Fighting has stopped, but Sarajevo still suffers

Many think only of survival as the devastating effects of the war are still felt.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Before Baghdad, there was Sarajevo. Those impatient to know when the war in Iraq will end need to remember this place.
The fighting officially stopped here in 1995, after more than 250,000 deaths. But in many ways, the war lingers. People still distrust one another. Children still stumble into mine fields. Shrapnel and bullet holes mark the fa & ccedil;ades of hundreds of buildings. Unemployment hovers above 50 percent. Economic aid and investment from the international community dwindle each year.
It's bad enough that markets are filled with framed photos of Tito, the president of the former Yugoslavia, as people yearn for the days of a communist dictator, when at least they had food. These days the United Nations runs the country.
Removed from office
Just last week, the top U.N. representative here, Paddy Ashdown, removed 60 Bosnian Serbs from office -- including an interior minister and the speaker of the Parliament -- for failing to arrest the main architects of the war, who are wanted for war crimes, including genocide.
But while the hunt for war criminals attracts headlines and has great symbolic importance, the rebuilding of a nation isn't so easily done in a land where Serbs, Croats and Muslims were at war for their very survival, and still hate one another.
"The international community has forgotten how long it takes to turn war into peace, to unstitch the wounds of war," said Ashdown, whose office window perfectly frames the rocket-scarred hull of Bosnia's old Parliament.
Muminovic Floso knows the difficulties. Muslim and 34 years old, he's rebuilding a mosque that Serbs blew up during the war. He said Serb hard-liners drive by shouting insults and telling him to leave the area, which is deep within what was known as the Republic of Serbia, a large angle-shaped section of Bosnia dominated by Serbs.
Floso was forced to leave in 1994, and he wasn't able to return until two years ago. He started work on the mosque in May.
"We will live next to the Serbs, but we will never trust them again," he said.
Thoughts turn to survival
Still, he said that most days, he didn't have time or energy to dwell on hatred.
"When nobody has a job, there are not many who can stop thinking about survival long enough to think about hate," he said. "We will not forgive, but we have to forget."
Serbs, too, are haunted by the war. Rada Radovic, 35, is rail thin with a single tooth and two twiggy daughters clinging to her legs. She's a single mother, widowed during the war after her husband left their Sarajevo apartment and joined the Bosnian Serbs in bombing his city.
Since then, life has been a series of refugee camps. She's now in her sixth, housed in a mobile home surrounded by the wood she'll need for heat in the winter, on the slopes of a remote mountain valley about an hour from her city.
An Italian peacekeeper lowered his voice as he looked around the refugee camp made up of Serbs.
"No one remembers these people," he said. "They are the mothers, fathers, wives and children of the defeated barbarians. These are the people everyone wants to forget about."
Massacre site
But it isn't easy to forget. Perhaps no place is that felt more deeply than in Srebrenica, site of the worst massacre in the war.
Muslims fled to Srebrenica in July 1995, hoping that Dutch peacekeepers could protect them. Serb troops killed as many as 15,000 in the coming weeks, murdering those who surrendered and tracking down others in the surrounding woods.
Today, a memorial on the edge of town is streaked with freshly turned earth, as every day bodies, or pieces of bodies, are buried, finally identified with the help of DNA evidence.