In Sarajevo, Brave Dreams of a Real Peace

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  As the clock ticked toward the deadline for halting the siege of Sarajevo, residents of this withered capital crept out from their cellars into snowy silence and dared believe 22 months of bombardment might truly have come to an end.

While few feel confident that the daily grind of wartime hardship could cease anytime soon, a tense but undeniable quiet has followed NATO’s warning to encircling Bosnian Serb forces to pull back their artillery from within firing range of the capital or face punishing air strikes.

U.N. officials insist there will be no tolerance for defiance of a proclaimed cease-fire, and repeated warnings that NATO is serious about its threat of force seem to have compelled the Serbs to move or surrender their heavy guns.

The absence of crashing mortars and booming howitzers at first unnerved those accustomed to the daily rhythm of a bombardment that has taken more than 10,000 lives in the capital in less than two years.

But with eleventh-hour signs that the West’s gravest challenge to the Bosnian Serb besiegers may be effective, even the most cynical survivors are talking of a more peaceful future.

The wider war roiling the Balkans and the strangling blockade of this city are far from over, they say, but a merciful reprieve from death and maiming has generated a feeling that the NATO ultimatum has brought them to a turning point.

“I’ve said all along, ‘Let there be no water and no electricity and let there be prices higher than anywhere in the world but, please, don’t let there be any more shelling,’ ” said Ermina Music, who takes refuge from the city’s savagery by working long hours in her cellar restaurant.

“The blockade will continue, and we will remain trapped here like prisoners,” she said. “But this could be the beginning of the end, and at least people are starting to talk about there being a next step.”

The siege is not over, contended Asim Smajlovic, a war invalid peddling fresh vegetables and cans of meat sent here as humanitarian aid, but he hailed the halt of artillery shelling that has forced the city’s 380,000 holdouts to cower indoors.

“The atmosphere is already better. People are walking around outside, and more are coming here for shopping and trading,” said the sandy-haired vendor, arguing that those who defended Bosnia from a takeover by Serbian nationalists will score a psychological victory if the guns stay silent.

Many Sarajevans suspect that physical security may come at the price of their long-term freedom, as hundreds more U.N. troops have begun arriving to interpose themselves between the city and its attackers--a move that may preserve the borders of a rogue Serbian state-within-a-state seized by force and subjected to “ethnic cleansing.”

As the U.N. troops deploy to create a buffer zone between what is left of Sarajevo and the Serb-held territory that surrounds it, they are effectively partitioning the area along the lines of the territorial status quo.

“The new borders will be those lines around everything the Serbs hold now,” lamented Rasim Kadic, leader of the opposition Liberal Party. “At the demarcation line . . . now we’ll have (U.N. Secretary General Boutros) Boutros-Ghali’s border guards in the place of the Serbs.”

The U.N. commander of troops based in Bosnia, British Lt. Gen. Michael Rose, has described his plan for a cease-fire line as a temporary step to separate and protect hostile communities.

But many Bosnians fear the U.N. intervention will result in de facto defeat and ethnic division, citing the failure of the U.N. Protection Force to wrest occupied Croatian territory from Serbian rebels.

“I would rather the war continued than that they would divide the city. We’ve been living together for centuries,” said Hatema Gazibara, a 32-year-old Muslim.

Many worry that a U.N. buffer zone would actually tighten the rebels’ stranglehold on the city by imposing a barrier to black-market trade.

Smuggling has helped augment the sparse and starchy rations provided by a U.N.-protected humanitarian relief network, on which virtually everyone in Bosnia now depends for survival. The clandestine imports have kept some semblance of a private economy alive amid the chaos.

Mirsad Mojezinovic, a 26-year-old soldier defending the city, contends that the encircling Serbian forces have agreed to let U.N. troops patrol their seized territory because they hope it will slowly strangle the city.

“If they don’t kill people with mortars, they’ll do it by starvation,” he said, predicting a long-term territorial stalemate. “For now, it’s the easiest thing for the U.N. to do, to stand between us and them. Now (the U.N. Protection Force) becomes the border.”

Often, discussion of the consequences of Bosnian Serb withdrawal from the proclaimed demilitarized zone extending 12 miles out from the capital degenerates into grousing over the hardships that won’t go away with the retreating armor.

But people like Davor Popovic, one of the former Yugoslav federation’s best-known rock singers and a native of Sarajevo, claim the atmosphere in their city is one of cautious hope and expectation for the first time since Serbian nationalists opened the siege in April, 1992.

“With this ultimatum, for the first time we feel the outside world grasps what has been going on here,” said Popovic.