War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [50]
The $5.1 billion international reconstruction effort, which has physically mended Sarajevo, masks despair. The smooth, plaster facades of apartment blocks, painted purple, red, blue, and yellow, shelter people who for the most part survive on the beneficence of others.
Beneath the physical rehabilitation, however, there is another reality. Men, out of work, often wounded physically or emotionally, waste hours in dingy coffee shops. Many of the young gather in the lines for visas outside foreign embassies. At night they meet in jammed, smoky clubs like Fis or The Stage where they can buy marijuana, Ecstasy, and heroin. An army of war invalids lies trapped indoors. Most of them lack proper medical attention, and many spend their days alone in rooms, tended by elderly parents.
“My son is inside,” said an angry seventy-year-old man, who would not give his name, as he stood outside his small house fitting new aluminum drainpipes to the roof. “He can’t get up. Every night my wife has to go in and turn him over so he can go to the bathroom.”
Thousands in the city, where half of the work force is jobless, live in apartments that belong to someone else, someone who lives across the ethnic gulf, still a universe away in this partitioned country.
Muslims now account for more than 90 percent of the population in this city of 3 50,000 and with the widespread uprooting of people during and after the war, only 20 percent of the city’s residents are natives of the city. The siege and the drastic changes that followed it have left behind exhaustion and bewilderment that makes routine life daunting.
“I will never again be able to live such a strong, horrible, and wonderful life,” said Boba Lizdek, thirty-two, a book translator. Lizdek, a Serb who stayed in Sarajevo through the war, said that since then she had lost her focus and purpose. “It is as if I see life through pieces of a mirror that lies in fragments,” she said.
The suburb of Dobrinja, built as the athletes’ village for the 1984 Winter Olympics, was on the front line during the war. Sections of the town are in ruins, the walls and roofs gone, the bricks and cement chewed up by shell and bullet holes. Crude grave markers poke up at odd angles from tiny, overgrown parks and lonely patches of ground.
The renovated buildings, often next to the ruins, gleam with spotless white plaster and terra-cotta tiled roofs. The balconies hold boxes of carnations. The streets are quiet.
Murdija Badzić, fifty-one, lived in a small apartment that she and her husband rebuilt for $ 10,000. It was clean, with new carpets, a semicircular blue sofa in the living room, and freshly painted walls.
In June 1992, Serbian troops occupied the Dobrinja area. Badzić was herded barefoot along with her children to a prison camp, where they were held for two weeks.
The family stayed away for four years out of fear, she said, and when she returned in 1996, all the mementos of her life, her photos, the children’s favorite toys, the wedding gifts, and the collection of trinkets that remind couples of the passage of time together, had vanished.
The two-room apartment held nothing of the old life. The only photo on the wall was of her eldest son, Husein, a soldier killed in the war. She and her husband lived with their remaining two sons. The young men, unemployed since the end of the war, had applied to emigrate to the United States. When Badzić spoke of the war, her youngest son, Aladin, twenty-four, abruptly left the room.
“Forgive him,” she said. “He cannot talk about the war. He cannot hear about it.”
During the family’s detention, Aladin, who was sixteen