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Once Upon a Time<br />
in Sarajevo<br />
The diary of the peace initiative to Sarajevo<br />
25th October to 3rd December <strong>1995</strong>
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Contents<br />
Introduction to Sarajevo<br />
Historical Background to the Seige<br />
of Sarajevo 1992-1996<br />
Synopsis of the Journey of the<br />
<strong>Peace</strong> <strong>Project</strong> to Sarajevo in <strong>1995</strong><br />
Cast of Characters of Once Upon<br />
a Time In Sarajevo<br />
The Diary of Dominic Ryan: The<br />
Journal of Sarajevo 26th October<br />
to 3rd December <strong>1995</strong>
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Introduction to Sarajevo<br />
Ideas are like children that take time and<br />
patience to be born, grow and develop. So with<br />
the idea of bringing a humanitarian painting and<br />
its message to Russia, it took a long time before<br />
that idea bore fruit. I had to be patient to see<br />
a whole series of stages complete themselves.<br />
Sometimes destiny is kind in its cruelty. Without<br />
these postponements in Moscow I would never<br />
have met Darja and I definitely would never have<br />
been inspired to step into the chaos, brutality and<br />
numbing suffering of a war zone. The very act of<br />
such events conspiring against me in Moscow had<br />
propelled me into a new and unknown career.<br />
Had everything gone to plan, if the exhibition had<br />
gone ahead as planned, I would have immediately<br />
returned to Australia and continued my life as an<br />
artist. But experiencing these postponements in<br />
Moscow helped me to understand that what I should<br />
do next was to bring with Darja a symbol into a war<br />
zone—an area that was similar to the landscape<br />
of the painting. Out of the Moscow exhibition,<br />
I understood clearly that what I was doing was<br />
smuggling an artwork and a message into a war<br />
zone.<br />
After Michelle and I were rendered homeless<br />
in Moscow, after I had met Darja, the next step<br />
was a natural one. I had a strong desire to attempt<br />
this time to bring the message of the mural into<br />
a new but hostile environment and let it speak to<br />
people. The direction that I had taken began to<br />
alter. Sometimes when we set out on a path and<br />
the direction of this path veers a couple of degrees;<br />
the more we walk upon this path, the greater that<br />
angle becomes. So what begins as a mere couple of<br />
degrees over time veers far away from our original<br />
point of departure.<br />
When I returned to Australia, life continued on<br />
in a muted fashion. I had rented a small pink wooden<br />
double-fronted house in Collingwood, an industrial<br />
suburb in the centre of Melbourne. Michelle, my<br />
Australian girlfriend from Moscow, was again<br />
living with me, having returned from Queensland.<br />
During this time over eight months I continued to<br />
correspond with Darja. The plan that we would go to<br />
Sarajevo was slowly mulled over in our minds. I went<br />
to see Tahir Gambis, an Australian-Bosnian actor,<br />
who was contemplating travelling to Bosnia before<br />
me, and who was hoping to make a film about the<br />
siege in Sarajevo.<br />
The mission for Darja as my guide and assistant<br />
and I, was to smuggle a humanitarian billboard,<br />
the image of the Millennium into Sarajevo, The<br />
message I wanted to incorporate with the billboard<br />
image was ‘We Have All Suffered Enough’. I went<br />
to a company called Colour Graphics in Australia<br />
and we created this forty-eight foot by fifteen-foot<br />
image which was printed on a plasticised tarpaulin.<br />
I rented a Hi-8 camera, and a couple of bolts and<br />
screw drivers. I contacted various embassies<br />
and after research and financial support I flew<br />
to Slovenia where I rendez-voused with Darja in<br />
Ljubljana. From there we travelled to her family’s<br />
house in Maribor before deciding to enter Sarajevo.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Historical Background To The Seige Of Sarajevo 1992-1996<br />
Yugoslavia began to disintegrate following the<br />
collapse of Communist regimes in other parts of<br />
Eastern Europe in 1989. In June 1991, the state of<br />
Slovenia declared its independence, closely followed<br />
by Croatia.<br />
Despite opposition from other member states in<br />
the European Union, Germany recognised Slovenia<br />
and Croatia in December 1991. Other EU countries<br />
followed. This had immense consequences: it left<br />
Yugoslavia as a Serbian-dominated rump state.<br />
This was intolerable for Muslims in Bosnia, who<br />
had lived amicably with Serbs and Croats in Bosnia<br />
for 40 years, and whose ideal was a multinational<br />
Yugoslavia, but who now faced being a vulnerable<br />
minority in a state ruled by Serb nationalists.<br />
A referendum on Bosnian independence was<br />
held in February 1992. The Bosnian Serbs boycotted<br />
it, because they did not want to be separated<br />
from their brethren in Serbia. Since the Muslims<br />
(44%) and Croats (17%) made up a majority of<br />
Bosnia’s population, the referendum produced an<br />
overwhelming vote for independence.<br />
In April 1992, the EU and US recognised the<br />
new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina. War broke out<br />
immediately, but the Serb-controlled army had<br />
confiscated the weapons of its territorial defence<br />
forces. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims were<br />
swept from their homes, especially along the Drina<br />
valley in the east of the country.<br />
During the next four years Bosnia would be torn<br />
by the bloodiest and most ruthless European conflict<br />
since the Second World War. The capital, Sarajevo,<br />
was the focus of an epic siege in which 12,000<br />
people were killed, including 1,600 children.<br />
The siege of Sarajevo began with Serbs raining<br />
shells on the city from hilltop positions.<br />
In August 1992, evidence emerged of Muslims<br />
in northern Bosnia being herded into concentration<br />
camps. These TV images led to the creation of a UN<br />
War Crimes Tribunal, now sitting in The Hague (the<br />
first international war crimes trial since Nuremberg).<br />
At the same time, the largest refugee movement<br />
in Europe since the Second World War began as<br />
Muslims fled to Croatia and other parts of Europe.<br />
‘That summer of 1992, only months after the<br />
Bosnian war erupted, was the darkest period in<br />
Europe since the Holocaust. In an orgy of murder,<br />
rape, detention, and eviction, the Serbs put<br />
hundreds of thousands of dispossessed Muslims to<br />
flight and seized their ancestral lands.’ Ian Traynor,<br />
The Guardian, 22 December 1994.<br />
By 1993 Serbs controlled almost two-thirds of<br />
Bosnia, while Croats had taken over nearly onethird.<br />
Evidence of massive human rights atrocities<br />
were discovered, including the raping of thousands<br />
of Muslim women and ‘ethnic cleansing’ actions by<br />
Serbs, especially in eastern Bosnia. In May 1993, the<br />
United Nations designated six UN-protected ‘safe<br />
areas’ in Bosnia. These were all areas that had been<br />
under siege by the Bosnian Serbs for some time and<br />
where Muslims were under threat: Sarajevo, Tuzla,<br />
Bihac, and three small enclaves in eastern Bosnia<br />
(Srebrenica, Gorazde, Zepa). UNPROFOR (UN<br />
Protection Force) soldiers provided limited military<br />
protection and humanitarian aid.<br />
In July <strong>1995</strong>, Serb forces launched attacks on the<br />
UN safe areas in eastern Bosnia, forcing thousands<br />
of Muslims from their homes in Srebrenica and<br />
Zepa, and ‘ethnically cleansing’ areas that had been<br />
Muslim for generations. The men were driven out<br />
of the ‘safe havens’—as the UN forces watched—to<br />
mass execution sites in the countryside around.<br />
In August <strong>1995</strong> shells launched from Serb<br />
positions in the surrounding hills landed in a<br />
marketplace in Sarajevo killing 85 people. NATO<br />
finally launched massive air strikes against Bosnian<br />
Serb positions.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
The Siege of Sarajevo<br />
26th October to 3rd December <strong>1995</strong><br />
In which the artist Dominic Ryan after returning to Australia meets again the<br />
Slovenian journalist, Darja Lebar. They decide to enter Sarajevo towards the end of the siege in<br />
october <strong>1995</strong> smuggling a humanitarian billboard carrying a message - we have all suffered<br />
enough into the city. After being temporarily arrested on the grounds of spying for the Serbians<br />
by inadvertently taking photos in a sensitive military area, with the help of the UNPROFOR<br />
French 4th battalion the two along with the French battalion erect the billboard in the destroyed<br />
House of Youth. Ryan is subsequently awarded the Liberty Prize for Human Rights in the EU. He<br />
returns to Australia. Forming a small voluntary group of friends who decide to continue to focus<br />
on conflict resolution in zones of war.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Cast of Characters:<br />
Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
DARJA LEBAR<br />
FUAD HADJHALOVIC<br />
DR JURASLAF KELLER<br />
OMER DELIC<br />
FATIMA DELIC<br />
BRANKO SERKOVIC<br />
ZOLKA or ZORAN<br />
MIRZA<br />
IGOR CAMO<br />
ALMIR VRPOIC<br />
ZJELKO<br />
NEVAN<br />
ENDIA<br />
RADGOVIC<br />
TAHIR GAMBIS<br />
ALMA SAHBAZ<br />
DAVID BALHAM<br />
DEBORAH<br />
SERGEANT MARCO ROYER<br />
CAPITAINE OLIVIER DEMENY<br />
Slovenian journalist and associate and guide for Dominic Ryan, Darja’s<br />
boyfriend, Ivo Standeker, died on June 17, 1992 in Sarajevo. Tanks and<br />
mortar shells from a Serbian position in Sarajevo injured Standeker,<br />
a journalist with the Slovenian magazine Mladina. Darja was a also<br />
wounded by sniper fire in Snipers’ alley<br />
Director of Gallery, ‘Collegium Artisticum’, Sarajevo<br />
Honorary Consul of Australia in Zagreb Croatia<br />
landlord of Dominic Ryan while sojourning in Sarajevo.<br />
Former Yugoslav Airline pilot<br />
wife of Omer Delic<br />
friend of Darja Lebar<br />
39-year-old photographer with magazine, SfeboneBosna<br />
ISCON Hare Krishna representative from Sarajevo<br />
composer of music for peace installation<br />
friend of Darja Lebar who subsequently became her husband<br />
friend of Almir<br />
tour guide and former paramilitary commander<br />
secretary at the Obala Centre for Art, Sarajevo<br />
musician, flautist and friend of Dominic Ryan<br />
cinematographer, human rights activist, who was making film Exile In<br />
Sarajevo at the time of ryan’s exhibition<br />
cinematographer and subsequently co-director on Exile In Sarajevo<br />
UNPROFOR radio and Public Relations Officer, Sarajevo<br />
Public Relations Officer at UNPROFOR<br />
UNPROFOR, Skenderija, French 4th battalion<br />
Public Information Officer, UNPROFOR, Skenderija, French 4th battalion
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
The Diary of Dominic Ryan: The Journal of Sarajevo<br />
26th October to 3rd December <strong>1995</strong><br />
The end is easy because a new<br />
chapter has just begun. After three years of siege<br />
the war in the Balkans has nearly ended. When it<br />
does end there will come an end to the countless<br />
slaughter of human beings. How I begin is perhaps<br />
more difficult. I did not come here to write this<br />
diary and I am not a journalist. I did not come here<br />
to make blood money, be a danger safari tourist or<br />
drink from the cup of destruction. But rather the<br />
Director of ‘Collegium Artisticum’, Fuad Hadjhalovic,<br />
who I had met in the Bosnian Embassy in Ljubljana<br />
had invited me to participate in the Winter Festival<br />
of Sarajevo.<br />
It is hard to trace the cause and origin of an<br />
event. We can return in our memories further<br />
into the past but always there is one point when a<br />
moment becomes destiny. That moment was the<br />
moment of the autumn of 1993 in Moscow, Russia. It<br />
was Perestroika, when Communism had fallen to be<br />
replaced by a rampant anarchy.<br />
I had moved to Moscow at the invitation of the<br />
Russian Federation of <strong>Peace</strong> and Conciliation with a<br />
large mural called Millennium.<br />
After my girlfriend Michelle and I had had<br />
our apartment guttered in a sudden blaze in the<br />
outskirts of industrial Moscow and our belongings<br />
left in charred ruins we were temporarily homeless.<br />
A chance meeting in a nightclub ‘Sexton Fondz’<br />
brought a journalist into our life. Her name was<br />
Darja Labar who was recuperating in Moscow that<br />
spring. Darja was a Slovenian journalist who had<br />
been wounded by a sniper in 1993 in the besieged<br />
city of Sarajevo. She had subsequently spent three<br />
months in a coma recuperating in the five-star Mayo<br />
Clinic in Minnesota USA.<br />
We had decided together to design a billboard<br />
based on my art. The text would read, ‘We have all<br />
suffered enough’. The next phase would be to bring<br />
this message into a city under siege. I realised that<br />
this mission was not only to communicate through<br />
art but also to reach out and to give innocent people<br />
who were suffering, the innocent victims of war, a<br />
voice to speak through global media.<br />
Sometimes when I am inside an event I never<br />
realise quite the import or exciting nature of what<br />
is around me. Surrounded by events that seem to<br />
be ultra-normal they are actually extraordinary.<br />
Therefore even before they were to occur I realised<br />
that they needed to be recorded for others to share<br />
our journey.<br />
Thursday, 26th October, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Ljubljana, Slovenia<br />
So I am sitting half on the chair half on the<br />
billboard in a dimly lit brasserie in Ljubljana on<br />
a high backed cane chair. It is called ‘Rum and<br />
Cola’ and I have just arrived, exhausted, waiting
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
It is a quietness that I can’t quite put my finger on and perhaps<br />
is the proverbial calm before the raging storm. Darja looks as if<br />
she has grown with the years since I last saw her in Moscow—<br />
for the onset of jet lag like an aerial flu. Darja has<br />
only recently picked me up from the Ljubljana<br />
airport. 4.23 pm downtown temperature 8 degrees<br />
centigrade in the shade and I’m thinking this coat<br />
with its faux leather is ridiculous… It is a sombre,<br />
smoked and choked zero day, and the bustling life in<br />
the streets of this provincial Slovenian town seems<br />
as if it has been plucked out of a 1950s postcard<br />
and re-animated…. There’s a meandering river that<br />
slithers snake-like through the city centre, and<br />
suddenly it occurred that this is a Second Paris, but<br />
only Paris when it was back in the 1950s—tranquil,<br />
serene and effervescent.<br />
Boulevards of pedigree trees along shady<br />
riverbanks, sidewalk cafés and chic restaurants.<br />
There is quietness and stillness in the air. The<br />
pedestrians seem to move as if they have this<br />
stiffness in their legs.<br />
It is a quietness that I can’t quite put my finger<br />
on and perhaps is the proverbial calm before the<br />
raging storm. Darja looks as if she has grown with<br />
the years since I last saw her in Moscow—9 months<br />
ago exactly. A handsome strong women in her late<br />
twenties, with chestnut brown bobbed hair cut at<br />
the shoulders, a double breasted military leather<br />
style jacket, dark glasses and a generous slash of<br />
bright vermilion lipstick. Her bobbed hair is always<br />
cut in such a way that the bullet scars beneath her<br />
left eye are hidden.<br />
I had first encountered Darja Lebar in Moscow<br />
eighteen months prior with my Australian girlfriend<br />
Michelle in a first floor night club ‘Noche Noi Klub’<br />
deep in the heart of Moscow suburbia—a heavy<br />
metal nightclub, ‘Sexton Fonda’ with a rusted<br />
chicken wire cage to protect the band from the<br />
drunken audience throwing broken “Piva” bottles.<br />
Darja was originally a friend of Michelle’s at that time<br />
but after a succession of events catapulted the three<br />
of us into being together and, in some ways, I felt<br />
that a mysterious series of external circumstances<br />
were guiding us towards a new and ultimately better<br />
destiny. Every person I believe has a destiny or<br />
multiple destinies and my destiny with Darja is just<br />
one of those threads. It is not coincidence, it is not<br />
chance but an extraordinary fusion of fate with luck.<br />
Darja had been a reporter for the Slovenian<br />
journal Republika. Tanks and mortar shells from a<br />
Serbian position in Sarajevo killed Standeker, her<br />
boyfriend at the time, a journalist with the Slovenian<br />
magazine Mladina. Darja was also wounded by<br />
sniper fire in Snipers’ Alley three months later while<br />
covering the Sarajevo siege at its beginning while in<br />
the passenger seat of a taxi. A hollow point bullet<br />
had penetrated her cheekbone, narrowly missed her<br />
left eye and had moved down past her jaw shattering<br />
the jaw and the facial structure until it lodged itself<br />
at the base of her neck. Small fragments of shrapnel<br />
remained, undetected, lodged in her brain, which<br />
subsequently induced limited epileptic seizures.<br />
She had spent three months in a coma in the Mayo<br />
Clinic, a private clinic in Minnesota. When we met<br />
in Moscow she had only recently been released from<br />
the clinic to recuperate.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Darja is and was a remarkable woman—strong<br />
and almost military-like in a way that she walked<br />
and strode. She always wore one doubled breasted<br />
leather jacket covered in a patina of age. I think<br />
it had been bought in Moscow at one of those flea<br />
markets… Always burgundy trousers, never dresses<br />
and rarely makeup. Except today with that splash of<br />
lipstick… Our relationship is friend and colleague,<br />
but sometimes I feel it could be more, and she is<br />
here in Ljubljana now to assist me.<br />
As I look out across the square with its Parislike<br />
condiment, and the babbling of the River<br />
Ljubljana my mind keeps going back to Moscow<br />
… Even before this is to begin … how did I meet<br />
this women? where did it all begin…? I tell myself<br />
to trace it back<br />
Dominic, and<br />
maybe I can<br />
understand what<br />
model the future<br />
is going to present<br />
the two of us…<br />
In a Moscow of<br />
inflation, gangsters<br />
and a filthy metro,<br />
Michelle and my<br />
one bedroom<br />
apartment on the<br />
outskirts of the city had been burnt down.<br />
Guttered and divested of our possessions we<br />
were homeless… It was on my birthday, May 21,<br />
and the apartment was at the end of the metro<br />
line… Pragueshka, is the Metro zone at the end of<br />
the line in Moscow (in all senses I can assure this<br />
diary). It was a miniature cat-urine-smelling one<br />
bedroom apartment which felt like half-life cancer<br />
living there; I don’t know why. After returning from<br />
a celebratory birthday picnic at 4 in the afternoon,<br />
we discovered the apartment was obliterated by<br />
fire. Two wooden sticks of wood hammered as a<br />
cross had been nailed across the front door after the<br />
fire brigade had left. Seriosha, my mafia friend, had<br />
looked across at me, paused and then grinned from<br />
ear to ear and declared, ‘Happy Birthday, Dominic!’<br />
Destitute with nowhere to go, our first option was<br />
to billet at our friend’s, the Red Soviet artist, Pasha,<br />
studio. A cold water flat on the other side of Moscow<br />
at Filiovsky Park, he tolerated us for about three<br />
days, two hours and twelve seconds but, because he<br />
had to work at the studio, we were soon back in the<br />
spring cold, friendless and searching for new digs.<br />
But Darja, Michelle’s friend who was living with<br />
a Brazilian interior decorator at the time, soon<br />
befriended us, suggesting: ‘Come and stay with me.’<br />
We happily agreed.<br />
My memories of that time are of a chaotic<br />
Moscow, mud in the streets, pukh, a kind of blossom<br />
in the air, a clear fresh spring when we always<br />
played Sade’s ‘No Ordinary Love’. And here we<br />
lazed by the windowsills. Whenever I hear that song<br />
replayed, like Proust’s Madeleine, I spontaneously<br />
return to the nostalgic era when Darja, her Brazilian<br />
boyfriend, Michelle and I were sprawled in that<br />
apartment in the spring of 1994.<br />
We became as close as two couples can. But<br />
Darja had soon had her first epileptic seizure one<br />
evening when we were watching a Russian RTN<br />
television programme and I was visiting a friend in<br />
the street—Michelle saved her life, telephoning the<br />
ambulance and taking her to the ZILL hospital in the<br />
black of night. I was proud of Michelle that night.<br />
It was a strange, even curious time of endless<br />
departures and arrivals. After our sojourn with<br />
Darja we renovated the burnt-out flat and sadly<br />
returned there while Darja remained in Moscow.<br />
We eventually lost contact like a thread stretching<br />
until it broke. Six months later Michelle returned<br />
to Australia and, alone, trudging the weary<br />
Moscow boulevards one day in November 1994,<br />
I unexpectedly bumped into Darja in that same<br />
leather jacket on Novi Arbhat... We began talking<br />
effusively… We met two days later over espresso<br />
coffee and discussed the possibilities of taking a<br />
billboard—a facsimile of the painting Millennium<br />
and a humanitarian message—into Sarajevo. She<br />
thought it a<br />
good idea. It was<br />
inspiring and<br />
something we<br />
both felt we could<br />
achieve together.<br />
As I pen these<br />
memories a welltrained<br />
waiter<br />
has just bumped<br />
into me and my<br />
reverie is awoken.<br />
Yes, Darja is the<br />
catalyst for this journey. Even though my mind is<br />
focussed on Sarajevo as a gaol, it has arisen out of<br />
instinct and desire. But Darja gives me the strength<br />
and understanding that it is possible. The only<br />
person who knows the terrain, she can give me an<br />
added understanding of the geography, hurdles and<br />
challenges we are to encounter on the way. She<br />
speaks the language, and will be my guide, translator<br />
and mentor.<br />
Sunday, 29th October, <strong>1995</strong>, Slovenia<br />
We spend the today travelling to her family<br />
home which lies in some forested hills on the border<br />
with Austria, just outside Maribor. It is a small<br />
country house plucked irreverently out of a fairy
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
tale…I keeping I thinking the Brothers Grim or<br />
Goldie Locks is going to skip down the slate path<br />
towards me… The house, where she lives with her<br />
aged wrinkled parents, her two brothers and their<br />
children live, has been recently rebuilt after being<br />
burnt down. This abode is serene and tucked away.<br />
We occasionally listen to the radio and the news<br />
to monitor what is happening in Sarajevo. We have<br />
rung on a few occasions the UNPROFOR in Zagreb<br />
to discover if conditions on the ground are hostile or<br />
not. Currently there is a limited cease-fire between<br />
the Bosnian Serbs and the Muslims, which may<br />
allow us to safely travel across the demilitarised<br />
zone (DMZ) to reach the city of Sarajevo.<br />
A news report has flashed across CNN today,<br />
which is good. It reads:<br />
(CNN) -- The United Nations hopes opening<br />
the main road into Sarajevo will help life return<br />
to normal in Bosnia. Sunday, civilian buses,<br />
escorted by peacekeepers, made the first trip out<br />
of Sarajevo through Serb territory in more than<br />
three years. Only a fearless few turned up for the<br />
test ride.<br />
“I’m nervous. A little tense,” said one young<br />
woman, Emina.<br />
There were a dozen passengers and a<br />
dozen U.N. escort vehicles. Security was tight.<br />
Everyone was searched before boarding, and<br />
U.N. soldiers checked their strategy one last time<br />
before they left along the main road, straight<br />
through the Serb checkpoint.<br />
Darja’s idea is that we should visit the Embassy<br />
of Bosnia-Herzegovina tomorrow, which has<br />
been recently established in Ljubljana and sits in<br />
the southern sector of the city of Ljubljana. We<br />
also hope to travel there to be interviewed by<br />
the director of a gallery in Sarajevo, ‘Collegium<br />
Artisticum’ to see whether the gallery might be<br />
interested in exhibiting the billboard.<br />
Monday, 30th October, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Ljubljana, Slovenia<br />
Bosnia-Herzegovina is now a new but separate<br />
nation-state with its representatives burrowed<br />
officiously here in this makeshift office Embassy<br />
in Ljubljana with bureaucrats zig-zagging across<br />
corridors holding sheaves of paper. The half light<br />
of the twisted shadows of the gnarled oak tree<br />
branches cast looming figures as oblique diagonals<br />
across the wide ebony desk in the Embassy Bosnia-<br />
Herzegovina as I rolled out the small image of the<br />
billboard to show the director of a museum in<br />
Sarajevo, Fuad Hadjhalovic. The Director of the
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
‘Collegium Artisticum’ is a round-faced fatherly man, with big glinting eyes that are kind, and embracing. It<br />
is wonderful when someone can be inspired by a message that you bring. It is not something that they see in<br />
terms of financial gain or economic viability. It is just simply the spirit of a message and they are taken up by<br />
that wave and they wish to surf it.<br />
In this era such events are so rare and I honour the people who can balance both the economics of their<br />
lives with courage and the pursuit of truth, justice, and love of the good.<br />
He is a thickset, burly man aged around of 55, but his appearance seems closer to the late sixties after the<br />
effects of a three-year siege and malnourishment—still ongoing in his hometown. Our spontaneous meeting<br />
as the result of a chance encounter with a mutual friend of Darja in the boulevard seemed fortuitous. Our<br />
meeting has occurred today at 3.36pm in the Bosnian Embassy in Ljubljana. Fuad likes the project immensely<br />
and with his bearish grin beams across the room at me. A smile is language enough that the project has been<br />
accepted. I manage to spread out the rolled up laminated image that is 20 centimetres across, as well as letters<br />
of introduction, as I explain the idea of bringing the forty-two by eleven foot image of war and peace entitled<br />
Millennium to Sarajevo. The words across it say: ‘We Have All Suffered Enough’.<br />
Also texts are in Serbo-Croatian, Bosnian and Russian.<br />
The director said: ‘Yes, Dominic, I like it, it appeals to my sensibilities, but my only concern is that words in<br />
Croatian and Serbian have to be excluded.’<br />
I am at a loss but this is one condition that I realise has to be accepted. My dilemma is whether nothing is<br />
to be done or something? My original concept is to bring the humanitarian message into the middle of the DMZ<br />
between the two sides, the Serbians and Bosnians. But what the people at the Embassy are saying now is: ‘No.’<br />
I realise they don’t want it there. It must come from their side and this is their message. As Fuad says: ‘We are<br />
the ones who have suffered enough.’ We left the meeting and now we must decide.<br />
In light of what is currently happening I agree but again I keep musing to myself—‘the message is neutral<br />
and its purpose is served by speaking to both sides.’ It is something akin to a neutral Red Cross message—<br />
humanitarian and speaks for the innocent on both sides of this conflict. But when people have suffered and
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
I can see below me not only the old<br />
and new city and the dappled almost<br />
medieval rooftops of Old Ljubljana and<br />
its surroundings, but also the moody<br />
marsh of Barje, and closer the green<br />
park Tivoli but also the Kamnik Alps in<br />
the north.<br />
have suffered at the hands of others they feel that<br />
they are the only victims (and in a sense they are<br />
predominately the victims even though acts have<br />
been perpetrated on Serbs), and the perspective<br />
is from that wound inside. Often it is a question of<br />
degree and sometimes injustice exists predominately<br />
on one side more than the other. So this is the<br />
dilemma I must face—either I present nothing or a<br />
slightly lopsided message. I must decide and yet I<br />
am pausing undecided as to what I must do.<br />
After a few hours here looking as a tourist from<br />
the Castle at the centre of the city I cast my eyes<br />
across the horizon thinking. The Castle, which<br />
is about a thousand years old, has been under<br />
reconstruction for quite a few years now, I can see<br />
below me not only the old and new city and the<br />
dappled almost medieval rooftops of Old Ljubljana<br />
and its surroundings, but also the moody marsh of<br />
Barje, and closer the green park Tivoli but also the<br />
Kamnik Alps in the north.<br />
Making my decision, I choose the latter,<br />
otherwise I must return with zilch. I will adjust the<br />
translations. Is it a compromise? Or a sell-out? I am<br />
not certain.<br />
And so, we, Darja and I mindlessly return to<br />
Maribor, another two and a half hours on the train<br />
with the locomotive’s rhythmic pulse rocking us into<br />
a Clockwork Orange reverie, while we brood, silent<br />
in our own separate worlds… This evening is serene;<br />
the high ravines topple past us on the train as the<br />
treacle golden sun is setting. After our arrival in<br />
Maribor as it is getting dark we roll out the billboard<br />
across the wet snow laden bitumen of the drive of<br />
her parents house across the garden patio …the<br />
dog sniffing it…maybe odours of Australia trapped<br />
in its creases. Racing with the fading light, using jet<br />
black paint I replace the Serbo-Croatian words with<br />
sticky white Letra-set images that keep being blown<br />
by the wind and those white Letra-set images simply<br />
say: ‘This is an image to the futility of war and its<br />
inability to solve the problems of humanity’.<br />
1st–4th November, <strong>1995</strong>, Maribor,<br />
Slovenia<br />
We spend a couple of days in the city of Maribor<br />
collecting fragments of white Letra-set, trying to<br />
arrange, like a jigsaw, all the letters correctly and<br />
laying it out in the sunshine, snatching moments<br />
when there is no rain or snow. Winter is encroaching<br />
and we have to be fast. I can feel it in my bones…<br />
The city of Maribor in the north of Slovenia is<br />
provincial and old world. The guidebook says that<br />
it is considered to be a cheerful, friendly city. Some<br />
relate this pleasant situation to its extensive winegrowing<br />
regions that routinely invite visits from<br />
Maribor residents. These vineyards are part of the<br />
natural beauty of the city, along with the Pohorje<br />
forests, the valley of the Drava river, the Kozjak<br />
and the Kobansko ravines, or the Slovenske Gorice<br />
hills and fields at the southeast of the city. But for<br />
me I can only feel the wind and sleet and my mind
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
is focussed on another city—Sarajevo where there<br />
are no guidebooks or tourists or souvenirs…the only<br />
souvenirs we will return with our memories and<br />
perhaps this diary.<br />
Each day, we religiously ring the United Nations<br />
and UNPROFOR in Zagreb for news and information<br />
on flights for incoming and outgoing personnel, but<br />
all the flights are booked out. There is no room for<br />
a grubby hippie-artist with long hair or a wounded<br />
Slovenian journalist. We are priority seven. Priority<br />
one is refugees and UN personnel. We are trying to<br />
get places in an airlift that will lift us into Sarajevo<br />
but it seems as if there are no possibilities. We are<br />
continuously hitting a brick wall. Bureaucratically<br />
they, the voices on the other end of the telephone,<br />
are polite and distant, but unhelpful.<br />
We are playing a waiting game, and the game<br />
is—we are waiting to go. Not knowing what to do we<br />
travel to a small town on the border of Austria, to kill<br />
time where Darja buys woollen jumpers while I am<br />
carrying my video camera, which I have rented.<br />
Sunday, 5th of November <strong>1995</strong><br />
The time is the time to rest… a meandering<br />
and sedate period…and leisurely visit to some<br />
lakes in the south of Slovenia…. Darja’s girlfriend<br />
who accompanies us seems like she has a feminist<br />
streak…even lesbian. Some of my best friends are,<br />
so it’s no insult but only a gentle observation. Her<br />
friends from the past are no exception. We drive<br />
with Darja with her friend to Lake Bohinj, twentyfour<br />
km south west of Bled. All her friends are<br />
strong, masculine women, not necessary lesbian,<br />
although Darja did recount to me a funny story<br />
about this woman who was absolutely infatuated<br />
by her. The woman was an American journalist<br />
stationed in Moscow in 1994. The two of them<br />
used to have these pretend romances and even<br />
orchestrated a mock wedding at her apartment,<br />
at which point they were going to really take the<br />
plunge as they say and get legally married. Darja<br />
towards the end of the finale of this clandestine<br />
pantomime backpedalled and said: ‘No!’<br />
Cold feet or a lack of enthusiasm. I recollect the<br />
budding bride was called Janet. Janet in any case<br />
was beside herself.<br />
At this point when Darja cancelled the wedding,<br />
she was due to return immediately to Slovenia.<br />
After boarding the plane at Shevimetizvo airport<br />
in Moscow the plane failed to take off. It was<br />
not allowed off the tarmac. The passengers sat<br />
dumbfounded for one hour and seemingly hostage to<br />
some security breach… a terrorist… a flu epidemic<br />
or an embargo? Darja was sitting in the aft end of<br />
plane when two sun glassed military personnel<br />
We are playing a waiting game, and the game is<br />
— we are waiting to go.<br />
strode on board. They declared to Darja ‘ There<br />
is someone outside waiting for you. We have been<br />
informed that it is a matter of life or death’<br />
Darja replied ‘What?’<br />
They said: ‘Can you please come with us?’<br />
She gets up. With all the other passengers<br />
staring blankly at her, there is Janet waiting at the<br />
steps of the plane pretending that she has an urgent<br />
life saving medicine that Darja had failed to take,<br />
and that without it, Darja would die.<br />
Darja looked at her: ‘What are you doing here?’<br />
Janet blushes coyly: ‘I just wanted to see you<br />
this one last time and this is the only way I could do<br />
it to say goodbye.’<br />
‘Great, okay, goodbye.’<br />
Darja had given Janet her telephone number and<br />
address in Ljubljana as she had an apartment there.<br />
Three weeks after Darja’s arrival in Ljubljana Janet<br />
appears at the front door. ‘Darja, its me. I‘m here’<br />
Again Darja was learning to exercise the word:<br />
‘Great’.<br />
Although she was a good host and Janet a great<br />
guest, a week later her uninvited guest had to leave<br />
unexpectedly. Janet was pregnant to an American<br />
she had slept with on a one night stand in Moscow.<br />
She decided over the toss of a coin to keep the child<br />
and return back to America. Darja’s obsessed fan<br />
disappeared overnight.<br />
Monday, 6th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Maribor, Zagreb<br />
Three days after our excursion to the Austrian<br />
border, the next journey will be spent by train<br />
travelling to Zagreb from Maribor. Zagreb will be<br />
an entirely different city. Compared with Zagreb in
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Croatia, Slovenia has a tucked-away Swiss Toblerone<br />
chocolate feeling—a miniature country with hard<br />
working industrious people in track suits. But what<br />
it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in hard work.<br />
An uneventful day filled with scribbled shopping<br />
lists written in smudged biro, chores and menial<br />
tasks. The errand at hand is to collect everything<br />
which we need for the journey: spanners, nylon<br />
rope, small supplies of food…Toblerone… aspirin,<br />
torch and batteries, cold winter jackets… bright<br />
ultramarine blue thermal underwear… old Slovenian<br />
socialist toothpaste with the cap stuck a kilter…<br />
boring but essential necessities. Once this has been<br />
completed the next is to conclude repairing the<br />
printed billboard. Finally after three hours and 23<br />
minutes with Darja and her stop watch and the dog<br />
sniffing both of<br />
us, the billboard is<br />
wrapped up into its<br />
own distinctive bag,<br />
curiously it appears<br />
like a filled body<br />
bag.<br />
There is a<br />
euphoric moment<br />
like an explosion<br />
of the present Now<br />
as Darja is standing<br />
beside me staring down at the huge image laid out<br />
across this impromptu tarmac, a MIG jet has left<br />
a smoke trail across the heavens above us like the<br />
signature of a giant, the golden sun is setting like<br />
treacle it is a naked and invigorating feeling.<br />
Tuesday, 7th November, <strong>1995</strong>, The<br />
journey to Zagreb, Croatia<br />
Even although I am the one with the intent,<br />
and the finances while Darja remains my loyal guide<br />
I know I am ultimately lost and adrift without her.<br />
I am troubled because I am taking her, Darja, back<br />
to Sarajevo, the place where she had been shot<br />
in the head… perhaps I muse our journey is like<br />
a time bomb…it will trigger memories and issues<br />
she cannot envisage but ultimately may help her<br />
too…or are we playing with fire…it is her decision...<br />
I look across at her yet she doesn’t know I’m gazing<br />
staring stealing a person’s image in my memory….<br />
Her mind-eyes-heart are elsewhere. At least I know<br />
that much… I don’t even believe she remembers the<br />
tragic and urgent last departure from that sad city.<br />
Thus her return will ultimately be very different.<br />
Each of us is travelling to meet our unknown that<br />
is disguised as fate or destiny or bank managers or<br />
bullets… and in her case she is returning to the past<br />
that had cut off a future she had believed would be<br />
trouble free.<br />
Perhaps this diary is more about Darja Lebar<br />
than Dominic Ryan. I was entering a zone of war<br />
with only a rented SONY hi 8 camera and few<br />
expectations. Darja was returning to the scene of the<br />
crime, which had left her disfigured and her future<br />
frozen in the past. By returning to face her demons<br />
Darja was attempting to heal the past. The city<br />
and the war had altered her destiny. Three months<br />
prior to the shooting she had been awarded the best<br />
journalist in Slovenia for her reportage from inside<br />
a city under siege. After being critically wounded<br />
by the sniper’s bullet she was returning for the first<br />
time to see the town, which had changed her life.<br />
Darja had lost her eye and still carried shrapnel in<br />
the neocortex of the her brain that could not be<br />
removed.<br />
There were moments of respite and calm before<br />
the storm. As the train travelled through the hills<br />
towards Zagreb I asked Darja:<br />
‘So how far do we have to go?’<br />
‘Far.’ She laughed…<br />
‘Why are we going to Zagreb?’<br />
She laughed with a bell chime to it… and<br />
squinted<br />
‘I think we have to talk about this. We have to<br />
have a very serious talk about this.’<br />
Our arrival is<br />
five hours later<br />
with weather<br />
conditions: light<br />
rain 2°C; westerly<br />
wind, 2 mph;<br />
relative humidity:<br />
96%; pressure<br />
(mB): 1027, rising<br />
visibility, fog<br />
And that was<br />
it…<br />
The idleness<br />
was soon to change and the seriousness of the<br />
journey set in. The area around Zagreb station is<br />
actually a grim and Celine-like, or at least it was<br />
tense that morning…. We decided to walk around<br />
and see what we could find, and shortly found a line<br />
of police roadblocks in the course of being set up.<br />
From what we could decide, these separated us from<br />
the old town, and there was nothing we could do<br />
about it because the police are only letting residents<br />
in.<br />
In Zagreb there are old winding mountain streets<br />
and genuine colourful markets. Nearby in the<br />
embassy district leafy boulevards stretch lazily, and<br />
beautiful elegant women in black leather jackets<br />
and red stripes of lipstick sip petit coffees. The city<br />
is clean, beautiful, not too large, and has an electric<br />
feel throughout it. Zagreb is a completely different<br />
world to the Europe I know. It is the ornate baroque
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
flourishes of the buildings, of the facades. The large<br />
tree-lined streets coupled with images and signs<br />
referring to bomb shelters and warnings as a result<br />
of the blitzes they have recently experienced.<br />
Upon our arrival, Zagreb was festooned with<br />
the perfume of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In<br />
Zagreb, when the streets are full with bustle and the<br />
knowledge that nearby a war is close—something<br />
that you can not tangibly touch. Inherent is the<br />
sense of pregnant anxiety, someone has swallowed a<br />
pill and they are waiting to feel its affects. The city<br />
was relatively benign and untouched by war. The<br />
journey had begun in cars, trains and buses, but<br />
the journey is more than travelling to the goal of an<br />
exhibition. It is also the places and the people we are<br />
to encounter during this journey.<br />
Since the United Nations proved a dead end,<br />
we had already discovered that there is one bus<br />
line that is ferrying people across to Sarajevo over<br />
300km away which had opened a few days ago.<br />
Economics prevails even in situations like this. So<br />
there are two things that we can do—find this small<br />
office in downtown Zagreb and buy a ticket. The<br />
office is shabby, down at heel; on the wall are faded<br />
photos of a gleaming by-gone Yugoslavia in National<br />
Geographic-green, scuffed and dog-eared. Old airline<br />
posters that are hanging at half-mast from the wall<br />
advertise the Greater and bygone Yugoslavia…<br />
Behind the formica desk, chain-smoking, there is<br />
a woman with bottle blond hair who has this long<br />
distance look about her as she puts the phone down,<br />
sucks on her cigarette and asks us whether it is a<br />
one-way ticket we want. We sit in a corner on the<br />
couches waiting and waiting. Finally they say there<br />
is a convoy leaving<br />
the day after<br />
tomorrow and it<br />
seems as if this is<br />
going to be the only<br />
option for us. We<br />
buy the ticket!<br />
The following<br />
evening we had<br />
a festive dinner<br />
with the honorary<br />
consul to Australia,<br />
Dr Keller and his<br />
Indian wife in the Hotel Dubrovnik. He spoke kindly<br />
to us. ‘You realise Dominic that you and your friend<br />
are travelling into a war zone. As a government<br />
representative I cannot forbid you to go; you are a<br />
free agent but as a representative of Australia I can<br />
only say that you will be essentially on your own. We<br />
cannot help you.’<br />
We sit there, attentive like puppets at the dinner<br />
table adjusting our serviettes like a businessman plays<br />
with his tie… Darja, his wife, Dr Keller and myself.<br />
I keep on thinking and laughing, it is like Keller,<br />
killer. It is the synchronicity of what is happening<br />
seems to sort of match everything. We speak of my<br />
Australian Bosnian friend, Tahir Gambis. He says: ‘Oh,<br />
I remember Tony Gambis, I had to visit him in hospital<br />
as he had been wounded by tank shrapnel during<br />
the war in the early stages and was lying in a hospital<br />
unable to return to Australia.’<br />
We were travelling into a zone where only<br />
accredited journalists and UN peacekeepers<br />
were permitted. In order to reach Sarajevo it<br />
was necessary to pass through six checkpoints.<br />
Documents or visas to enter Sarajevo or Bosnia were<br />
not required, yet the only civilians granted entry<br />
apart from the UN peacekeeping forces were the<br />
odd diplomat and now NATO.<br />
It is a journey into the centre of the darkness<br />
towards a distorted humanity. Each step towards<br />
this darkness is a step away from the light. I know<br />
such a journey will be difficult.<br />
These are strange days in the words of Jim<br />
Morrison of the Doors…surreal where again we walk<br />
through the streets surrounded by uncanny peace,<br />
laughing children, and surreal quietness. Anything<br />
except this is a future, which is unknown.<br />
Thursday, 9th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Zagreb, Croatia – Split<br />
As the day of departure arrives—what is so weird<br />
is that there are other people waiting to ascend the<br />
steps of the bus. We are not the only ones. I assume<br />
always incorrectly. Bonded families returning in<br />
spite of the imminent threat of death. We step onto<br />
the greasy linoleum aisles of the bus, dragging the<br />
billboard like a filled body bag. Nobody even blinks.<br />
Once seated, I gaze down from the dirty windows<br />
and I notice with solemn surprise everybody: the<br />
passengers—the overweight scarf-covered mothers,<br />
babuskas and young pimply men in denim and torn<br />
T-shirts are silently crying. The waving bystanders<br />
outside are crying, and the ones leaving inside are<br />
crying. Little old ladies with worn duffle bags, torn<br />
plastic sacks, teenage boys with metal buttons
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
They don’t know if they will die or whether<br />
they will see each other ever again.<br />
The roads are straight, and in one instance six hours<br />
into this journey late at night we come across a<br />
petrol tanker that had jack knifed in the centre of the<br />
highway…or something that was spun right across<br />
the road, blocking our path—<br />
Slowly through the<br />
dirty bus windows the<br />
landscape changes.<br />
and she has her own fears about the life that she had,<br />
a life that stopped after that bullet went into her face.<br />
In a sense she has to return to confront that reality
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
We are each entering a new world<br />
together but each of us is alone. Her<br />
eyes staring out into the passing<br />
countryside and even though she<br />
is accompanying me, it is almost<br />
as if only her physical body is<br />
accompanying me and she is returning<br />
to a place and a time and a life which<br />
I don’t have any connection to. I must<br />
realise and respect this—that I cannot<br />
share her sorrows or her life.<br />
implanted in their lips and Metallica T-shirts—and<br />
I realise that it is because of the unknown, because<br />
these people know that maybe they will not see<br />
each other again. For me it is a first, for them it is<br />
usual. They don’t know if they will die or whether<br />
they will see each other ever again.<br />
Every moment I use to try and draw out events,<br />
which have occurred, on this voyage. Then a diesel<br />
engine coughs slyly and jolts awake…<br />
Slowly through the dirty bus windows the<br />
landscape changes. Unhurriedly the world around<br />
us alters. Winter becomes more established even<br />
though we are travelling south. We have to travel<br />
a roundabout route: the bus travels from Zagreb<br />
down to Split and then up again over Mt Igman,<br />
which is where the one road to get to Sarajevo lies,<br />
past the tunnel that used to be, and then into the<br />
old city of Sarajevo.<br />
Darja and I sit in different seats. Dominic on<br />
this side of the aisle; she on the other. It is on this<br />
journey that I start to realise that Darja is distant.<br />
What a fool I am…of course…how stupid can I<br />
be in failing to understand the obvious… We are<br />
each entering a new world together but each of<br />
us is alone. Her eyes staring out into the passing<br />
countryside and even though she is accompanying<br />
me, it is almost as if only her physical body is<br />
accompanying me and she is returning to a place<br />
and a time and a life which I don’t have any<br />
connection to. I must realise and respect this—that<br />
I cannot share her sorrows or her life. Yes, there<br />
is our association but our association; she has her<br />
own demons to confront and she has her own fears<br />
about the life that she had, a life that stopped after<br />
that bullet went into her face. In a sense she has to<br />
return to confront that reality and to understand<br />
the impact it had on her being and on her destiny.<br />
She is brave and strong and maybe she has, like
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
One lonely heroic bus with a bald headed bus driver who speaks a<br />
language I don’t understand with the cold staring Bosnian civilians not<br />
speaking, not moving, not looking anywhere but into the empty passing<br />
countryside… lifeless trees and villages that have been recently shelled<br />
pass us by like ghosts trees and phantom villages.<br />
Oedipus, no choice but to be this way<br />
She is a million miles away but she sits two<br />
metres from me and I must accept that we have<br />
become distant partners on this twisting voyage<br />
towards Sarajevo.<br />
My thoughts rallied. ‘I am here to bring a 42’<br />
by 11’ image of war and peace to Sarajevo entitled<br />
Millennium but when I arrive, I know I cannot<br />
not bring myself to photograph these people. It<br />
will seem like stealing. To take and not to return.<br />
It is bad enough to take a people’s culture, even in<br />
images, when that is all they have, but to document<br />
suffering even when others have the need to have<br />
that suffering communicated is a difficult task. So I<br />
have chosen not to photograph the people. Out of<br />
awkwardness, shyness and an ethical point of view<br />
I instead will photograph the buildings. The way<br />
they had been destroyed by shells, the patterns and<br />
textures.<br />
The image is a large Christo-like poster, which<br />
I hope to be erected firstly in the House of Youth,<br />
or rather what is left of the House of Youth. The<br />
building has been bombed and reduced to rubble.<br />
As I understand it the building, Skenderija, is the<br />
equivalent of The World Trade Centre and Theatre<br />
complex. I am hoping that it Millennium will be<br />
shown in the streets of Sarajevo as a memorial and<br />
testament. The text reads: ‘this image is a mirror<br />
to the futility of war and its inability to solve the<br />
problems of humanity.’<br />
Thursday, 9th November, <strong>1995</strong>, Split,<br />
en route to Sarajevo<br />
It is 3.59 pm and we are travelling at 90<br />
kilometres an hour on the one lonely heroic bus with<br />
a bald headed bus driver who speaks a language<br />
I don’t understand with the cold staring Bosnian<br />
civilians not speaking, not moving, not looking<br />
anywhere but into the empty passing countryside…<br />
lifeless trees and villages that have been recently<br />
shelled pass us by like ghosts trees and phantom<br />
villages. While we are travelling into afternoon dusk<br />
and then the clumsy inky night…. eventually to our<br />
goal… pointing towards Sarajevo. The countryside<br />
passes us by in grey pastel snatches like someone<br />
handing out old tired postcards of Bavarian forests,<br />
which are taken away before you can see the full<br />
image. The roads are straight, and in one instance<br />
six hours into this journey late at night we come<br />
across a petrol tanker that had jack knifed in the<br />
centre of the highway…or something that was spun<br />
right across the road, blocking our path—an auto<br />
accident actually.<br />
Twenty minutes later into our trip we pass<br />
through villages which are just shells of rubble,<br />
broken with only one or two buildings that have<br />
any form of occupancy. Whole villages pass us by<br />
which are razed, with burnt, living rooms and empty<br />
windows. Like the eyes of the passengers so are
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
And the silence inside the cabin here<br />
is palpable… the silence amongst the<br />
passengers is deafening…<br />
the windows as we pass… It is a face that has been<br />
blinded. The houses are mere shells with nothing<br />
inside them. And the silence inside the cabin here<br />
is palpable… the silence amongst the passengers<br />
is deafening… Just as I’m getting used to this eerie<br />
silence the bus driver slips in a cassette…the music<br />
is worse… ranging from Croatian equivalents of<br />
Tom Jones crooning Croat hits from the past three<br />
decades to the euro-trash Abba.<br />
Each village has fifteen, twenty houses and in<br />
each village three quarters of the houses are left<br />
razed to the ground. It has emptiness, a fear and<br />
it was as if we have stepped into this fairyland and<br />
the whole land has been caged by an evil spell from<br />
a wicked warlock. A sickness has passed across the<br />
earth. None of us can avoid that sickness. And now<br />
the sickness is spreading to become part of us.<br />
My thoughts are alone and I gravitate back<br />
to Zagreb. Curious but our honorary consul Dr<br />
Keller had never been to Australia. He was the<br />
honorary consul but he had never visited Australia.<br />
It was as though he was an armchair traveller who<br />
geographically loved our country but had never<br />
visited. He is the representative of Australia out of<br />
his love for what it represented. He was not paid for<br />
his position and I honoured him for his voluntary<br />
nature of what he did. The buildings passed by,<br />
one by one—burnt-out desiccated shells like dead<br />
prehistoric animals with their rib cages showing.<br />
Split on the Adriatic coast—we arrive after<br />
twelve hours. A thirty-five minute stopover. We<br />
barely have time to urinate. Above our heads there is<br />
a black starless night while we are aching and tired.<br />
I slept sporadically backwards and forwards and<br />
have been reading a dog-eared book on the Turin<br />
shroud. Half read like an unfinished meal, it would<br />
remain undigested. Split is Croatia’s second largest<br />
city and it has a haphazard, hyper-electric ambience.<br />
It has a main street lined with derelict cafes facing<br />
the sea with a Roman palace behind it. I have heard
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
news that the western powers are making ideas to protect Split, in order to let the humanitarian aid coming<br />
in without problems. I have that feeling that nobody really knows what is going on. In Split, there is no war; in<br />
Split for months, only refugees.<br />
Here Darja takes me by the hand, almost tentatively like a child asking her father to come and see a new<br />
wild zoo animal… imploring me. ‘We must see this!’ To witness and view these incredible series of marble<br />
temples in Split. I suddenly realise as if I didn’t already know, that I am travelling. Moments of serendipity when<br />
suddenly we pinch ourselves and cry ‘my God!’<br />
It is a moment of inexplicable awe gazing at the Roman architecture with its patina of history and time like<br />
a singing aura. It is still and breathless. No wind…here but for the echoes of the footsteps on the marble tiles<br />
while boys and couples linger, kissing and giggling against Doric columns. There is moist warmth in the air<br />
maybe because we are further south. There is no snow. Spotlights illuminate the architecture and then I hear<br />
someone shouting to us to return quickly to the buses on the final leg of the journey—the journey towards<br />
Sarajevo.<br />
We travel into the night. I wake up and all I see is muddy walls surrounding us and lines of horrific broken<br />
barbwire. We stop for what seems two hours at a checkpoint. There are muffled voices of people who are<br />
speaking in languages I don’t understand. No passports are requested. Nobody cares; we are not passing<br />
through countries or across borders but rather into the dangerous unknown… We are stepping into a world of<br />
anarchy, suffering and injustice.<br />
Friday, 10th November, <strong>1995</strong>, Crossing over from Mt Igman into Sarajevo<br />
There are blurred mages of the charcoal night passing us, dashing spotlights blinding our eyes and then<br />
disappearing. More disturbing barbed wire and burst sand bags, and a half demolished tank appear. Upon<br />
awakening I notice that we are now in a convoy pushing slowly across Mt Igman. It is 7.00 am in the morning as<br />
the day dawns, I yawn myself awake. I feel greasy and unwashed like the windows. We pass a metal drop-gate<br />
in red and white like a barber’s pole. Here there is a rickety command post with stacked containers to create<br />
a wall, and camouflaged non-demarcated soldiers are squatting beside it mumbling into a walkie talkie—no<br />
insignias… I can’t tell if they are Serb or Muslim…just dirty stained khaki. One soldier gets in and sits with two<br />
oily Kalashnikovs on his knees and a thousand yard stare. Meanwhile these two personnel carriers, one at the<br />
front and one at the back escort the bus. An AA round will go through a hard metal chassis bus like a burning<br />
poker through margarine.<br />
Travelling at twenty-three kilometres an hour, the bus skips potholes, rolling like a ship in a force 8 gale, as<br />
we edge up and then down, in waving ribbons, along Mt Igman.<br />
As we descend the sausage-shaped mountain, the snow-sprinkled valley of Sarajevo becomes gradually<br />
apparent. Sarajevo is a city that sits in a fat bowl of a valley with a mountain range that completely surrounds<br />
it—a perfect circle of terror. It is the ideal position for an attacking force because the Serbian paramilitary have<br />
surrounded the besieged city which is trapped in the basin, a position most difficult to defend—and from an<br />
attacker’s perspective they can remain unseen indefinitely, their artillery punctuating the high ridge. A million<br />
shells have rained upon this one town. And for the people living here it is like being in a fishbowl and people<br />
killing fish for sport while a world looks on.<br />
Sarajevo lies at the bottom of this basin where the Bosnians lie under siege, and on the rim of the basin all<br />
these Serbians with tanks shelling the city. The former Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary have stationed<br />
themselves on this mountainside. On the outer perimeter of the city is the dead zone, where there are just<br />
burnt-out houses.<br />
Mt Igman had a thin covering of snow-like icing sugar. The bus drove down into the basin slowly, almost<br />
lazily with the convoy, as we went through the snow. It was the first snow since Split that I had seen. There is<br />
television up front on the bus, which is playing the most curious karate-style movies with Bosnian sub titles.<br />
Darja is asleep nodding with the roll of the bus into her scumbled leather jacket on the seat opposite<br />
me. So we drive through the suburb of Butmir, which has been all but destroyed by the fighting there. The<br />
first buildings as we enter the cities outskirts look haggard and run down. We pass the outskirts of the new<br />
embattled city where there are large brutalised housing commission buildings—a cheese grater has gone<br />
through them, slicing them up indiscriminately.<br />
Sarajevo is not a simple city. It has been documented and yet not observed enough. Battalions of journalists<br />
have descended upon Sarajevo like vultures to a dying animal to document its suffering, its massacres, and<br />
then, taking their spoils of war, they leave. I wonder if I am any better? Did they give anything of themselves to<br />
these people? To live off the sufferings of others I cannot do. I am not so sure now how I can help the suffering
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
of others with this image and project, but at the very least I am not seeking to exploit or profit from it.<br />
We soon leave the Muslim suburb of Dobrina which has been destroyed - with only the shells of houses<br />
remaining. Only 50 meters away, the Serb forces are poised in their positions, with their AA guns, which fall<br />
under the limit set by the heavy weapons exclusion zone.<br />
We pass across the airport tarmac and into Doboj, but we must wait 35 minutes before we are waved<br />
through. There is safe passage. Doboj has already been destroyed by the Serbs. These were apartment blocks<br />
built for the Olympics. We passed a large wall of destroyed automobiles, vans and buses which had been formed<br />
like bricks as sniper shields.<br />
We finally turned onto Snipers’ Alley which runs from Sarajevo’s suburbs into the centre of town. In 1992 a<br />
car could drive this road at 120 kilometres an hour but today we were slower and there was limited pedestrian<br />
traffic.<br />
After our arrival my first feelings are of numbness across the knuckles. I am hauling the billboard in the bag<br />
on the rollers through the snow-covered ice, slipping and sliding. Swearing castrated oaths under my breath,<br />
Darja striding ahead going from hotel to hotel. Darja marching with this military step and me in pursuit. We go<br />
to the Hotel Bosnia but its achingly too expensive or simply overpriced… Hotel Grands, then Europa Garni are<br />
closed… everything is closed up except the Holiday Inn… INFAMOUS DURING THE SEIGE… but we don’t<br />
have the finances… We are not CNN…<br />
As I walk into the disused foyer of the Holiday Inn I notice that none of the lights are on even in the early<br />
morning.The hotel was built for the Olympics in 1984 but right now it looks like the victims as paraplegics are<br />
having their own conference and nobody is winning… Half the side of the building is completely shattered<br />
while there remain a few dispossessed people, a lost concierge and a lone businessman at the back. The Inn is<br />
in the area of Snipers’ Alley, which has been the most vulnerable area in the city on a large square. I can see<br />
around me shrapnel-scarred housing commission blocks where people have turned nature strips into vegetable<br />
gardens, but all the vegetable gardens are now dead and the odd turnip or cabbage sticking through the thick<br />
black rich soil speckled by the snow.<br />
The sound is a listless stillness; it encroaches on us. After the Holiday Inn where it looks like there is no<br />
possibility of staying we move onto another hotel closer to the old part of the city. Here there are yet again no<br />
further possibilities either. It seems to be too expensive.<br />
Darja finds someone outside of the hotel who indicates with some sophisticated sign language that there is a<br />
couple, an old airline pilot and his wife, who can offer us full accommodation. We trudge again in order to find a<br />
taxi. Everything around us is dirty and run down. I’m still swearing under my breath. I need sleep and food and I<br />
know I won’t be served with either immediately… The dirt, the grease, the greyness; it is not even grey; it is like<br />
the difference between a clean tooth and a tooth that is dirty and a tooth that is rotting and it is like everything<br />
here looks like it is rotting. The siege has been going on and it is right at the end of the war but there is quietness<br />
as a result of the cease-fire. We believe there is an accord which is going to happen in the next two or three weeks<br />
to resolve the conflict but we are waiting on all parties to resolve the demarcation of the borders.<br />
The couple’s names are Fatima and Omer Delic. He is a retired airline pilot. The address is, so I don’t forget:<br />
440115 Autuno Brauna, Fourth Floor, Sarajevo. The 440115 is actually their telephone number. I must write it<br />
down and slip it into my shoe so if I get lost I’ll be OK.<br />
Fifth-floor apartment, three levels as we climb in nauseating spirals on the baroque Austro-Hungarian<br />
staircase with blown out windows on the east side and an acute smell of cat urine in the stairwell which<br />
after Moscow feels like home… There is no hot water and we have to boil the water. I can hear Rasta music<br />
somewhere. How curious! There is no electricity and no windows, just plastic UNHCR sheeting. It is ice cold<br />
and the water and foodhas to be carried up four stinking flights of stairs like a masochist gym in New York. And<br />
the food, if you could call it food, are basic necessities like potatoes.<br />
Saturday, 11th November, <strong>1995</strong>, Sarajevo<br />
At the height of the war a packet of Marlboro cost twenty-five dollars. Darja tells me that the Serbs still hold<br />
all the high ground around the city and have replaced their heavy weapons with AA guns. Firing 75mm rounds,<br />
which lie under the limit, these weapons can do as much damage as a mortar can. There are now specific zones<br />
of the city, out of the line of sight, which are safe. The Serbs have not surrendered all their heavy artillery to<br />
the UN, since they are still using some of them, to fire upon the eastern part of the city. Therefore this is a<br />
memo that no person is ever really safe here. The local cigarettes, Drina, which are manufactured in the city,<br />
are still being sold. It seems that everybody here smokes. The one initial thing that I have noticed, even though<br />
I don’t smoke or drink alcohol, is that here the people’s past time, or their way of dealing with this situation is to<br />
smoke. Every single person chain-smokes the local Drina.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
disaffected artist coming in to appease his<br />
own western guilt; a do-gooder or whether<br />
something is literally going...<br />
They just sit there and<br />
stare back at me, smiling<br />
through their gums<br />
always wearing their<br />
double pyjamas and<br />
dressing gowns as if the<br />
Sarajevo siege is some<br />
kind of pyjama party out<br />
of Monty Python but its<br />
just that …this is the best<br />
clothes to keep warm.<br />
If Picasso painted Guernica and brought this image into an<br />
environment where there was a war happening, the image<br />
of Guernica in this huge bombed out environment would be<br />
a potent image.<br />
What the fuck am I doing here? I really don’t know. I am following the scent or the actual points of bringing<br />
a message to people about suffering, and I just question whether I actually am doing something legitimate—for<br />
myself or for them. It is a weird environment to be in. I question whether this is just some weak and limp,<br />
disaffected artist coming in to appease his own western guilt; a do-gooder or whether something is literally<br />
going to come out of this. I know when the intent is right then good things occur of their own volition even if we<br />
see difficult events surrounding them.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
This is a symbolic act, and the act is to take the billboard into<br />
an area where the context is meaningful—that we are putting a<br />
message about war and the futility of war and we are taking it<br />
into an area where there really is war.<br />
Sunday, 12th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Inside the socialist-style apartment Omer proudly<br />
shows me a framed photo of him arm in arm with<br />
Tito standing at a school reunion in a sepia tone. An<br />
image of him meeting God almost. Omer with Tito!<br />
Omer and Fatima have a set of cheap Yugoslavianera<br />
spoons on the mantle piece proclaiming the<br />
winter Olympics… old communists that have been<br />
hoisted up by the war and are about to be propelled<br />
into a new period but because they are almost<br />
unwilling they are still frozen in the old era.<br />
The only way I can speak or communicate with<br />
them is with my broken Russian, which does not<br />
seem to help much but at least it is a kind of a<br />
buffer. We sit down for breakfast. They just sit there<br />
and stare back at me, smiling through their gums<br />
always wearing their double pyjamas and dressing<br />
gowns as if the Sarajevo siege is some kind of pyjama<br />
party out of Monty Python but its just that… this is<br />
the best clothes to keep warm.<br />
I am still questioning my motives for coming. I<br />
am questioning why I am here, but in the process<br />
there is human contact and this is nothing about<br />
questioning, it is just human beings bridging the<br />
gap between their isolation, their loneliness, their<br />
insecurity. It is goodwill that is the better angel<br />
within us and whatever the case, it is a step where<br />
we find out what good can come out of a difficult<br />
situation.<br />
This is a symbolic act, and the act is to take<br />
the billboard into an area where the context is<br />
meaningful—that we are putting a message about<br />
war and the futility of war and we are taking it into<br />
an area where there really is war.<br />
If Picasso painted Guernica and brought this<br />
image into an environment where there was a war<br />
happening, the image of Guernica in this huge<br />
bombed out environment would be a potent image.<br />
So it can be argued Millennium takes art into a new<br />
area. It is an attempt to extend the boundaries of art<br />
to create a form of diplomacy. It is crossing areas:<br />
diplomacy, art, politics, humanism, but also none of<br />
the above but all of the above simultaneously.<br />
Looking around their kitchen I muse: it is<br />
interesting how the war created all these new<br />
industries. All of a sudden there was no electricity<br />
and the situation was one where they had to create<br />
new grass roots economies. One such economy was<br />
creating these small wooden stoves. The stoves,<br />
which were metal, could burn a couple of small<br />
pieces of wood and they would heat up the water<br />
and cook eggs with limited wood fuel. All the major<br />
amenities are free: the trams, although taxis are<br />
not. Taxis like in Russia are just individuals without<br />
accreditation driving around. There are a few small<br />
shops, which have generators working, but the<br />
streets are effectively empty. There are one or two<br />
trams running and I can see children riding on the<br />
back of them holding on to them like in Rio.<br />
Today we visited some of Darja’s friends and<br />
inspected a few possible sites for the installation.<br />
We went to ‘Collegian Artisticum’, which was in<br />
Skenderija building; it is Faud’s gallery. We took the<br />
billboard and stored it there. We actually laid it out<br />
onto the floor and I got onto my knees and with a
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
little black pen and scribbled out little holes that<br />
had formed where the folds had stripped the paint<br />
off.<br />
We go to visit Darja’s friend Zoran and he told<br />
me about how he had to burn all of his drawings,<br />
all of his artwork in order to stay alive during the<br />
cold winter. I guess that is the dilemma; it is survival<br />
over civilisation. It is the structure of what you do,<br />
where do you draw the line? If you are under siege<br />
and you are in a library, do you burn the books or<br />
don’t you? It is up to every individual to come to<br />
their own decision and draw their own line.<br />
Zoran’s experience is one of meaning. He takes<br />
photographs and sells them to the paper, chains<br />
smokes, and from what I can see is kind man with<br />
a slightly addictive personality but that is just my<br />
perception; maybe that is not the case.<br />
I don’t seem scared here. I don’t feel as if my life<br />
is in danger. There is some sense of caution. You<br />
can hear the odd machine gun fire in the distance<br />
and it is sporadic but it only seems to occur in the<br />
evening and only upwards the perimeter of the city.<br />
Monday, 13th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Darja and Zoran<br />
The Olympic stadium where we have gone today<br />
has been turned into a cemetery and it is the only<br />
place they said that people could be buried. This<br />
is Alifakovac Cemetery, the stadium used for the<br />
Olympic games… As I walked past the stadium,<br />
which is full of graves, fresh and not so fresh<br />
graves from this insane unnatural siege because<br />
the original cemeteries have been filled like a cup<br />
which has overflowed… I trudged dishevelled<br />
past buildings, which had not been repaired since<br />
the beginning of the siege for obvious reasons. I<br />
walked to a diminutive cemetery and saw it was full<br />
of graves, with all the headstones inscribed with<br />
1993 or 1994. And as I walk I muse about a typical<br />
day ten moths ago… a Chronology of the War… A<br />
typical day eight months before went like this:<br />
ORDER PUNITIVE AIR STRIKES. THE
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
COMMANDER DENIED MAKING ANY<br />
SUCH REQUEST. *4170<br />
9. 9/1/94 (Sunday)<br />
(A) MILITARY ACTIVITY:<br />
Combat and Shelling Activity:<br />
In its daily report, UNPROFOR described shelling<br />
at a «relatively low level». Sixty per cent of<br />
the rounds were reportedly directed at the<br />
confrontation line, the rest impacted in populated<br />
areas. The situation in the Mt. Igman area was<br />
described as getting tense. The Bosnian Serb<br />
army was reportedly moving supplies to support<br />
their efforts in the western part of the city.<br />
*4171<br />
Source(s): UNPROFOR.<br />
Targets Hit: Airport runway; the Catholic<br />
cemetery; the Holiday Inn.<br />
Source(s): Associated Press; United Press<br />
International.<br />
Description of Damage:<br />
Shelling of the airport runway shut down the<br />
airport in the morning.<br />
Source(s): Associated Press; United Press<br />
International.<br />
Sniping Activity:<br />
Not specified<br />
Casualties:<br />
Four persons were wounded in the shelling of<br />
the Catholic cemetery.<br />
Source(s): United Press International.<br />
Narrative of Events:<br />
Shelling of the runway shut down the airport<br />
in the morning, but repair work completed at<br />
about noon later allowed the first aid flight in<br />
five days to land. The runway shelling forced a<br />
UN aeroplane carrying Japan’s Yasushi Akashi,<br />
civilian head of UN peace-keeping in the former<br />
Yugoslavia, to turn back to Zagreb. *4172<br />
UNPROFOR blamed the day’s airport shelling on<br />
Bosnian Serb forces. According to UNPROFOR<br />
spokesman Bill Aikman: «The results of the<br />
crater analysis have just been completed. Two<br />
mortar rounds were fired from Serb-controlled<br />
areas this morning onto the airport runway».<br />
*4173<br />
Four persons were wounded in the morning<br />
when a shell hit the city’s Catholic cemetery.<br />
*4174<br />
Several shells reportedly hit near the Holiday<br />
Inn. *4175<br />
(B) LOCAL REPORTED EVENTS<br />
Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic said<br />
that his side was unwilling to concede any more<br />
territory and warned that if BiH wanted to<br />
carry on fighting they could expect a massive<br />
response. “We’ve fulfilled everything that was<br />
expected of us and there can be no question at<br />
all of any more territorial concessions by the<br />
Serbs», Karadzic was quoted as saying by the<br />
Bosnian Serb news agency. If BiH continued<br />
fighting, «we will activate wartime production,<br />
mobilize wartime production, mobilize the entire<br />
population”, he<br />
said. *4176<br />
The first two days<br />
Darja has been<br />
supportive and<br />
responsive to our<br />
mission and has<br />
helped extensively.<br />
Upon entering<br />
Sarajevo I felt I<br />
might understandably lose her. The distance inside<br />
her is drawing us apart. But I feel that she must<br />
simultaneously revisit her past. On the third day she<br />
went out and walked up Snipers’ Alley to return to<br />
the scene of the crime.<br />
Upon her return there was a vacant and<br />
pregnant feeling about her—a borsch of wisdom<br />
and confusion. It is important for her to return to<br />
confront that attack where her whole destiny was<br />
changed. In so doing she will experience the pain<br />
but that pain will be annulled. So it is a healing<br />
journey, which she needs to undertake to recognise<br />
her own personal destiny irrespective of mine.<br />
In sharing someone else’s journey, even though that<br />
journey is something that we walk along together<br />
we must always acknowledge that the time that<br />
we share with another is only there to assist that<br />
person. They have other experiences, which may<br />
not be experiences that we can partake of. At this<br />
point our paths diverge. In this instance Darja and<br />
my paths have joined. I cannot foresee when they<br />
will part but I feel it is soon.<br />
Tuesday, 14th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Today the first port of call is the house of a<br />
friend, an Australian Bosnian, Tahir Gambis. He is<br />
making a film about the siege with his co-director<br />
Alma. Although difficult to find him, eventually<br />
we are in the same room. Tahir has promised to<br />
document our journey and he and Alma are going to<br />
accompany us around the streets as we attempt to
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
erect the billboard.<br />
He was just<br />
getting up from<br />
his bed and looked<br />
across at us<br />
rubbing the sleep<br />
from his eyes.<br />
‘You caught<br />
me on a really bad<br />
day’, said Tahir.<br />
‘Why don’t we<br />
go out for dinner in<br />
the next couple of nights?’ I replied.<br />
‘I feel something coming on.’ He didn’t seem so<br />
enthusiastic.<br />
‘Coming on as in flu?’<br />
‘Something, I am not sure what it is but it is<br />
getting worse. I had a bad headache this morning<br />
but I am starting to get a bit dizzy now.’<br />
‘Is this something that you often have?’<br />
‘Yes.’<br />
‘As a result of what?’<br />
‘Exhaustion, too much coffee.’<br />
‘So it is just your general lifestyle and it is not as<br />
a result of being wounded?’<br />
‘Sometimes I am all right. You are never well after<br />
a major wound and spend a year in hospital.’<br />
‘What happened with the situation? You went up<br />
into the hills and you were like boom.’<br />
‘I was making my way to Sarajevo and I was<br />
travelling with HVO as a camera man and was<br />
wounded by a tank shell; shrapnel of a tank shell.’<br />
‘Did you lose consciousness when it happened?’<br />
‘No.’<br />
‘Was your leg severed?’<br />
‘It was shattered; my bone shattered and so my<br />
leg was like a floppy jelly.’<br />
Alma had seen too much. I was shocked by the<br />
stories that I would hear from everyone. Looking<br />
at the gaunt faces, staring at you in the crowds.<br />
Alma had given up those years of her early years<br />
simply carrying water… Her years were stolen from<br />
her youth. All she did was stay under ground and<br />
carry water. Because their lives were frozen for that<br />
period of time of the siege, war steals youth. And<br />
from this springs resentment and that bitterness<br />
that your time is taken from you.<br />
It was only afterwards, after this meeting<br />
that I returned again to speak to Zolka or Zoran<br />
as he was known to his friends. The 39-year-old<br />
photojournalist worked for the magazine DAIAS. He<br />
had sold his apartment and had drunk the proceeds<br />
away and yet still remained intact.<br />
He showed me a photograph of his wife and their<br />
two children. She was estranged and separated<br />
from him in Serbian-controlled Sarajevo and had<br />
then moved further away. They had not seen each<br />
other since the beginning of the war. I looked at a<br />
faded photograph of her, which he proudly produced<br />
from a worn and torn wallet and I looked again at<br />
him. The pale almost parchment like quality of his<br />
skin about his face was stretched taught. He was<br />
handsome although old beyond his years. He was<br />
worn, tired and haggard. This is normal here. He<br />
chain-smoked and drank too much but I could see<br />
his loyalty to his wife did not waiver nor could it be<br />
rushed. I stared again at the picture of her. I looked<br />
and saw a dark-haired and beautiful woman. He was<br />
waiting for the time when they would be together,<br />
when the war would cease to separate them. He had<br />
dreams of fleeing, of escaping to the tranquil West, a<br />
Europe immersed in denial… Here it is the frontier<br />
of Europe but it is also another planet. He spoke<br />
of residing in Prague, of an exhibition there and of<br />
sending her money, and their reunion. And then<br />
it dawned upon me that this love so bruised and<br />
fucked up was stronger and more real than the film<br />
Paris Texas, that his wife was more beautiful than<br />
Natassja Kinski and he more haggard than Harry<br />
Dean Stanton. Real people lost and yet sustained by<br />
the thread of the past. He was a lovely man.<br />
Tuesday, 14th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Here are a few simple descriptions about the<br />
town. Everything is expensive except life, cigarettes<br />
and coffee. The theatre is free. The trams are<br />
free and, like the Moscow metro, people sardine<br />
themselves in to commute to the new quarter, which<br />
looks more like an embattled Dresden than anything<br />
approaching the adjective ‘new’. The children run<br />
after the rusted trams and surf them using the<br />
protruding metal hooks. Everybody smokes the<br />
cheap home brand Drina for one Deutschmark. The<br />
currency used here is the Deutschmark. There are<br />
Muslims, Serbs and a myriad of coffee shops side<br />
by side. Now there is popcorn, but before there<br />
was only bread. The women here are beautiful.<br />
At the height of the war one packet of Marlboro<br />
cost 35 Marks and a kilo of meat costs 145 Marks.<br />
People would say to me: ‘When there is no food<br />
then everybody<br />
turns to cigarettes,<br />
because everything<br />
in Sarajevo turns to<br />
ash.’<br />
At every<br />
moment, from<br />
all the places in<br />
the mountains<br />
surrounding the<br />
city, the Serbian<br />
snipers could hit
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Source(s): UNPROFOR.<br />
Targets Hit: Airport runway;<br />
the Catholic cemetery; the<br />
Holiday Inn.<br />
Source(s): Associated Press;<br />
United Press International.<br />
Description of Damage:<br />
Shelling of the airport runway<br />
shut down the airport in the<br />
morning.<br />
Source(s): Associated Press;<br />
United Press International.<br />
Sniping Activity:<br />
Not specified<br />
Casualties:<br />
Four persons were wounded<br />
in the shelling of the Catholic<br />
cemetery.<br />
“Here it is the frontier of Europe But it is also another planet.”
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
The signs, ‘Opazne Zona’, ‘Dangerous Zone’, or<br />
‘Watch Out’, ‘Sniper’, as well as the signs showing<br />
the direction of traffic are written in oil-based paint on<br />
pieces of UNHCR plastic sheets...<br />
“When there is no food then everybody turns to cigarettes,<br />
because everything in Sarajevo turns to ash.”<br />
“Now everything is available, although you cannot buy<br />
your Gucci bags or your Ralph Lauren head scarves.<br />
In a climate of death, Ralph Lauren is not the sunscreen<br />
you are looking for.”<br />
every target in the city. Therefore, the most dangerous zones are bridges, crossroads, and streets that are<br />
exposed to the mountains. Those are the places where the possibility of getting shot was somewhat increased<br />
even if one is a fast runner. One is never sure whether one should walk fast or slow.<br />
Would the shell land where you are, or in front of you?<br />
The signs, ‘Opazne Zona’, ‘Dangerous Zone’, or ‘Watch Out’, ‘Sniper’, as well as the signs showing the<br />
direction of traffic are written in oil-based paint on pieces of UNHCR plastic sheets, or on pieces of cardboard,<br />
wooden board, or simply written in chalk on the wall.<br />
My friend Alma explains:<br />
‘Now everything is available, although you cannot buy your Gucci bags or your Ralph Lauren head scarves.<br />
In a climate of death, Ralph Lauren is not the sunscreen you are looking for.’<br />
The electricity has been turned on, but it is sporadic. Some nights there is burst of brief electricity, some<br />
nights everything is submerged in darkness. One evening the lights went out in the city and the house Darja<br />
and I were staying in was again in dark. The family took out one candle. This was all which they possessed. So I
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
“During the war everything ceased. I<br />
simply carried water and collected<br />
firewood. My studies stopped and I<br />
remained close to my family. I was<br />
lucky. No one who was family was<br />
killed.”<br />
descended the broken staircase to the unlit streets<br />
with a torch and found a candlelit shop to buy a<br />
packet of candles. One Mark per candle.<br />
There is still no water in the pipes so the water<br />
must be carried up five flights of stairs. Stubbornly<br />
Omer and Fatima refuse to allow either of us to help<br />
carry water. There is a hole in their kitchen from a<br />
grenade attack. The neighbour was killed last month<br />
while Omer and Fatima were out.<br />
They are both retired and have a pension of<br />
seven Marks per month. They have no children. It<br />
seems because of this we became their surrogate<br />
children. The supply of gas comes like the sea, in<br />
and out. Hence the thriving business in wood stoves.<br />
Three quarters of all windows are gone and have<br />
been replaced with imprinted UNHCR plastic opaque<br />
sheets, almost like a fashion accessory, which are<br />
stapled over three quarters of the windows in the<br />
city. All these things are common knowledge. But<br />
common knowledge does not make life easier. My<br />
friend Alma remembers:<br />
‘During the war everything ceased. I simply<br />
carried water and collected firewood. My studies<br />
stopped and I remained close to my family. I was<br />
lucky. No one who was family was killed.’<br />
The universal feeling here around us is naturally<br />
grim but I was actually surprised at the buoyancy<br />
and optimism of the people. Every second family<br />
has lost at least one member. And I am sure that the<br />
suffering on the Bosnian Serb side is equal. Every<br />
mortared and wooden building is punctuated with<br />
holes from machine gun fire or grenades.<br />
Every living person has a graphic and grim story<br />
to recount. Every story is unique and different.<br />
Every perspective is dissimilar. Every perspective<br />
is no less than any other. Some people have been<br />
broken by the war while others have somehow<br />
grown in ways people cannot over in the West. This<br />
is the active principle which suffering provides.<br />
It seems that there is a paradox at work here. All<br />
war is stupid and futile in that war’s road is paved<br />
by such suffering. Its origins are meaningless and<br />
yet within the totality of its destruction when<br />
everything is lost, amongst some people a flame of<br />
goodness arises which I believe cannot be found in<br />
relationships in the West or in post-industrialised<br />
society. In every conversation I would engage<br />
in with people in Sarajevo it was always they<br />
who understood more than I. Because of this I<br />
believe they must be given the means and voice to<br />
communicate the volume of suffering which they<br />
have experienced. To communicate to others as well<br />
as to release it from within themselves. And when I<br />
say they, I speak of the innocent of both sides.<br />
A friend of Darja’s, Branko Serkovic said about<br />
this war: ‘It was an examination to test the limits<br />
of endurance. My message from a country of last<br />
things would be: I would like you to have been<br />
here.’ For a brief moment I was there. Towards the<br />
end of the war.<br />
Sarajevo is a ghetto where people slowly rot, if<br />
they do not die. The old soldiers look older than<br />
the old in many ways. And their eyes are far away.<br />
On the day of the Dayton cease-fire, we could hear
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
“It was an examination to test<br />
the limits of endurance. My<br />
message from a country of<br />
last things would be: I would<br />
like you to have been here.”<br />
For a brief moment I was there. Towards<br />
the end of the war.<br />
sniper fire and grenades from tanks punctuating<br />
Clinton’s speech. Nobody thinks much about this<br />
continuation of hostilities because it is an everyday<br />
affair.<br />
Each person has a different story and each has<br />
the content which could become a film. But each<br />
does not need the vainglory because each story is<br />
still unfolding.<br />
He tells me that he would sell his<br />
books while the shells were falling<br />
and say: “Buy or die.”<br />
Wednesday, 15th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Today while walking up Markala Tita one of the<br />
main drags in the old city I bumped into this tall<br />
graceful man dressed in curious saffron robes… I<br />
had met the President of the Hare Krishna’s ISKON<br />
with his Sony Walkman playing a techno version of<br />
Hare Krishna’s mantra There are eight permanent<br />
members in the ashram, he told me. He also had not<br />
left the city for the period of the siege. His name<br />
was Mirza. He tells me that he would sell his books<br />
while the shells were falling and say: ‘Buy or die.’<br />
Not a particularly charitable notion. ‘After awhile it<br />
became apparent those who didn’t buy or help us<br />
did suffer so I stopped asking people for donations<br />
for that very reason.’ Instant karma!<br />
About a possible cessation of hostilities he said:<br />
‘If after a man and a wife have been divorced after<br />
much personal suffering and domestic violence, a<br />
decree is made that these two people who have been<br />
separated must live together under the same room,<br />
will it not be difficult? There are times when they<br />
must share the bathroom. It will not be easy.’<br />
Thursday, 16th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
The Gallery who has sponsored our journey,<br />
‘Collegian Artisticum’ lies in the run down basement<br />
of the Skenderija, Sarajevo’s World Trade Center<br />
but it is guttered. There is a muted suggestion that<br />
we are going to have the exhibition in the destroyed<br />
House of Youth, which is directly above it or in the<br />
old National Library, which has also been shelled.<br />
Tahir and Alma have decided to accompany Darja<br />
and I with their cameras to ‘Collegian Artisticum’ today<br />
as we heroically roll out the folded billboard. There<br />
are sand bags up the back of the gallery to absorb any<br />
shelling, which might occur. There are broken sand<br />
bags mounted like bricks in the basement where the<br />
gallery is situated... Little hills like ant mounds indicate<br />
where a particular bag has burst. We have brought with<br />
us an assemblage of wires and hooks from Australia to<br />
help hang it. We are still inspecting various locations<br />
where we can exhibit the painting, trying to work<br />
out what we shall do. The idea is just to have a press<br />
conference in the city to announce the exhibition.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
It is happy marriage of good<br />
will and aesthetics that Fuad,<br />
the director, is supporting this<br />
billboard and he is suggesting<br />
that we go to the International<br />
Centre for <strong>Peace</strong> in Sarajevo.<br />
There are sand bags up<br />
the back of the gallery<br />
to absorb any shelling,<br />
which might occur.<br />
The Gallery who has sponsored our journey, “Collegian<br />
Artisticum” lies in the run down basement of the Skenderija,<br />
Sarajevo’s World Trade Center but it is guttered.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
It is happy marriage of good will and aesthetics<br />
that Fuad, the director, is supporting this billboard<br />
and he is suggesting that we go to the International<br />
Centre for <strong>Peace</strong> in Sarajevo. They are organising<br />
a winter festival and we might use the billboard as<br />
some kind of symbol for the people in Sarajevo.<br />
As we descend, we pass on the stairs a group<br />
of military soldiers and young boys who have been<br />
recently conscripted. As we go down they are<br />
going up with parents—it’s like a school graduation<br />
ceremony. Outside all the shops are denuded and<br />
empty. There is no sort of economy as such and<br />
the only economy right now is war and conflict. We<br />
have to go and see the Director of the International<br />
Centre for <strong>Peace</strong>, Ibrahim Spahic. On the schedule is<br />
that tomorrow we have a meeting with Danca who is<br />
the secretary for the Centre.<br />
Slowly Darja seems to be becoming increasingly<br />
distant. It is difficult to explain. It is not an<br />
articulation of hostility; it is just the way I think that<br />
she has become in order to deal with her situation.<br />
Even though I have helped her to come here, this is<br />
her world. I am an interloper and I must remember<br />
this, and be aware that my relationship to her is<br />
not important. Perhaps because I am dependent<br />
upon her as a guide, as translator our relationship<br />
becomes co-dependent. But she needs to break free.<br />
The pilot and his wife fuss over me like their<br />
long lost son. If I am late or if I don’t come home at a<br />
particular time that I am supposed to they treat me<br />
like I have been a naughty boy.<br />
Meanwhile in the real world over the last few<br />
years it a nightmare…<br />
I had a conversation with some of the people<br />
downstairs about the finding of mass graves. One,<br />
a woman resident of Sarajevo informed a German<br />
journalist of a possible mass grave in the city.<br />
The grave she said is alleged to sit in the Muslim<br />
controlled centre of town, between the burned<br />
library building and the Miljacka River. One UN<br />
personnel recounts to us that a captured Serb<br />
soldier related details regarding the site of a mass<br />
grave in Rajlovac. According to the soldier and UN<br />
investigations Seselj’s troops were in the village<br />
of Ahatovici generally burning houses and killing<br />
its people. The soldier’s mission in the village was<br />
to ‘kill and destroy’. It was alleged that Seselj’s<br />
troops captured 150 men, women, and children and<br />
ushered them into a pre-dug pit. They then with<br />
machine-guns and automatic rifles executed all of<br />
the persons. Later, two Yugoslav People’s Army<br />
trucks arrived on the scene, and two other prisoners<br />
who had had their lives spared had to load the dead<br />
bodies onto the trucks.<br />
Friday, 17th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
I am now outside waiting in the morning<br />
bleakness and numbing cold stamping my feet<br />
waiting for Darja, near a Benetton store surrounded<br />
by stacked sandbags, actually quite intact, opposite<br />
a coffee shop with its windows full of moisture<br />
which I sometimes frequent to write my notes. A<br />
...and after traipsing down moth-eaten<br />
burgundy carpets in urine odoured<br />
corridors and sandbagged windows<br />
I see a man chain-smoking two<br />
cigarettes
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
few pedestrians hurriedly pass me by with their hands in their pockets and necks hunched into their shoulders<br />
trying to shrug off the cold… I go to the coffee shop to work on the journal and witness the day go by. The days<br />
seem to crawl by in quick succession like the machine fire in the hills. A white tank slowly grumbles by with a<br />
blue-capped soldier UNPROFOR. As the Survival guide book says:<br />
‘The United Nations Protection Forces were awaited as saviours when they first arrived in Bosnia and<br />
Herzegovina with their white vehicles and blue berets. As time went on they proved to be powerless. They<br />
help in repairs of the infrastructure, in cleaning the city. They are also establishing bureaucratic rules of their<br />
own. In some instances they have proven to be good merchants, they are driving around in trucks, jeeps,<br />
transporters...They transport wounded, bring humanitarian aid, drive from and to the airport. In short, nothing<br />
is done without them. UNPROFOR Headquarters is in the building of Communications Engineering at Alipasino<br />
polje. Soldiers are in the barracks, which were formerly inhabited by the soldiers of the Yugoslav Peoples Army.<br />
The main headquarters of the UNPROFOR’s commander is in a private villa.’<br />
Darja arrives ten minutes late but I am in a good mood… We have a meeting with the people from the<br />
International Centre for <strong>Peace</strong> situated on Titova 9 (and/or Gabelina 16)—a woman called Danca Illic, and<br />
after traipsing down moth-eaten burgundy carpets in urine odoured corridors and sandbagged windows I see<br />
a man chain-smoking two cigarettes—it is the director; a tall man, slightly gaunt and brooding. Everyone here<br />
is gaunt, emaciated undernourished and chain smoking, so from this perspective he is no different… but he<br />
appears to be more so.<br />
He walks up to us with a brisk saunter, a smile and deftly flicks his ash into a broken Bakelite tray. There<br />
is an air of political ambition about this gentleman. His name is Ibrahim Spahic, and I later am told he is the<br />
Political leader of the Civil Democratic Party, his own small political party that is something both legitimate and<br />
important.<br />
I next have another meeting with Tahir Gambis and Alma. They seem to fight like an old married couple<br />
around their bare kitchen table. Tahir limps from a war wound and Alma looks like she should be in front of<br />
the camera with her beauty, dry humour and style instead of holding the microphone... The irony is that two<br />
days later they come to me and they said: ‘Dominic when you mentioned to us that we were an old couple we<br />
realised that we actually are fond of each other.’ I had been the catalyst for kindling their relationship from<br />
professional reticence to passion. Tahir always thought that whenever Alma desisted from walking into his<br />
room it was because it smelt of his body odour, but on the contrary she refrained because of her politeness:<br />
mixed signals meet passion in a war zone. When we think one thing is the case it is often completely different.<br />
We as human beings are not psychic in the way that we believe people perceive us.<br />
Tahir has been here for a couple of months and is making a film. He and Alma are wandering the streets<br />
in the centre of the city at the present working on the film. We discuss the possibility that they should follow<br />
Dominic around for three days while Darja and I work on the project of the peace initiative.<br />
The following day we rendezvous again at the offices of Danca at the International Centre for <strong>Peace</strong>. Up<br />
three flights of stairs, staring out at sandbagged windows that are completely shattered. Chain-smoking again<br />
Danca on the telephones, ‘Yes, yes, I perfectly understand…’ She indicates for us to come in and sit down. We<br />
begin the negotiations of where to put the billboard and where to have a press conference.<br />
I am attempting to approach the United Nations, the 4th Battalion UNPROFOR, and the French Battalion<br />
in the compound south of the centre to assist us with erecting the billboard. We also visit that day the press<br />
centre at the United Nations compound which is in the old post office in the city. I need to visit some people to<br />
assist with the music, sound system, PA, and we go to a couple of possible sites where we feel we might be able
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
We also visit that day the press centre at the United<br />
Nations compound which is in the old post office in<br />
the city.<br />
The cool Balkan sun<br />
is shining, peeping<br />
surreptitiously through<br />
the winter clouds.<br />
to exhibit the billboard. The bombed out library in<br />
the east is a possibility.<br />
The cool Balkan sun is shining, peeping<br />
surreptitiously through the winter clouds. It is the<br />
first day where the sun has come through and a<br />
few lazy dogs are basking, gnawing on plastic bags<br />
with some kind of refuse or offal in them. I can see<br />
sporadic activity and people just getting on with<br />
their lives as usual.<br />
The Holiday Inn is the biggest most kitsch<br />
grandest and most infamous hotel in town. It is<br />
situated just off Snipers’ Alley. A ten-storey semiguttered<br />
yellow-filled deconstructionist monolith,<br />
which had been built for the ’84 Olympics. It now<br />
stands in an elephant graveyard of littered glass,<br />
shrapnel scars and overgrown and sad cabbages.<br />
Although the snipers have rarely shot since the<br />
cease-fire the people still walk with a hurried and<br />
pregnant pace. This is where we first met Nevan.<br />
The foyer was dark brooding and empty of any<br />
clients except the odd journalist.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
I remember Nevan’s third axiom as: ‘there are no<br />
good deaths; only quick ones.’<br />
I couldn’t help but notice the half burnt map on<br />
the glass counter:<br />
“I said that if the one on the left wins I will kill them both. If<br />
the one on the right wins I will let both live.” The one the<br />
left lost and he killed them both.<br />
WELCOME - The hotel is located in the<br />
city centre opposite to the Land Museum<br />
(Zemaljski muzej). From the airport<br />
Dubrovnik and Zagreb via Motorway E,<br />
at Stupska petlja (loop) exit to the left.<br />
Continue down Zmaja od Bosne street.<br />
The hotel is approximately 100m on your<br />
right. Sarajevo International Airport 8 Km,<br />
Railway Station 0,3 Km. City centre 0,5<br />
Km. Business district 0,7 Km.Features:<br />
206 rooms. 10 floors. 3 Restaurants, 2<br />
bars. Meeting rooms to 450. 24 hours room<br />
service. Gift shop. Art Gallery. Local: Land<br />
museum 0,1 Km, Zetra sports hall 0,8 Km.<br />
Bascarsija (old town) 1,2 Km. Bay’s mosque<br />
1,3 Km, Vijecnica (city hall)1,4 Km.<br />
Cathedral 1,5 Km.Vrelo Bosne, Stojcevac<br />
I chuckled to myself as I read it, it all sounded so<br />
optimistic…<br />
Then Nevan walks up to us.<br />
‘Looking for another commission guide?’ he<br />
enquires.<br />
‘No thank you, we’re fine.’<br />
Nevan was thick set, square shoulders and built<br />
like a cross between an Olympic athlete and a sumo<br />
wrestler with bi-focal glasses and a black and red<br />
gimme cap. 31 years of age. Single. His lover, he<br />
tells me, is on the other side of the city on Serb<br />
controlled [territory]... They are both Serbian.<br />
He showed me some battered journalists’<br />
cards from Americans who had written on the back<br />
of them in red biro. He was searching for a room<br />
in town with some Japanese journalists but at 269<br />
Marks this hotel was prohibitively expensive. He<br />
is now an itinerant guide and translator for the<br />
numerous journalists who enter and exit weekly.<br />
Mostly Japanese, he tells me. The Japanese<br />
apparently love to do stories here.<br />
‘I am a poker player. Everything, which I do, is
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
according to chance. I flipped a coin. If it went heads<br />
I was to go across to her on the Serbian side. It was<br />
tails and I remained here.’<br />
He spoke to me how he heroically defended the<br />
bridge, how as a battalion commandment every time<br />
he went out he had to return with the same number<br />
of men and that even if dead they could not be left<br />
behind. He spoke about how he killed two Serbians<br />
in one of the abandoned houses in the No Man’s<br />
Land between the two areas. He had waited in an<br />
adjacent room when the two soldiers entered. They<br />
neither saw nor heard him. He waited. They began a<br />
game of cards.<br />
‘I said that if the one on the left wins I will kill<br />
them both. If the one on the right wins I will let both<br />
live.’ The one the left lost and he killed them both.<br />
Nevan spoke of how<br />
the sense of power<br />
over the destinies of<br />
others made him feel<br />
like God. ‘I am God<br />
and I will not die’, he<br />
said to me…. It was<br />
an addiction.<br />
Nevan did not<br />
believe in freewill and<br />
‘when a war such as<br />
this imposes itself<br />
and turns your life upside down I cannot accept the<br />
rhetoric of soft western and bourgeois sentiment.’ I<br />
can understand his point of view. I believe otherwise<br />
but I respect his position because I have not<br />
experienced this war the way he had. He did not<br />
believe in God. He did not believe in an afterlife. ‘I<br />
will die...maybe’, he said to me. I remember Nevan’s<br />
third axiom as: ‘there are no good deaths; only quick<br />
ones.’<br />
He didn’t want to listen to my arguments. Later<br />
he just wanted to play pool. I gave him an invitation<br />
to the exhibition. He never came. I never saw him<br />
again. I liked him. It’s not for me to judge Nevan.<br />
Judgement comes with complete information and<br />
wisdom. I don’t believe I possessed either.<br />
Saturday, 18th November, Sarajevo<br />
The first tentative steps towards creating a<br />
humanitarian statement seem to be proceeding as<br />
planned. There seems to be unified response to what<br />
I am doing and people are inspired and positively<br />
assisting with open arms. This is something which I<br />
really did not anticipate but which I appreciate. I am<br />
beginning to feel more and more exhausted by this<br />
process. Each day my bones seem to ache more and<br />
more. What constitute this fatigue are simply the<br />
tensions of this area.<br />
Alma, Tahir’s assistant takes me one day for<br />
coffee to a small coffee shop around the corner here<br />
without alcohol—everything is a coffee shop. Tahir<br />
and Alma have been following us these past few of<br />
days, filming our every fart, move, and jostle. It is<br />
important that we are able to document this time so<br />
that perhaps in the future I can create a memory of<br />
this event.<br />
There is a curfew at 10.00pm. I spend the<br />
tonight with this friend of mine, Radgovic Sinisi, an<br />
artist and toothless flautist, who has lost his front<br />
tooth as a result of the war or maybe because he<br />
was a little drunk one night… I’m not so sure…<br />
Radgovic’s house is full of the strangest idiosyncratic<br />
paraphernalia… What the diary did not say was<br />
that I visited him the first night with Zoltan; Darja<br />
is out seeing friends and it is in the centre of the<br />
city, crumbling with half the room blown apart. I<br />
return again. There one of the UNHCR plastic sheets<br />
like a death shroud that covers the window and he<br />
manages to play this song with the flute. At the same<br />
time, because there is no electricity on tonight and<br />
therefore he must show me with his candle. All these<br />
portraits his girlfriend has painted have shrapnel<br />
embedded in them from a mortar shell which went<br />
through the house two months ago. It symbolises<br />
to me the collision between culture, civilization and<br />
war. How easy it is to effectively destroy creation<br />
without thought.<br />
At Radgovic’s we collapse into floral patterned<br />
moth-eaten armchairs. He plays the flute as an<br />
impromptu concert for the camera. He gets up and<br />
makes coffee… all the while talking at amphetamine<br />
break neck speed as if there is no tomorrow... he
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
“Dominic, the clever people left here<br />
long ago. But clever people are<br />
not brave. Only the stupid and the<br />
loyal remained here and refugees<br />
have filled the rest of the people in<br />
Sarajevo.”<br />
then skips around the house, Dominic following him<br />
me with the video Hi-8 camera as he shows photo<br />
portrait of his girlfriend beside the river Milajacka<br />
canal in black leathers holding an Uzi with her<br />
Doberman... On the broken mantelpiece rests a<br />
sepia photo of his girlfriend with the two Dobermans<br />
holding an Uzi. With the machine gun she poses as<br />
the formidable heroine; or something out of some<br />
sort of ridiculous home movie. Radgovic keeps<br />
repeating: ‘Agh such beautiful snake eyes.’<br />
The two Doberman dogs are leaving presents<br />
of their faeces everywhere for Radgovic to pick<br />
up…. ‘But I love them…such a beautiful design’, he<br />
says stroking the dog’s hind legs….And we talk and<br />
discuss his position and his life long into the night.<br />
In a way Radgovic without a front tooth distils and<br />
symbolises the whole of the paradox of Sarajevo,<br />
the confusion, the idiocy of this environment—the<br />
flautist without a front tooth like an artist who is<br />
blind or a Beethoven who is deaf…<br />
When I went with Radgovic a couple of<br />
interesting things have happened. I am writing<br />
this that evening… I took my coat off (the big faux<br />
rubber one which I had brought from Moscow) and<br />
I went to look for my wallet but there was nothing<br />
there. Radgovic was playing host to me and for one<br />
nanosecond a thought flashed that he had stolen it.<br />
So often all my money, my documents, everything<br />
was in there and I had this moment of doubt. The<br />
moment of doubt seared into me—I had to ask<br />
myself do I approach him and accuse him? Do I wait<br />
till I return home, wait till I go home and double<br />
check because there is the slim possibility that I had<br />
left the documents at home? Sometimes by trusting<br />
my forgetfulness I gain a friendship. So it was a risk<br />
and I decided to go with this even though it was a<br />
new friendship. You could say that in doing this we<br />
trusted that not all people are likely to take from us.<br />
Because of my paranoia of what I went through<br />
in Russia and all the things, which had happened in<br />
Russia, I was confounded by this dilemma. I chose to<br />
return. I returned that night after curfew. Through<br />
the darkened streets his place was a little bit further<br />
south in the old quarter of the town and there was<br />
not a car or a street lamp. Occasionally hiding form<br />
the military police. I can remember being by myself<br />
walking, hiding, I could see a car coming and I would<br />
then leap into the shadows, again waiting, crouching<br />
and then go further on. It took me maybe an hour to<br />
get back at about 1.15am. At home the wallet was<br />
waiting.<br />
After that event with Radgovic it was in a way a<br />
distillation of trust. There are elements of goodness<br />
in a world which is rotting and being torn.<br />
Sunday, 19th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
The Baseasija is Sarajevo’s main market square,<br />
and the hub of the inner city. Over forty cramped<br />
streets radiate off it where you can buy cut price<br />
cigarettes, the odd stale coffee grounds, handmade<br />
tin coffee pots and cups, and AC Milan football<br />
shirts. The Benetton shop seems to be the only
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
store in town that has a marketing policy and has<br />
been opened since May 26 of this year…. I believe<br />
Darja was actually responsible for Benetton’s finding<br />
a blood splattered t-shirt to use for one of their ad<br />
campaigns. Is it sick to exploit a form of attention to<br />
human rights abuses? It is a necessary and legitimate<br />
statement about life and problems.<br />
Inspite of a ceasefire, the shelling is only at<br />
night in the distance that you can hear the sound<br />
pounding—like a distant rumble of a giant digesting<br />
a bad meal<br />
After this I walked to the National Library which<br />
had been targeted by the Serbs, and they had used<br />
incendiary shells to torch the entire library. It has<br />
been suggested that we use this as the area for the<br />
exhibition by Spahic. The walls are still standing<br />
and the interior had<br />
been torched, with all<br />
the beautiful tomes<br />
and books destroyed<br />
including the<br />
historical documents<br />
from the Ottoman<br />
Empire.<br />
I then sauntered<br />
today off to see the<br />
Commander of the<br />
4th Battalion in<br />
the compound of the UNPROFOR in Skenderija.<br />
Past the drop gate through the security clearance<br />
mustering my French. There is the United Nations<br />
peacekeeping brigade stationed at the centre of<br />
Sarajevo. Because of my French (schoolboy at best,<br />
but at least it disarms them and they are prepared to<br />
help us) I take the pamphlets and the booklets and<br />
introduce my suggestions.<br />
After a period waiting I am shown into a severe<br />
office with a UN flag and a series of maps strewn<br />
over a desk. I throw the documents onto the<br />
formica table for the French Battalion commander<br />
Capitaine Demeny. He inspects them like he might<br />
an hors d’oeuvre, picks the image of the billboard<br />
up and turns it around with his index and thumb…<br />
squinting… He pauses and then indicates rather<br />
matter-of-factly that he will gladly allocate some<br />
soldiers for the event.<br />
Darja is often really elsewhere… I can never<br />
track her down. It is frustrating but she has her own<br />
life. Often I end up alone, walking the streets. There<br />
is much to be done and little time to do it. The clock<br />
is ticking for a message to others.<br />
In the downtime between meetings I spend<br />
with it my Pentax 35mm camera walking around<br />
being the indulgent Western disaster tourist taking<br />
photographs of shattered buildings of bunkers of<br />
sandbags of people walking the streets.<br />
In some ways I am surprised, the shelling is<br />
only at night - in the distance that you can hear the<br />
sound pounding—like a distant rumble of a giant<br />
digesting a bad meal.<br />
Igor Camo, the composer of the music I used,<br />
said to me:<br />
‘Dominic, the clever people left here long ago.<br />
But clever people are not brave. Only the stupid<br />
and the loyal remained here and refugees have filled<br />
the rest of the people in Sarajevo. I myself with<br />
my girlfriend tried to escape across to the Serbian<br />
sector twice. You would have to be crazy to remain<br />
here. And now to avoid military service I also must<br />
pretend to be crazy. But I am already crazy being<br />
here... so I don’t need to pretend. I simulate epileptic<br />
fits and speak to the military psychologist about how<br />
I identify with Estragon in Waiting for Godot.’<br />
As I wander now through the streets all I can see<br />
amidst the people trudging through the snow with<br />
their bad teeth and shopping bags are the burnt-out<br />
cars, the broken, empty windows, the buses parked<br />
head to toe, cars, and the cabbages growing in the<br />
parking lots, among the odd UN peacekeeping vehicle.<br />
The good guys in white—well NATO has come.<br />
Walking I came across a friend of Darja’s at a<br />
street corner, Gazi Hurssrev Begova. Dark, good<br />
looking in an<br />
intellectual way he<br />
had a humour about<br />
him I could not put<br />
into words… Almir<br />
Vrpoic sat hunched<br />
over with me and<br />
spoke quietly, as he<br />
did not want others<br />
to hear. Nudging<br />
me, we wander off<br />
to get a drink going<br />
towards the River Milijacka, which runs straight<br />
through the centre of town like a canal.<br />
He had been a bodyguard for one of the generals.<br />
He had been brought up in a suburb, which is now<br />
under Serbian control, called Dobrinja. His best<br />
friend was a boy named Zjelko. They had shared<br />
everything in life together. They had grown up<br />
together and so when the war began, the borders<br />
had been redrawn and they had lost contact with<br />
each other. He spent four years of the war as a<br />
soldier but often on the front-line as a bodyguard.<br />
Whilst on the front-line between Stup and Ilijda<br />
he called across to the Serbs and asked if his friend<br />
was one of the soldiers stationed amongst them.<br />
After some time a shout came back: ‘Yes, he is there.’<br />
The weapons were put aside and both walked into<br />
the centre of the DMZ and stood in the cold for four<br />
hours and talked.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
“It is not me. It’s the others. It’s the politicians. We just follow<br />
orders, he said. There is no freewill. No choice. He blamed the<br />
authorities above me on my side. It was our battle but we do not<br />
decide who is to right, who”....<br />
And then he laughed. A slow embarrassed laugh.<br />
Almir said:<br />
‘My friend asked me: “do you need food,<br />
because I can get it for you. Do you need anything?<br />
Cigarettes?”<br />
‘I had nothing. We had no food. But I said no. I<br />
declined. I was not proud. It just wasn’t right.<br />
‘I said to him: “Why has this happened that we<br />
are fighting each other. We were... maybe still are<br />
best friends, but the war has done this...”<br />
‘His reply was:<br />
“It is not me. It’s the others. It’s the politicians.<br />
We just follow orders, he said. There is no freewill.<br />
No choice. He blamed the authorities above me on<br />
my side. It was our battle but we do not decide who<br />
is to right, who”.... And then he laughed. A slow<br />
embarrassed laugh.<br />
‘We stood in that stupid cold for four hours on<br />
the line with both our soldiers twenty metres behind<br />
us, quietly smoking. We reminisced and asked after<br />
our mutual friends. I have never seen him since.’ At<br />
this we shuffled off.<br />
Almir and I met up later that day... We<br />
were watching the film produced by The Who,<br />
Quadrophenia. I remember that I have seen it only<br />
in snippets, perhaps a few years before. Now I had<br />
time to sit and see the whole. I explain to him the<br />
tribal nature of English society, of the Mods and<br />
Rockers. There is a pause and then with a kind of<br />
innocence and candour he replied:<br />
‘So it is like the Serbs and Muslims.’<br />
I gave him a stainless steel pencil and holder. He<br />
gave me a set of old Slobodna Bosnia magazines—<br />
the Rolling Stone of Bosnia, if you like. I liked him.<br />
(Later Almir married Darja, or at least they<br />
remained together. Two good people who found<br />
each other.)
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
It is the first musical event, which had happened during the war, and this band had come across in the convoy<br />
after us and Laibach is a Slovenian band satirising fascism with a heavy metal pulse.<br />
“Life is Life” will be sung to the beat of<br />
their little drum in the Opera House.<br />
...at the National Theatre in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, in conjunction with the Obala Art<br />
Centre and Radio Zid and the Open Society Institutes of Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the<br />
NSK groups (Laibach, Irwin, Noordung, New Collectivism, Department of Pure and Applied<br />
Philosophy, Retrovision), proclaimed the NSK State Sarajevo (following a similar event in Berlin<br />
in 1993: NSK Staat Berlin).<br />
The formal opening is on 20th of November, at 12.00 p.m. local time, in the main auditorium of the National<br />
Theatre. An NSK representative unveiled a commemorative plaque and, in the presence of a delegation from<br />
cultural and political circles in Sarajevo, gave a welcoming address.<br />
The Slovenian band Laibach is playing tonight.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
I keep on wondering whether I am trying<br />
to fulfil my destiny here or escape my destiny or<br />
maybe this is some just fucked up heroic adventure<br />
that I am not even suppose to be making. Is it ego<br />
driven, adventure driven, indulgence or simply<br />
a sacrifice? I am risking my life; I am risking my<br />
finances to do something like this, but at the same<br />
time even this ridiculous document is a form of<br />
questioning and trying to understand why we do<br />
things. Intuitively, we feel deep within us that there<br />
is something that we have fulfil in order to achieve a<br />
state not of happiness, but if we have a conscience<br />
and intuition which asks us to do things then in<br />
fulfilling that, even though there is difficulty, even<br />
sacrifice, it allows us to live with ourselves and to<br />
live with ease. This is an important ingredient to<br />
human happiness and the human conscience.<br />
The Press release reads:<br />
20th and 21st of November <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
at the National Theatre in Sarajevo,<br />
Bosnia-Herzegovina, in conjunction<br />
with the Obala Art Centre and Radio<br />
Zid and the Open Society Institutes<br />
of Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina,<br />
the NSK groups (Laibach, Irwin,<br />
Noordung, New Collectivism,<br />
Department of Pure and Applied<br />
Philosophy, Retrovision), proclaimed<br />
the NSK State Sarajevo (following a<br />
similar event in Berlin in 1993: NSK<br />
Staat Berlin).<br />
The formal opening is on 20th of<br />
November, at 12.00 p.m. local time, in<br />
the main auditorium of the National<br />
Theatre. An NSK representative<br />
unveiled a commemorative plaque<br />
and, in the presence of a delegation<br />
from cultural and political circles in<br />
Monday, 20th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
National Theatre, Sarajevo<br />
The Slovenian band Laibach is playing tonight.<br />
Their style is a satire on the fascist dogma of the<br />
neo-Nazis, the New World Order, and the fall of<br />
totalitarianism. ‘Life is Life’ will be sung to the<br />
beat of their little drum in the Opera House. The<br />
National Theatre is still intact and the lights are on.<br />
It is free. The doormen here have machine guns.<br />
The foreigner does not need a ticket. He becomes<br />
part-prince; part untouchable.<br />
It is the first musical event, that has happened<br />
during the war, and this band had come across in<br />
the convoy after us and Laibach is a Slovenian band<br />
satirising fascism with a heavy metal pulse.<br />
The guards tell us we can film but only for<br />
like three minutes. Darja has some journalist<br />
accreditation but I am the inept foreigner without<br />
credentials.<br />
People look at me quizzically as if I am some sort<br />
of beached whale. As if I am really out of place here,
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
and I notice the humour is a form of black humour,<br />
and so at times this humour is pointed towards me.<br />
I have to realize it is actually not something to take<br />
personally that it should not be part of my paranoia<br />
or seen as a direct attack on me, but rather their<br />
way of getting by. This is their way of dealing with<br />
the situations, which are often life and death—and<br />
black humour is there so that to people here can<br />
laugh in the face of death. A throbbing earache and<br />
the concert is over and my tinnitus has begun!<br />
After the band finishes we go off to the café<br />
in the basement next door to the Obala Centre<br />
of Art. It seems as though it is a city, which is<br />
so multicultural and is able to absorb all sort of<br />
cultures. It is one of<br />
those post-grunge<br />
regulation clubs<br />
without a juke-box,<br />
or pool table, but<br />
cheap beer and tables<br />
that look like they’re<br />
collected from street<br />
corners.<br />
The other thing I<br />
have noticed in the<br />
city is that because<br />
alcohol is forbidden<br />
as a result of the war (or maybe because of<br />
predominance of Muslim criterion or philosophies)<br />
there seems to be a humongous amount of coffee<br />
shops where they serve very bad milk less coffee.<br />
At the Cafe Obala I met again Darja’s friend<br />
Zolka. Darja had known him before she was<br />
wounded. The unexpected explosion of violence<br />
had punctuated the evening. I’m sitting down,<br />
feeling momentarily alone. Everyone is speaking<br />
in a language I cannot understand when this fight<br />
zeroes in on our table. I have been asked to babysit<br />
the cameras of Darja, Zolka and I. Two men<br />
begin fighting over the usual misunderstanding and<br />
differences of opinions, which they cannot verbally<br />
reconcile. Beer pours over the floor. The table is<br />
upturned. I pick up the cameras as the beer pours<br />
over the men land and me on the table breaking it.<br />
We then leave the room, the press of people,<br />
the sandbags and the smoke and step into the cold<br />
night air—the ten o’clock curfew and the gracefully<br />
descending snow.<br />
Tuesday, 21st November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Today we have sprinted around searching for<br />
the PA, seeing Igor the sound guy, attempting to get<br />
the UNPROFOR soldiers to tie the awnings up…<br />
the usual mall touch-ups prior to the event… It is<br />
evening…Darja is somewhere in the new city with<br />
friends…I am alone staring at the television in a<br />
language I cannot understand. Her life is here and<br />
mine is somewhere else…. I get up and go over to<br />
my garret room. I begin to write the speech, my<br />
hand scrawls the words, which come quickly and<br />
with ease:<br />
‘I know there are many who see war as an<br />
inevitability but because something exists or may<br />
seem inevitable does not make it right under the law<br />
of man or God. If peace is to come it is not only up<br />
to NATO or Clinton, it is not only up to the three<br />
governments; it is up to all the people who have<br />
fought and suffered out of bravery, in confusion, in<br />
doubt and even in hate. It is the responsibility of every<br />
person to understand the divisions, which they have<br />
been taught are only just that; divisions, which have<br />
been taught that, if not brotherhood then at least<br />
coexistence can only occur when the heart wills it. This<br />
war maybe over but the peace will only last when it is<br />
first made in all of our hearts.’<br />
I paused and then reread what I had written. I then<br />
continued:<br />
‘This image is for all countries who wage war against<br />
each other. How do we speak of peace, it cannot be<br />
spoken it can only be lived. It cannot be cultivated, it<br />
cannot be imported. This peace exists only within the<br />
human heart and only exists in this moment. In the<br />
invisible heart it lives as a seed within every person<br />
on this planet. There are those who water it and there<br />
are those who cannot feel it.<br />
‘To those who wage war out of greed or in hate<br />
and all I can say for them is that the price of peace<br />
can never be paid by war. In planting the seed of war<br />
only further war will grow and can grow from it.<br />
‘<strong>Peace</strong> is the sanctity of the heart filled with love<br />
for another. It is understanding that what happens to<br />
you is without fear. What happens to you happens to<br />
another. The origin of war is based on the structure<br />
of greed, of fear, of violence and of power and in
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
if not brotherhood then at least coexistence can<br />
only occur when the heart wills it. This war may<br />
soon be over but the peace will only last when it is<br />
first made in all of our hearts.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
that greed cannot understand the stillness of peace.<br />
It seeks only to make peace into an image of itself.<br />
Greed cannot understand the modesty of enough.<br />
For those whose thirst for power inflicts suffering on<br />
others all I can say is that the desire for power never<br />
ends. It arises because the individuals feel totally<br />
inadequate, because their foundation is based and<br />
built on fear. If they cannot live in the heart now than<br />
they must live in fear. This fear exists because the self<br />
feels inadequate as it is. This power fuels the greatest<br />
desire but this thirst for power can never make a<br />
person happy therefore they seek more power. It is<br />
built on a foundation, which does not exist. It cannot<br />
touch the truth.<br />
‘So all people who walk this road to power and its<br />
desire to expand accordingly through force is built<br />
on their<br />
fear and<br />
therefore<br />
it can not<br />
be built on<br />
truth.’<br />
I put the<br />
pen down.<br />
This is what<br />
people<br />
needed to<br />
hear!<br />
Tuesday, 21st November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
The third official meeting with Danca Illic the<br />
secretary of the Winter Festival occurred today. We<br />
plan to erect the billboard in a disused musical hall,<br />
Skenderija, which had been bombed six months<br />
previously. There will be a press conference and<br />
a few speeches. There are no guarantees it will<br />
succeed and no one knows what is in store or who<br />
will help.<br />
The next port of call is on the city’s parameter.<br />
Darja and I take a taxi to see the press centre of the<br />
United Nations command post. The United Nations<br />
command post looms in the distance; it is a fortress<br />
in a sea of destruction. The PTT, Post and Tele<br />
Communications Bureau is the headquarters of the<br />
UN in Sarajevo. All the windows had been destroyed,<br />
replaced by sandbags. The balcony is embroidered in<br />
razor wire. Guards poke their rifles from bunkers.<br />
Soon we are sitting in the UNPROFOR offices in<br />
the old sandbagged PTT building in the press room<br />
with the New Zealanders David Balham and Deborah<br />
during a blackout, writing a press release in ball<br />
point pen, while Deborah says: ‘Not only have we<br />
seen worse press releases, we’ve written worse.’<br />
Darja and I had first met Debra the press officer<br />
two days before. Debra and I had sat together in the<br />
darkness without a light fumbling for candles and<br />
matches for three hours. Today the electricity is<br />
back on.<br />
The ghosts of the living continue to haunt this<br />
landscape. The next meeting is with the director of<br />
the gallery, Faud Hadjhalovic, who is our sponsor<br />
and organiser. The billboard also has to be repaired.<br />
There is not a glimmer of light in this darkness. It<br />
was neither the war nor the bombings, which are<br />
unnerving but rather the silences. These are the<br />
causalities, not only the dead but also the living<br />
whose ghosts inhabit this landscape.<br />
Today the electricity has been turned on but it<br />
is sporadic. Some nights there is electricity, some<br />
nights everything is submerged in darkness. One<br />
evening the lights went out in the city and the house<br />
where we were staying in was again in darkness.<br />
Wednesday, 22nd November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Today Tahir, Alma, Darja and I are walking along<br />
Marsala Tita to visit the market which suffered 37<br />
dead casualties from Serbian shelling of civilians on<br />
the 28th of August <strong>1995</strong> in the Market on Markale.<br />
As Tahir limps along the street he points with a<br />
wavering finger at the craters, explaining since he<br />
was an eyewitness:<br />
‘After the explosion I raced here and this wind<br />
rose and seemed to blow everything right across the<br />
street…Fingers, hands, limbs, plastic bags…’<br />
My mind flashes<br />
to the news reports...<br />
Flash across<br />
television screens…<br />
some faceless voice<br />
reads:<br />
MARKET<br />
MASSACRE IN<br />
<strong>SARAJEVO</strong><br />
A mortar bomb has exploded in the<br />
main market square in Sarajevo killing<br />
37 and wounding 200 people. It is the<br />
worst single atrocity in the 22-month<br />
old conflict between Bosnia’s Serbs,<br />
Muslims and Croats. UN inspectors are<br />
examining the crater left by the bomb<br />
to determine where it came from, but<br />
it is widely believed the Serbian forces<br />
besieging the city launched it. Some<br />
people were literally torn apart. The<br />
single 120mm shell landed on a stall in
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
A mortar bomb has exploded in the main market square in Sarajevo<br />
killing 37 and wounding 200 people. The worst single atrocity in the 22-<br />
month old confl ict between Bosnia’s Serbs, Muslims and Croats.<br />
The single 120mm shell landed on a<br />
stall in the packed open-air market just<br />
before noon leaving Muslims and Serbs<br />
dead and injured. “Some people were<br />
literally torn apart.”<br />
A mortar bomb<br />
has exploded in<br />
the main market<br />
square in Sarajevo<br />
killing 37 and<br />
wounding 200<br />
people.<br />
“After, the explosion I raced here and this wind rose and<br />
seemed to blow everything right across the street… Fingers,<br />
hands, limbs, plastic bags...’
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
...walking through the area thinking of the injustices and insoluble genocide… Here<br />
is Snipers’ Alley, the site of the Bread Queue Massacre, the burned-out library, the<br />
bombarded hospital and the overfl owing cemetery.<br />
the packed open-air market just before<br />
noon leaving Muslims and Serbs dead<br />
and injured. “Some people were literally<br />
torn apart. Heads and limbs were ripped<br />
off bodies,” said one eyewitness.<br />
Tahir explained how he raced to the scene and<br />
with his cameraperson Roman to film the Markale<br />
massacre—with ray ban sunglasses on and chewing<br />
gum. When they came to edit the piece they just<br />
could not use it because it looked too sacrilegious.<br />
Sometimes we cannot see how we are. Even though<br />
he was severely upset by such an event—the way he<br />
appeared rendered the footage useless. We cannot<br />
see what another person observes; despite the fact<br />
that Tahir was shocked and horrified by the event,<br />
it just so happened he was chewing gum and he had<br />
sunglasses on and on film it just looked insensitive.<br />
We walk on to one of the Galleries. Obala Centre,<br />
which brought Laibach to Sarajevo. There, is a<br />
mongrel marmalade coloured dog at the Obala<br />
Centre for Art. It lies like all dogs, on a mat beside<br />
the desk of the woman who works here but this one<br />
has a twitch. Endia from the centre explains: ‘it is<br />
because of too many grenades going off. Its a nice<br />
dog... don’t be frightened of her. She maybe a little<br />
old...’, her voice trails off. There is a bit of mange<br />
on her fur coat. The colour of the hair is mustard. A<br />
cross between a terrier and a Labrador at a guess.<br />
I went to pat it and it snarled. As Endia explains<br />
to me: ‘it’s kind of a metaphor for those here who<br />
have been traumatised by the war. If you attempt<br />
to reach out to such people, to give them some<br />
form of affection they can be hostile through their<br />
conditioned fear and suspicion. It becomes a reflex.’<br />
This is my premise—always innocent people<br />
must suffer, as a result of what others consider was<br />
right and wrong; just and unjust. The military define<br />
the death of a civilian as collateral damage; as an<br />
unfortunate and regrettable price we must pay for<br />
conquering injustice. If we conquer evil with good<br />
but we sacrifice this with the deaths of innocent<br />
people are we any better than those who perpetrate<br />
the evil? Can we fight injustice with the death of any<br />
human being? The horror of war is that a state of<br />
belief or an ideology gives justifications through God<br />
or country. God or country cannot justify the killing<br />
of any innocent person.<br />
Thursday, November 23rd, Arrest in<br />
Snipers’ Alley Sarajevo, No Man’s<br />
Land 5.56pm…<br />
4.20am of the next day…<br />
I’m writing this a few hours after getting back<br />
from a strange evening and night. Yesterday the<br />
unexpected became expected… the unknown caller<br />
knocked at the door… it was creepy… eerie empty<br />
feeling which stole into my mind and heart… but<br />
I as usually was deaf to the voice inside my head
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
This is my premise—always innocent people must suffer, as a result of<br />
what others consider was right and wrong; just and unjust. The military<br />
define the death of a civilian as collateral damage; as an unfortunate and<br />
regrettable price we must pay for conquering injustice. If we conquer evil<br />
with good but we sacrifice this with the deaths of innocent people are<br />
we any better than those who perpetrate the evil? Can we fight injustice<br />
with the death of any human being? The horror of war is that a state of<br />
belief or an ideology gives justifications through God or country. God or<br />
country cannot justify the killing of any innocent person.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
...are not heroic, they are not adventures, they have an<br />
unearthly deadness and ordinariness about them because we<br />
are not certain of what will happen in the future...<br />
which ordered: ‘be careful…’ But since the final<br />
expectation is realising nothing else will surprise<br />
me… this is what stole like a burglar into my<br />
consciousness—tonight the gonzo diplomat…. and<br />
crusading artist Dominic Ryan was detained for<br />
photographing military installations close to Snipers’<br />
Alley. Arrested might be a better term.<br />
I had neither authorisation nor an accredited<br />
journalistic ID as I trudged through a militarily<br />
sensitive area… I had been outside the Holiday Inn,<br />
very close to the frontline and Serbian-held zone<br />
videoing dilapidated building. I was told or rather<br />
instructed later that they were military targets. The<br />
fact that it was one hundred metres from the hotel<br />
and buildings we were staying in seemed of little<br />
consequence. In any case I spoke little Bosnian.<br />
I tried to convince the military personnel that I<br />
am an artist with a peace message for both sides…<br />
by drawing little drawings in my address book<br />
and they replied: ‘and I am Milosevic…!’ So from<br />
their observation post where I was apprehended at<br />
mother of pearl twilight around 6 in the evening, I<br />
was forcibly escorted by two armed and sullen khaki<br />
militia, no insignias, walkie talkies, Kalashnikovs…<br />
the usual…. to the station and then to the Central<br />
Bureau for Security and Police, where I sat for<br />
eleven hours in what looked like an empty mustard<br />
brown schoolroom, dinted and scuffed with white<br />
sheets covering the windows and I was expecting<br />
a bare bulb sinning… but there was no electricity!<br />
I was initially interrogated for speaking broken<br />
Russian and possessing among other things a<br />
Russian stamp in my passport... the obvious reason<br />
being that I was a KGB or Serbian spy.<br />
It began like this –<br />
The BBC offices are situated in Snipers’ Alley:<br />
an area where the Serbs attack and send mortared<br />
shells. At this stage there was technically a ceasefire<br />
and even though that small single armed gunfire<br />
was close. I decided to walk out with my tiny little<br />
camera like a fucking fool and film the destruction of<br />
broken masonry.<br />
First I wander into benign areas where there<br />
are grey cabbages in uncultivated and neglected<br />
gardens, and some lawns have also been cultivated<br />
for food. It is very, very vacant and there is this<br />
deathly stillness about it. I wander five hundred<br />
metres away from the two main buildings, which<br />
have been torched; there is no traffic on the roads.<br />
Because I do not have a tripod I place the Sony<br />
camera on the floor so there are no shudders in the<br />
filming.<br />
I am walking through the area thinking of the<br />
injustices and insoluble genocide… Here is Snipers’<br />
Alley, the site of the Bread Queue Massacre, the<br />
burned-out library, the bombarded hospital and<br />
the overflowing cemetery. I decide that I am going<br />
to film these buildings. It is unearthly quiet and<br />
there is nobody around but I have inadvertently and<br />
unknowingly stumbled into an area, which is the no<br />
man’s land between the Serbs and Bosnians.<br />
I have walked maybe two hundred metres south<br />
and for thirty-five minutes I am blissfully ignorant<br />
of the consequences of my act. I am filming away<br />
and then all of a sudden a Bosnian soldier comes up<br />
and I smile sheepishly at him and of course because
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
of the language issues I say ‘hi’ and I don’t have any documents. I have a British passport and I try to talk with<br />
them but the only way I can talk is by speaking my Russian, which fucks me up even more because all the Serbs<br />
speak Russian or at least understand it.<br />
I am immediately assumed to be a Serb spy filming military installations. I am not mistreated in any way.<br />
They are the military police and they take me directly with quiet urgency to the police station. I am kept alone<br />
in this large empty room for eleven hours. It is a schoolroom with benches, but I cannot leave... My thoughts are<br />
Zen at that time.<br />
I realise that next time I need journalist accreditation. This dawned late in the evening… if there is a next<br />
time… the kind of mistake that we learn …<br />
They are actually polite but nobody speaks English except for very basic questions. They start off with<br />
the usual barrage of questions—where do you come from, where are you going, why do you not have papers<br />
as a journalist with you… etc., etc., etc. The presumption is that I am lying; they patiently wait for the chief<br />
police, mumbling amongst themselves. The chief does speak a smattering of classical English as he after ten<br />
hours saunters through the door to begin his new morning… I see him and after so many hours I get taken into<br />
another school room and there are ten or twelve school desks and my thoughts keep on reverting back to Dr<br />
Keller and his words:<br />
‘Hey man you are on your own!’<br />
The Police Chief is bald but very polite, has manners and courteous while he looks intently at the footage<br />
replaying inside the Hi- 8 camera watching it in the viewfinder. I don’t even know his name but he speaks a<br />
broken doggerel English.<br />
They ring up Omer and Fatima who are like grieving parents— Omer saying: ‘He is such a kind sweet nice<br />
boy; he has not done anything.’ Not that the military police really care, there is a distorted proof to the contrary<br />
of what I have done. And with my camera they could have acted a lot more suspiciously. After eleven hours I<br />
am released. There are no charges placed, and it is a serious wake up call. Again it is the little kid who does not<br />
know better and yet it perseveres by playing with fire. I got burnt but did not die…I need to sleep… now.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Three things to remember: When one moves<br />
too far, and one does not know the terrain—one<br />
should never presume. But I guess it makes for a<br />
great diary entry. These things when they occur are<br />
not heroic, they are not adventures, they have an<br />
unearthly deadness and ordinariness about them<br />
because we are not certain of what will happen in<br />
the future and it is the uncertainty which holds us<br />
tight and bound like prisoners. The sense of being<br />
trapped in the present, which we cannot escape<br />
from.<br />
I suppose the only thing I can laugh about is<br />
the bread with the lard, which they generously<br />
offered… Under these circumstances I ate it and I<br />
was hungry, and there you have it.<br />
Eventfully my warders seemed to relax... a glint<br />
came into their eyes…and so I could see that our<br />
little misunderstanding was clear…Mustapha and<br />
Nabusha were their names who then offered me<br />
a ritual reconciling cigarette to the non-smoker<br />
whose both parents had died of lung cancer and<br />
emphysema …a healthy little nail… As they say<br />
to bang into my coffin… the ritual cigarette and a<br />
half loaf of bread filled with lard or bacon fat. At<br />
first glance it seemed to be cheese but after eating<br />
three quarters of it I realised it was dry oily lard.<br />
They treated me well and were friendly and under<br />
circumstances of war—it was I who was in error and<br />
they who showed a degree of latitude. Reprieve! But<br />
it was a long time and a little adventure.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Monday, 27th November, <strong>1995</strong>,<br />
Sarajevo<br />
Finally, with the help of the 4th Battalion we have<br />
finally erected the billboard in the House of Youth in<br />
Skenderija (or rather what was left of the House of<br />
Youth). It is truly a skeleton of its former glory that<br />
has remained.<br />
The PA has been set up.<br />
The text read–‘This is an image to the futility<br />
of war and its inability to solve the problems of<br />
humanity’.<br />
We congregated in the destroyed House of Youth<br />
to erect the billboard today. There were seven 4th<br />
Battalion UN soldiers while the snow gently fell.<br />
We unfolded the billboard and erected it in the<br />
hall. There is no ceiling only sky and falling flakes<br />
of snow…The whole roof had been blown off and it<br />
took maybe four or five hours to erect. Tahir filmed<br />
it. Omer was there and Darja appeared. Zoltan took<br />
some photos. It was cool and I enjoyed it.<br />
Talking French to the battalion soldiers has been<br />
fun…trying out my French… with Sargeant Marco<br />
Royer laughing. In the distance you can hear the odd<br />
pop.<br />
Branci Festovic said about the war: ‘it was an<br />
examination to test the limits of endurance. My<br />
message from a country of last things would be<br />
I would like you to have been here.’ For a brief<br />
moment I was there.<br />
That evening a small congregation of people<br />
gathered with the press. Reuters were there a few<br />
papers CNN…The usual…I read the speech—the<br />
ambassador to the UK was present as was Fuad who<br />
spoke and Ibraham Spahic. This is a brief excerpt<br />
from my speech I wanted to include this evening…:<br />
‘This is addressed to the rest of the world and to<br />
those who cannot see and cannot understand. This<br />
image is for all wars that are waged. It is a memorial<br />
for what cannot be allowed to occur but does<br />
continuously occur.<br />
It is an image of the futility of war and its inability<br />
to solve the problems of humanity. This war maybe<br />
over but the peace will only last when it is made in<br />
all of our hearts – thank you.<br />
‘Firstly I would like to take the opportunity<br />
to thank the many people who took part in this.<br />
Hadjhalovic, Ibrahim Spahic and Danc Illic, from<br />
the Sarajevo Winter Festival, and the International<br />
Centre for <strong>Peace</strong>, the Millennium trust, Capt.<br />
Berthemey who was with the French Battalion and<br />
Sergeant Marco Royer. The French 4th Battalion for<br />
the UNPROFOR. The music is by Igor Camo and if<br />
you don’t make him famous I will. Lastly I want to<br />
honour Darja Lebar.’<br />
Outside in the snow a reporter asked me<br />
about the meaning of the painting—all I could say<br />
was: ‘What that say is that colour is a dimension<br />
above and beyond black and white, just as hope<br />
is a dimension above destruction. We had chosen<br />
to exhibit the painting in areas where there was<br />
problems.’<br />
Then a journalist turned to me and posed a few<br />
questions: ‘what were your thoughts on Sarajevo<br />
before you came here? Are there some changes<br />
since you arrived?’<br />
I said: ‘I think the television image is localised<br />
to one small area—people live here as if there is no<br />
war—human dignity<br />
is what we should<br />
see not dead bodies.<br />
If peace exists<br />
than let this be a<br />
memorial to what<br />
should not have been<br />
but was and if war<br />
continues than let<br />
this be a plea for that<br />
war.’<br />
And as I walked<br />
back through the snow all I could think of was what<br />
had happened in such a brief time. The next day<br />
Darja brought a little piece of paper for me. I had<br />
been awarded the Liberty Prize for human rights in<br />
the European Union and Bosnia Herzegovina.<br />
I believe suffering is unnecessary but nevertheless<br />
it can teach us valuable tools for learning. The first<br />
is that suffering is unnecessary. The second is that it<br />
strips us of the inessential aspects of life. One deals<br />
existentially. When you are hungry you seek food.<br />
When you are cold you seek warmth.<br />
People like Fatima and Omer amaze me. Simple<br />
dignified people who can live through this siege<br />
without undue hate or intolerance. There is<br />
perplexity and confusion within them because of<br />
what they continue to experience, but not hate.<br />
They are 70 years of age and yet they live with<br />
great grace. Without complaint they watch The<br />
Pink Panther at night on Television BiH with long<br />
underwear and three dressing gowns and a beanie<br />
because of the cold. I sat and watched Easy Rider
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
We unfolded the billboard and<br />
erected it in the hall. There is no<br />
ceiling only sky and falling flakes<br />
of snow…The whole roof had been<br />
blown off and it took maybe four or<br />
five hours to erect.<br />
The text read–‘This is an image to the<br />
futility of war and its inability to solve the<br />
problems of humanity’. We congregated<br />
in the destroyed House of Youth to erect<br />
the billboard today. There were seven<br />
4th Battalion UN soldiers while the snow<br />
gently fell.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
That evening a small congregation<br />
of people gathered with the press.<br />
Reuters were there a few papers<br />
CNN…The usual…I read the speech—the<br />
ambassador to the UK was present as<br />
was Fuad who spoke and Ibriham Spahic.<br />
This is a brief excerpt from my speech I<br />
wanted to include this evening…:<br />
Danca said about the war: ‘it was an examination to test the<br />
limits of endurance. My message from a country of last things<br />
would be I would like you to have been here.’ For a brief<br />
moment I was there.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
It was a compliment to be awarded the Prix Liberte for services to Humanity in Europe in Bosnia<br />
with them one evening. Tahir, my Bosnian filmmaker friend, told me that it was shown many times in the<br />
cinemas during the siege. They must have been a well-worn copy that was available during the siege, which<br />
then became a symbol for the freedom, which had been denied them.<br />
It was a compliment to be awarded the Prix Liberte for services to Humanity in Europe in Bosnia by The<br />
International Centre For <strong>Peace</strong>.<br />
The tears of Zagreb, the endlessness of the buildings, the bridges which had been blown up, the refugees,<br />
the dogs of war, and the burnt out leaves of the books.<br />
My questions are many and myriad…like the name of a woman, which keeps popping into my head… is this<br />
going to last forever? Will the next generation carry the scars of the past as this one carries the scars of the<br />
previous generation? The solution is for all to forgive.<br />
If we build our hostilities towards those who have tried to liquidate us, we will become defensive and<br />
immobilised by our fears. Then we will be the defenders of our own fears. By defending we risk the fate of<br />
becoming like our enemies… People create wars out of fear. But it is not the fear of domination but of being
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
‘I know you want to help me. I have been here,<br />
I am a prisoner. Are we not all prisoners in our own<br />
minds, in our own thoughts and so who can set me<br />
free but myself?’
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
It was peculiar sitting there with Omer and Fatima trying to describe in my broken Russo-Bosnian what a<br />
seminal film it had been in the 60s, that Peter Fonda had made more money from that one film than his father<br />
had for all his films put together. Looking at the acid trip sequence and judging by their quizzical observation, it<br />
went right over their head.<br />
Sunday, 3rd December, <strong>1995</strong>, Sarajevo<br />
It is the last day here before we leave. The billboard will remain. Dirty unwashed children are playing<br />
without any other option and in front of me there is an old man who is walking with a great limp. Nothing is<br />
unusual here. Everyone here walks with a limp. He is pushing a small broken trolley with seven broken leather<br />
suitcases attached to it. Tied with torn cords. I happen to be following him. Eventually he comes to a small<br />
underground basement, which he unlocks. A very scraggy terrier or mongrel dog, I’m not certain, welcomes<br />
him, jumping up and down. He turns to me and beckons me to come and he turns towards me pointing with his<br />
little gnarled finger like the branches of the tree at the Embassy in Ljubljana and he seems to say, or am I just<br />
imagining this: ‘There are no accidents, every meeting is meant to be. Every meeting spans another one.’ In the<br />
centre of the room there is something I don’t understand what I am looking at. I look down into it and there is a<br />
hole. There is something sort of flowing from it.<br />
He says to me: ‘I know you want to help me. I have been here, I am a prisoner. Are we not all prisoners in<br />
our own minds, in our own thoughts and so who can set me free but myself?’ And he laughs. I turn my back and<br />
I race out the door and all I can hear is that laughter.<br />
The magazine that Darja and Alma worked on was Slobodan Bosna which means free.<br />
I just wanted to say Radovic Sinisa lived in Tetovosk 4 Sarajevo Bosnia. Phone number 546322.<br />
We get in the bus to leave, it is early morning, and the bus starts to accelerate while cement shrapnelscarred<br />
buildings begin to fade past me faster and faster. Winter is coming. My thoughts return to Sarajevo as I<br />
leave her.<br />
I agree with Radgovic I want to come back and see the hurt gone. I want to see business and life reinstated. I<br />
want to see little children laughing and bright vivid colours. I want to see art and flowers again and I want to see<br />
people in love. The scars will remain and so will some of the hate but as long as people do not kill themselves<br />
over it, it will be OK. If war does not happen in a year it is going to be OK. The people are scared here. They do<br />
not believe. Four years of war has left him or her with a deep hurt and suspicion, it’s a kind of shock, yet each<br />
person deals with their shock in a different way.<br />
People who have been incarcerated know what freedom is more than those who have never been in prison.<br />
I recall my journalist evening with David, Tahir, Darja, Phil and Whitney, two diplomats from Turkey, the<br />
Ambassador from the UK who spoke at the opening, the synchronicity of the mural, the speech, and the<br />
differences in time.<br />
The night with Laibach. Dr Keller and his stories, his money, the French Battalion and how there are only<br />
UN or journalists here. The man with the trolley. The dog. The pressman from Reuters.<br />
The burial of the dead in the stadium. A drawing for Darja. Cabbages in the nature strips. The UNHCR<br />
plastic on all the windows. 10.00pm curfew. The age of the young men, some of the young men would walk<br />
the streets and you would see them shuffling or hobbling or crippled and in this war what happens is that it<br />
just makes the young so old and it is as if they have been washed by this strange fairy dust which ages them<br />
overnight.
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
attacked…The Serbs indicate that they were victims of the Turks. ‘They the Turks murdered us 500 years ago<br />
and the Croats murdered us 50 years ago.’ But this cannot justify murder in this generation.<br />
It is not the evil in our lives but that we deny this evil… Every country turns into the monster it is seeking to<br />
defend itself from by using the same tools…<br />
How and when are we going cure<br />
ourselves of such in built fears?<br />
The answer is only love…
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Postscript<br />
Darja Lebar remained in Sarajevo resuming her<br />
career in journalism and human rights. She married a<br />
good man Almir and bore him a child.<br />
Dominic Ryan returned to Australia and set up<br />
a small NGO; the <strong>Peace</strong> <strong>Project</strong>. He later visited<br />
Kosovo, the Gaza Strip, Cyprus and the West Bank<br />
of Palestine and Israel in the Middle East. He was<br />
awarded the Liberty Prize for Human Rights in the EU<br />
after the Sarajevo initiative.<br />
Alma Sahbaz co-directed the film Exile in<br />
Sarajevo, which was released in 1998 and received<br />
an Emmy Award. She lived in Australia for a year<br />
and then returned and now works in Sarajevo in an<br />
NGO.<br />
Tahir Gambis directed Exile in Sarajevo and<br />
continues to crusade for human rights in Kosovo,<br />
Afghanistan, and the refugee crisis in Australia.<br />
The 4th Battalion of the French UNPROFOR<br />
returned to France eight weeks later.<br />
Postscript on the city of Sarajevo<br />
On February 26, 1996, by opening the northwest<br />
passage, i.e. by liberating the Vogos(h)c(h)a and<br />
Ilijas(h) districts, Sarajevo was proclaimed an open<br />
city. The Serbs had destroyed the post office and<br />
the city was left without telephones. Its water, gas<br />
and electricity supply was cut. The food supply was<br />
fast disappearing. The cemeteries were expanding.<br />
After the Dayton Agreement and the coming of the<br />
IFOR, the Serbs started to leave the occupied territory<br />
around the city. On March 19, 1996, the Bosnian<br />
Serbs left the occupied district of the city—Grbavica—<br />
which was the last part of the city to be returned to<br />
the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina under<br />
the Dayton Agreement. 10,615 persons, of whom<br />
1,601 were children, were killed in Sarajevo. More<br />
than 50,000 persons were wounded, a great number<br />
of whom remain invalids. The siege of the city lasted<br />
from May 2, 1992 to February 26, 1996, or 1,295<br />
days, which is the longest siege in the modern history<br />
of mankind. The 1295-day siege left the downtown<br />
area and certain suburbs in utter ruins.<br />
(NOTE: Maybe one day someone will dramatise this<br />
event, avoid the boredom and mediocrity by turning<br />
it into a love story with a series of thrilling and deadly<br />
escapades. Darja Labar decided to stay. I returned<br />
to Australia and have never seen Darja nor Sarajevo<br />
again.)
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
To Dominic, whom I love. A friend of mine, Branci Festovic said: “It was an examination to test the limits<br />
of endurance. My mesage from a country of last things was that I would like you to have been you<br />
here.” Dominic was there too. P.S To your son - Dominic smoked (he actually does not do that) a few<br />
drina cigarettes. That happened in the winter of ‘95 in a Bosnian capitol, Sarajevo. The town had been<br />
severely damaged in hate, intolerance and stupidity. Darja - Sarajevo 95
M I N U T E S T O WA R : Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo<br />
Minutes to War<br />
The Diary of a Gonzo Diplomat<br />
1. Moscow 1994<br />
2. Sarajevo <strong>1995</strong><br />
3. Israel-Palestine 1997<br />
4. Kosovo-Albania 1999<br />
5. Cyprus 2000<br />
6. Qaliya 2001 - Jerusalem 2002<br />
7. The <strong>Peace</strong> <strong>Project</strong><br />
Seven Diaries by Dominic Ryan<br />
Edited by Christopher Race<br />
Graphic Design by Walter Ochoa -<br />
Leigh Woodburgess - Pat<br />
Photographs by Dominic Ryan - Daniel Rosenthal -<br />
Tycho Sierra - Deaudeaux - Firouz Malekzadeh<br />
-UN forces Cyprus & Madeline Garlick–Tahir Gambis<br />
© Dominic Ryan 2005<br />
This is an inhouse publication for private purposes only.<br />
The <strong>Peace</strong> <strong>Project</strong>