Today, Sarajevo looks very peaceful. Looking at the crowd milling around under the shade of the trees that line the river running through the city center, it is hard to imagine that as recently as the mid-1990s, these people experienced death and hunger on a daily basis.
The Dayton agreement of November 1995 ensured that ethnic and religious communities are kept carefully apart. The complex political arrangement does not make for easy governance, and many experts question whether it is sustainable, but it has kept strife at bay.
Beyond the pleasant family scenes of a summer weekend, the war remains very present in the city. A first-time visitor cannot fail to notice the numerous cemeteries that occupy prime land in the center of town and are a constant reminder of the heavy death toll caused by the inter-ethnic war. Although the city appears relatively prosperous thanks to international aid and investment, pockmarked buildings, chiseled by hundreds of bullets, are still visible amid shopping centers and modern office blocks.
A couple of short documentaries I saw at the Sarajevo Film Festival also gave some clues about the less visible scars left by the conflict and the psychological process of recovery that is still ongoing among the population.
“The Srebrenica Cenotaph” is based on images filmed by a well-known cameraman from the town who documented the lives of his comrades-in-arms and fellow citizens in the months before the city fell to the Serb forces and before he himself was killed. When the cinematographer died, his camera was buried and retrieved after the war.
The footage, recorded in the months before the Srebrenica massacre, introduced us to Bosniak fighters, the butcher, who cured meat to keep it fresh, the shoemaker and other characters. Next to each name was a small coffin that required no explanation: all these men had died in the worst massacre to have taken place in Europe since World War II. On July 11, 1995, 8,100 men and boys, separated from the women by the Serbian forces that took over the town -- which was nominally under the protection of UN peacekeepers, who failed to protect the residents -- were taken away and killed.
In Srebrenica, the mourning is not yet over. Many of the bodies have yet to be officially buried. Forensic experts from the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) are still carrying out DNA tests on body parts that were exhumed from several mass graves. Over 6,000 people have so far been identified by comparing recovered parts with blood samples from relatives. Bodies are deemed ready for burial when 70 percent of the remains have been found.
Every year, on the anniversary of the fall of the town, more victims are put to rest in an emotional collective ceremony that inevitably reopens old wounds, but also brings closure to the grieving relatives. Last month, 520 more bodies were finally settled in their final resting place.
Equally moving, but in a very different way, was a short documentary entitled “Believers,” which focused on the Pontanima church choir of Sarajevo. Founded at the end of the war by a Franciscan priest, it is one of few remaining oases of multiculturalism in the city. Initially a Catholic choir, it gradually expanded under its visionary leader to include singers and spiritual music from other faiths. All the choristers spoke with passion about the music and their relations with their fellow singers. The choir has become a form of therapy, not just for themselves but also for the audience that comes to hear them perform.
Many concertgoers were initially surprised to hear one of their members, a Catholic nun, singing odes to Allah in a medrese, but once the initial surprise was over, the spiritual music allowed people to overcome their prejudices and find peace, the choristers explained. Working together allowed them to look ahead to the future, rather than dwell on the suffering of the past.
