`LEAVE US TO DIE IN PEACE'
left, except to be put out of their misery
Sarajevo THIS IS now a city without water, without food, without oil, without electricity, with- out defence against the guns which daily claim the lives of more of its inhabitants. It is reaching the end of its resistance. Its gov- ernment is weak, divided and ineffectual. Its army scarcely existed until a few domi- nant figures raised a personal following and headed up into the mountains to defend the state. Its people are unwarlike. They want to end the misery, at whatever cost.
I was running from the safety of the hotel, across open ground, heading for the old city. Vera, my translator, was with me. She wanted to check on the condition of the friend of a friend; I just wanted to get away from the claustrophobia of the Holi- day Inn. Somewhere across this field of fire a sniper had been working, half an hour before. We stumbled over the broken glass and the scattered rubbish, and I thought of a pair of cross-hairs and a tightening trig- ger-finger. And then Vera and I had reached dead ground, and we could smile and slow to a walk and behave like every- one else; except that in this street, shielded from sniping by heavy containers laid on their sides, the passers-by were soldiers with guns, women labouring under the weight of plastic cans full of brackish water, and men who sold packets of nettles and spindly carrots for ten deutschmarks each; and no one took any more notice of the crack of a sniper's rifle than you or I might take of the rumble of a heavy lorry along the Cromwell Road.
There have been worse and longer sieges. But there have been none in which the assets and attributes of a modern soci- ety have been so comprehensively destroyed. Yet, just occasionally, civilisa- tion does break out. I spoke to a woman whose neighbours were Serbs. Every now and then her phone would ring — this was in the days when the city still had power and a sheepish voice would ask to speak to the Serbian woman next door. It was the son, who was fighting with the Serbian besiegers on the front line overlooking the city. 'I always used to put him through,' the woman told me. 'They were decent enough people, even though they were Serbs. And we all have to live together, don't we?'
That is not the spirit of ethnic cleansing, of course. Up in the pleasant Alpine valley of Pale, the base from which the Bosnian Serbs are fighting their war, Dr Radovan Karadzic, their leader, corrected me impa- tiently. 'Ethnic cleansing is not the right word. It is ethnic shifting.' Dr Karadzic is a clinical psychiatrist by profession, and he reminded me strongly of all those Afrikan- er academics in Pretoria and Potchef- stroom when I worked in South Africa in the 1970s who would patiently explain to me the benefits of apartheid. Their greatest efforts were taken up by the need to con- vince outsiders that the victims of 'I've just sold your mother.' apartheid were in fact its main beneficia- ries 'These people do not want to live alongside the white man,' said the National Party zealots. 'These people want to be free to establish their own systems in their own way,' said Dr Karadzic, pointing at the map of the Muslim Bantustans he was planning to create; and it seemed to me I'd seen the gleam he had in his eyes, at anoth- er time, in another place.
Just as Dr Karadzic managed to convince himself that the Muslims were positively longing to be dispossessed, so his men too show a remarkable capacity to shield them- selves from what they are actually doing. As we drove back down along the Serbian front-line positions on our way to Sarajevo, we found a range of impenetrable, self-pro- tective excuses among the men whose guns did such execution daily, hourly, in the streets of the city which lay below them. We stopped at a sand-bagged log cabin with a blackly humorous luminous sign that read 'The Cetnik Café', though there were no real Cetniks here now, wild men with tangled beards and the habits of partisans, but ordinary Serbs, indistinguishable from the people you might see every day in Sara- jevo; the kind of men who, embarrassed, might try to ring up and speak to their mothers on the neighbours' phone. Like their leaders, they sheltered behind self- defensive myths as impenetrable as the overturned containers which protected the people of Sarajevo from gunfire positions like this.
Unwilling to recognise themselves as the killers and maimers of children and women and old men, they saw themselves as vic- tims in their turn. They gathered round us, anxious to dispel any doubts we might have about what they were doing there. 'We aren't besieging Sarajevo,' one of them insisted; 'we're just here to protect our Ser- bian villages from those bloody Muslims.' `We never start firing,' said another. 'It's always the Muslims who fire first. They break every cease-fire.' Anyway,' another broke in, 'we don't fire very often. We're just on stand-by here. I haven't fired a gun for maybe ten days.' Near his feet, as he spoke, were the gleaming piles of empty shells from heavy-calibre ammunition: the kind that even at this range could smash a head to fragments.
And now, a few days afterwards, I was wandering through the Old City, with the positions of these soldiers clearly visible over the damaged rooftops, looking with Vera for the house where her friend's friend lived. But we'd got the wrong address. 'We could ask there,' I said, point- ing to a semi-basement in an old, bullet- pocked house. Inside, an old woman sat on the floor, piling up a few logs cut from a small, possibly ornamental tree. Her dirty dress hung open at the neck, and did not hide her veined legs. She was all alone. Soon, with someone to talk to, she was weeping, her mouth open, the tears run- ning down her seamed brown cheeks. 'That you should see me like this,' she wailed. I could see all the food she now had in the world: a little soup in a cup, a bunch of stinging nettles, a small, wizened spring- onion. The only water she had was two inches at the bottom of an old whisky bottle. Ants foraged in a half-cup of sugar.
There had, I felt, been some more per- sonal disaster in the past. The cupboards were full of an old spinster's knicknacks: dolls, a china violinist, shepherdesses, a sentimental picture of Austro-Hungarian royalty. None of her five clocks was work- ing. There was a neat bullet-hole in an ugly tapestry picture of a grinning peasant. 'I'm all alone, you see. I'm an orphan, though now I'm 72. I only have two friends in the whole world: a man who brought me this wood — he's a Serb, but Serbs can be good men too — and a woman who shares her sugar with me.' She flicked a hand distract- edly at the ants, and tears filled her eyes again. 'I can't even wash myself, so even though I'm ill I'm ashamed to go to the doctor. And when the shells go off, I think I'm going to die. I hide in this corner and pray. This isn't living, sir, it's not living. Yet I don't want to complain. There are thou- sands of people in this city who are worse off than me: young people with their limbs missing, they're hungry and they don't have water. What is to happen to us?'
I kissed the old lady's hand and we gave her money and promised to bring her food. All she said was, 'I was once a manager, and now I have become a beggar. That is what this terrible war has done to me. Why can't they end it all now, and leave us to die in peace?'
John Simpson is foreign affairs editor of the BBC.
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