abutment. While he took
shelter there, two middle-aged women carrying plastic bags of bread
were hit by a new blast. Both were killed.

For Kemal Aljevic, the 45-year-old owner of a bar in Bascarsija called
Alf, after the American television puppet character, the sight of the
Kovlaci graves was too much. With tears streaming down his cheeks, Mr.
Aljevic said that the Serbian gunners appeared to be repeating the
destruction of Vukovar, the Croatian town of 45,000 that was reduced to
rubble by artillery fire last year.

“This will be three times worse than Vukovar,” he said.

As in Vukovar, the Serbs seem to use the heaviest weapons of the
Yugoslav Army, which formally withdrew from Bosnia and Herzegovina
three weeks ago and turned at least 55,000 men over to a new force of
Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs.

One of two Sarajevo newspapers still being produced, Oslobodenje,
quoted Yugoslav Army officers who had defected to the Bosnians as
saying that weapons being used in the barrage included 155-millimeter
howitzers, 120-millimeter mortars, 104-millimeter tank cannon and
132-millimeter multiple-rocket launchers. The paper said a total of
4,000 tons of high explosives had been fired into the city.

Some of the artillery shells are coming from a former Yugoslav Army
barracks at Hampjesic, 20 miles east of Sarajevo, the officers
reportedly added. Houses of Worship Become Targets

The destruction has reached every quarter of Sarajevo, and almost every
landmark. Fifty of the city’s 80 mosques have been damaged or
destroyed, including the oldest in the Balkans, Tabacki Mesdid, which
dates to 1450. The Morica Han, a 15th-century Turkish inn stop for
caravans, and the Islamic Theological Faculty, also from the 15th
century, were damaged.

The main synagogue and the Roman Catholic cathedral have been hit,
though only lightly damaged. The main broadcasting center and its
transmitter have been repeatedly shelled; repairs at feverish speed
have kept the radio and television stations on the air.

The Serbian nationalists seem to have taken little care to avoid
buildings of historic importance to the ethnic Serbs who live here, 38
percent of the city’s population before the fighting.

One building was extensively damaged by a shell that pierced its glass
dome. It was the National Library, formerly the city hall, where in
1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary attended a reception
minutes before he and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated by a
19-year-old Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip. Half a mile away, at
the site of the assassination, the museum dedicated to Mr. Princip has
now been destroyed.

The main Serbian Orthodox church in the city center has also been extensively damaged.

Sites linked to the 1984 Olympics have come under fire, too. Both
cupolas have been destroyed atop the former United States Consulate
building, a neo-classical structure on a rise above the city center,
which served as the Olympic museum. Its roof was penetrated by a shell,
and all its windows were shattered.

The hospitals are packed with the wounded, many with amputated limbs
from shrapnel blasts. Doctors report an unusually high incidence of
heart attacks and of psychological distress.

With gasoline unavailable, many of the doctors walk miles to work
through streets where every intersection offers clear sightlines to
snipers in the hills. Along the way, hundreds of cars, buses and trams
lie destroyed, many of them burned-out hulks.

A lung specialist who walks back from the Vrazova Health Center every
day spends her nights in a shopping-center storage room in the city’s
old quarter with her husband, a cardiologist.

With them, on mattresses on the floor, are a taxi driver, dentist,
fireman, electrical engineer, waiter and computer scientist, together
with their families — a cross-section of Sarajevo life, pressed
together as they rarely were before the fighting. Amid occasional
tears, there are moments of joy over chess games, crossword puzzles and
surprise meetings with old friends from other parts of town.

“You’re alive!” a professor exclaimed to another who appeared in a
shopping arcade on Saturday night, hugging him tightly for a full
minute as both wept.

On a radio broadcast that was frequently drowned out by exploding
shells, an announcer urged people to turn up the volume on the
station’s Bosnian patriotic songs and Beatles music. “We cannot kill
these maniacs with guns,” he said, “so let’s kill them with love and
music.” Escape Mechanisms: Music and Disbelief

In an apartment nearby, with only a candle burning to deny the gunners
a target, the 16-year-old daughter of a Muslim electrical engineer and
his architect wife, Meliha Dzirlo, lingered at a piano into the small
hours playing Beethoven’s “Pathetique” Sonata and a polonaise by Chopin.

Everywhere, when they were not arranging forays for food or water or
exchanging names of those killed or wounded, people appealed for help
from the outside world. After listening to a shortwave-radio account of
the United Nations plans for relief convoys, Asim Hadzic, a 30-year-old
Muslim who is a food-company salesman, shook his head.

“It would be a good start but it isn’t enough,” he said. “We want military intervention.”

The doctor who walks every day to the Vrazova Clinic, a Muslim who,
fearing for her house, asked not to be identified, took a wider view.

“I can’t believe this is all real,” she said, gesturing toward a pile
of rubble from an apartment building. “Here we are on the eve of the
21st century — in Europe, in a beautiful city and a country that
offered people every possibility of a good life. How can such a thing
happen? And how can a so-called civilized world allow it to continue?”