Sunday 21 October 2012

where's the front line?

‘I wish that for just five minutes, that man gets to experience the war..then I’ll ask him.’
Majda was visibly upset. The couple she’d brought to her home-hostel from the bus station had made the drive back an unpleasant one.

He was asking so many questions, she said to me. ‘Is the city (Mostar) still divided? Where’s the Muslim section? Is this the former front line? Are the Muslims and Croats still unhappy with one another?’

Majda told me that together with his questions, the man (who’s apparently a researcher/historian) was reaching conclusions of his own—it’s as if he had come to the city only to prove his own hypotheses about how people were living after the war. For many of us, that’s the easiest thing to do: watch a conflict unravel on TV and decide that that entire country has gone to the dogs, it’s unsafe to go there, people living within its borders are ‘so sad’, we’re so lucky not to be there, etc. And then we switch to a cooking show or something mind-numbing on one of the channels on cable.

Indeed, colleagues who found out I was going to Sarajevo looked at me in horror: that place is a war-torn city, they told me. Never mind the fact that the war took place 20 years ago. But Sarajevo was for me a city to be devoured with wonderment. Its name itself is exotic, and it was here that an assassin got the wheels of the First World War turning.

 I’ve lost count of the number of times people asked me why I’d chosen to visit their city. All the same, they could not hide the fact that they were thrilled to have a visitor, that too from a faraway little place they may not have heard of. And while I answered their queries, I could not help but wonder how this city lived through 44 months of terror, and how it has bounced back.

Much of Sarajevo has been cleaned up and reconstructed: cafes once again fill with people having their daily dose of tea and ćevapi, the streets are filled with Sarajevans going about their routine. Nevertheless, people have their stories to tell about the conflict of the 1990s. Meris recounted how his grandmother cheated death twice when mortars struck the Old Town. The first time round he thought he had lost her; turns out she was hiding in an apartment block not too far away. Across from BBI Centar, the modern steel and glass mall, is a park where a monument commemorates the children who were killed during the war. The green spaces behind the monument are still green, unlike similar spaces in Mostar. The high death toll meant every available space had to be turned into a grave for another family member, another friend. I remember walking through one such park where hundreds lay buried.

When I spoke to Meris over the phone some time after the trip, I asked him if it bothers him that the war is a main draw for tourists to his city. I was, after all, a part of this dark tourism (visiting places associated with tragedy and/or death). Not at all, he said. In fact, Meris was pleased that people are returning to his city. There’s more to Sarajevo than the war of the 1990s, and tourists need to know that we’re a people who want to move past that episode, he said. At the same time, it is imperative that people learn of the causes of the war and learn from those mistakes.

Still, while some of us have decoupled Sarajevo from the war, others will find it difficult to do so. I suppose some people who live there, and in fact in other parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina, will continue to negotiate with their memories. The people I met during my trip to the region acknowledge that all sides suffered, no thanks to greedy politicians. Yet some are uncomfortable with the thought of repairing broken relationships. For some, the perceived Other is really not that different after all. Yet there are those who still think that in their midst live people who continue to remain a source of worry: they threatened our way of living before, they might do it again.  

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