Rock and Hard Places (9 page)

There are almost certainly other near misses—Grbavica on the day of its handover finally seems like too interesting a thing to pass up, and we figure if we stick to the footpaths and don’t go barging into closed flats and opening cupboard doors, we should be fairly safe from mines and booby traps. Photographer Kennedy and I go to visit the ravaged suburb with Chris Watt of The Serious Road Trip, also visiting Sarajevo for the first time, and Jim Marshall, a Scot who spent most of the siege in Sarajevo with the Road Trip and now works for the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Jim offers to take us to see Grbavica because “I want to see where those fuckers were shooting at me from” (they hit him once, wounding him in one leg).

Grbavica is unbelievably creepy. There isn’t an undamaged building in the suburb, and few blocks lack the scars of fires, some of which have been deliberately lit over the last few weeks by Serbs determined that the Grbavica that they hand back to Bosnia should be of as little value as possible.

These sorts of scenes were supposed to have faded from history along with 1945-vintage newsreel footage of liberated Europe. The buildings all look like they’re waiting for demolition teams to come back from lunch and finish the job. Trenches fortified with rusty hulks
of wrecked cars connect the high-rise ruins. A steady drizzle of clothes, books, furniture and other household flotsam flutters from balconies and windows: the possessions that the departing Serb population didn’t want to carry. Some of this stuff is being flung overboard by people who were evicted from these apartments before the war and are now returning, some of it by opportunists hoping that perhaps the original owners are dead, or refugees, or emigrants, yet more of it by looters. From below, it’s as if the wrecked buildings are vomiting their diseased, hungover innards into the streets.

These blocks of flats were notorious throughout the siege as high-rise Bosnian Serb Army positions—not for nothing did the expanse of trunk road that runs past Grbavica on the other side of the river become internationally infamous as Sniper Alley. As recently as two months ago—which is to say two months after the signing of the Dayton Accords—a rocket-propelled grenade launched from one of these buildings hit a crowded tram, killing one person and wounding several others. We climb up the dark, damp staircases to the top of one of them for a sniper’s-eye view of Sarajevo. Even without a telescopic sight, it’s sickeningly easy to imagine how simple a job it must have been for whoever sat up here with his rifle. I look out over the city, and the people walking around it, through the windows and the holes in the walls that he fired from, and I wonder what he’s doing now.

Grbavica’s principal landmark—there’s about enough of it still standing upright to qualify as such—is its football stadium. Before the war, it was the home ground of Zeljeznicar FC, one of two teams from Sarajevo that used to compete in the Yugoslavian League. This afternoon, it looks like it’s just hosted an especially exuberant Old Firm derby, right down the splintered Celtic FC mirror in what used to be the bar. Scraps of shrapnel litter the terraces and the stands are spotted with bulletholes. On on the concourse behind the burnt-out snack bar, Martin finds a spent Bosnian Serb Army mortar casing.

The pitch is on fire. Half of it, anyway. The blaze has been started by troops from the NATO-led United Nations Implementation Force (IFOR) patrolling Bosnia’s peace. It’s a reasonably risk-free way of clearing any mines that might have been laid in it by thoughtful Serbs as they departed.

“How big a bang will they make if one goes off?” asks Chris, worriedly.

“Not that big,” says Jim. “We’re okay.”

Martin has noticed something infinitely more distressing. At the end of the pitch that isn’t ablaze, the goalposts are still standing, and around those goalposts, some kids are playing football. Martin sprints off towards them, waving his arms and bellowing frantic warnings in strangled, Scots-accented Bosnian. They ignore him.

“That’s the most frightening thing about this city,” says Jim. “It’s full of people who just aren’t scared of anything anymore.”

Outside the stadium, there are more children clowning around in the rubble. These children are, as children will, playing at soldiers, which in these wretched surroundings is both saddening and kind of funny. One of them has found himself an even more impressive souvenir than Martin’s mortar round. This kid is maybe eight or nine years old, and he’s equipped with all the usual kids-playing-war stuff—a yellow toy pistol tucked into his tracksuit bottoms, a black toy rifle in his right hand—but it’s what he’s got slung round his neck that has attracted my attention: a khaki, and very real, rocket-propelled grenade launcher. As any primary-school-age boy would, he looks utterly delighted with it.

My reasons for calling Martin over are not, initially, entirely journalistic: while there’s a hell of a picture waiting to be taken here, Martin also knows more about this kind of hardware than I do, and I’d be happier about life in general if I knew the thing wasn’t loaded.

“No,” says Martin. “We’d have noticed by now. There’d be one less building around here, for a start.”

Martin crouches in front of the kid, whose smile by now is almost wider than his face, prepares to shoot, and lowers his camera.

“Bollocks,” he says, laughing.

Problem?

“It’s too good,” he says. “Do you really think anybody, anywhere, is going to believe I didn’t set this up? I’ll take it, okay, but you have to buy it.”

 

THE VISIT TO Grbavica Stadium reaps an unexpected bonus: back in Trust, I mention it to someone, who mentions it to someone who
knows something about football coaching classes that were run for Sarajevo’s kids throughout the siege, and a few days later I find myself sitting down to lunch with someone who played in a World Cup. Cool. Pedrag Pasic, known as “Paja,” represented Yugoslavia in the 1982 World Cup Finals in Spain. He first made his name as a striker with his hometown club, FK Sarajevo. Later, he moved on to FC Stuttgart, where his partner up front had been Jürgen Klinsmann. He returned to Sarajevo after injury ended his playing career in 1988.

Paja could probably have got out of Sarajevo. He obviously had connections in Germany and, it seems to safe to assume, more money than most. And though these things matter less to most Sarajevans than the outside world has come to believe, Paja is neither ethnically Bosnian nor Muslim, hailing—like Radovan Karadzic—from the nominally Orthodox Christian Yugoslav republic of Montenegro.

“Sarajevo,” Paja shrugs, “is my home.”

Paja’s weekly coaching classes ran under cover in Skenderija Stadium, one of the arenas built for the1984 Winter Olympics—the upper rows of seats have been sandbagged and fortified, and were used during the siege as Bosnian army sniper posts. There’s about a hundred yards of open ground between the entrance to the stadium and the nearest buildings. I ask how on earth the kids had crossed it to get to football practice every week.

“Quickly,” says Paja, and smiles.

Back at Obala, I meet again with C.I.A. Enis does most of the talking, running through what is becoming a familiar list of influences, reasons and ambitions. They liked The Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine and Biohazard. They formed a band because it was a welcome distraction, even if they had to rehearse with acoustic instruments and then wait for a gig at a venue with a generator to see if any of what they’d come up with worked for real. They’d like to go and play outside Bosnia, and see if people will think they’re interesting for any reason other than where they come from. Lazily, I’m beginning to tick the answers off in my head in advance, when Erol, the other vocalist, says something horribly accurate.

“It’s important that people understand what happened here,” he says, quietly. “I don’t think enough people do. But what we want to do is present ourselves to the world and show that we are normal, or
as normal as we can be. I know what people think. People think we’re savages.”

He’s right, of course. The western governments who fiddled while Sarajevo burnt sought to justify their indolence by suggesting that internecine violence was the natural state of the Balkan peoples, as if the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had started of its own accord, as if the overweening ambitions of one murderous barbarian in Belgrade and another bellicose mountebank in Zagreb had nothing to do with it.

Wars are not natural disasters. Nor are they spontaneous occurrences. An operation as vast as the attempted genocide of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina requires planning—planning which could, and should, have been aborted by depositing a cruise missile through the letterbox chez Milosevic. It’s instructive to compare Yugoslavia to another European country which is a federation of linguistically similar but culturally different peoples with centuries of hostile history behind them, and to wonder what the world would think if the government in Westminster armed the English-born population of Wales and sent them on a rampage through the valleys, dealing murder and rape for the crime of being Welsh, and laid siege to Cardiff.

I wonder whether this would look like “the inevitable result of age-old ethnic tensions”—to paraphrase the conventional wisdom on Bosnia—or like there was a dangerous fruitcake in residence in Downing Street. The Irish writer and commentator Conor Cruise O’Brien, who should certainly know better, articulated the prevalent attitude when he wrote in 1992 that “There are places where a lot of men prefer war, and the looting and raping and domineering that go with it, to any sort of peacetime occupation. One such place is Afghanistan. Another is Yugoslavia, after the collapse of the centralising communist regime.” It’d be interesting to learn how he’d feel about that last sentence if the words “Yugoslavia” and “communist” were removed and replaced with “Ireland” and “British.”

The language used to describe the Bosnian war was riddled with perjoratives: the three sides were invariably divided, by media and diplomats alike, into “Serbs,” “Croats” and “Muslims.” It would have been just as accurate, and just as silly, to talk about a conflict between Bosnians, Croats and Christians, or between Serbs, Bosnians and Catholics. It’s hardly surprising that Sarajevans are given to wondering,
bitterly, how long the siege would have been allowed to continue, had it been a nominally Muslim army in the hills blazing away at the citizens of an ostensibly Christian European city.

“Have you heard about our new Bosnian anthem?” someone asks me one night in Obala. “It’s called ‘Too Many Muslims, Not Enough Oil.’”

 

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, I’M walking along Marsala Tita with Faris Arapovic, with whom I’d got talking and drinking the night before at Kuk. Faris, it turned out, is the drummer in one of Sarajevo’s better bands, Sikter. Today, I’ve been round at his family’s flat, where he’s shown me a video of Sikter playing in front of 100,000 people at Milan’s San Siro stadium the previous July. Several Bosnian bands had been invited to appear at the concert, headlined by Italian megastar Vasco Rossi, but only Sikter had been able to make it, as they’d been in Amsterdam at the time, while the other groups were marooned in besieged Sarajevo.

As we walk, I notice a vast column of smoke winding up into the cloudy sky from a couple of miles away in Grbavica, where I’d been the day before. I wonder if there’s some kind of trouble.

“Don’t know,” says Faris.

If there is, Faris has probably seen worse—his family’s flat overlooks the spot where, in August 1992, sixteen people were blown to pieces when two Serb mortars hit a bread queue. If Faris had got up that morning when he’d been supposed to, he’d explained earlier, he’d have been queueing up with them.

“They must be burning rubbish,” he says, squinting towards Grbavica.

Possibly. They were going to have to do something with all that junk that had been tossed out of the windows. But that’s a lot of smoke for a bonfire. We bump into Jim, whose office is across the road.

“Bit of Barney Rubble in Grbavica this afternoon,” he says.

It seems that an attachment of Bosnian Serb Army troops from Vraca, the suburb up the hill from Grbavica, had decided they weren’t going to take the Dayton Agreement lying down. They’d taken a slap at the Bosnian police who were moving into the area, and the Bosnian police had fired back. IFOR, evidently intent on showing both parties
who was in charge, had despatched Apache helicopters, which had clobbered the building occupied by the marauding Serbs. Hence the smoke.

“Well, there you are,” says Faris, triumphantly. “I told you they were burning rubbish.”

 

 

 

A
STORY STRAIGHT OUT of the “What could possibly go wrong?” file, and indeed everything pretty much did, except that it all sort of worked out eventually. And so it should have: it was a good thing that The Prodigy decided to do this. For all that the rock’n’roll tour is mythologised as a devil-may-care bacchanal, it is, in the main, a tediously hidebound ritual, in which, year in and year out, the same bands play the same venues, in the same cities, to the same crowds, get reviewed in the same publications, are asked the same questions on the same radio stations, and wake in the same hotels before being herded aboard the same bus to do it all again at the next stop down the track. This routine, like all routines, is a function of laziness—the reality is that once any band reaches a certain stature, they can play more or less anywhere they like, so long as they’re occasionally willing to take a slightly relaxed attitude to getting insured and/or paid. They also find, when they do make the effort to steer their caravan off the beaten track, that the audiences tend to be much more excited (you don’t even have to go to a picturesquely screwed-up recent war zone to prove this—I grew up in Sydney, and well recall the disproportionate adulation showered upon anybody who deigned to come all that way to play at us). It’s a valuable and important cross-pollination: the band are exposed to new influences, new ways of understanding their own work, and those who come to see them
get to feel like that they are citizens of the pop culture universe, rather than observers squinting through telescopes.