work in progress - jeb sharp

Andras Riedlmayer points out that I have been misspelling Gorazde as Goradze.  I have corrected throughout. — Jeb

Sometimes a day’s reporting can feel pretty fragmented, but then, on a good day, it all comes together anyway. Today was like that. I had time to let the morning unfold a bit. Walked east to west through Sarajevo’s old town and then most of downtown by the river, taking photos, marveling at the mix of still-war-battered buildings with the new.

My first interview was with Miroslav Lajcak, the international community’s “High Representative” to Bosnia.  He’s disappointed some people here, but I found him forthright and thoughtful about my particular set of questions, namely the central contradictions and dilemmas  of being in charge of this place and the legacy of Dayton and what might have happened differently at Dayton and what the challenges are now as a result of Dayton. He was patient and eloquent and did not try to evade the trickier stuff. For that he has my thanks.

I also spoke to Tim Clancy, author of the Bradt guide to Bosnia and Herzegovina, about the last of the highlander villages in the Dinaric Alps near Sarajevo.

And I spoke at length with Jacob Finci, leader of Sarajevo’s Jewish Community and soon-to-be Bosnian Ambassador to Switzerland.  He was particularly eloquent about life under 44 months of siege in Sarajevo:

It’s not very easy to describe in two minutes because this was so strange and  almost totally unbelievable. It was unrealistic to live in the city without electricity, without any source of energy, without water, without phone lines. We succeeded to survive with 5 liters of water per day per capita and this same water was used for cooking, for washing, for toilet, everything in 5 liters.

At the same time we pretended we were living normally. We organized theatre performances  and theatre performances used to start at 11 o’clock in the morning and after, instead of going to some fancy restaurant, we went to the soup kitchen, being lucky to get one pot of beans or pasta or whatever was served there and this was as I call it an imitation of life and this was also kind of our so to say way of our struggle because not everyone had a rifle but this was also way of our struggle for survival, our battle to show we are living persons and that we are fighting for survival.

I remember  the journalists who covered the war here they have been amazed that each and every person on the street was dressed lovely with the makeup and so on and said how it can be? The answer was simple: maybe some foreign television will  take a picture of me and my family probably will see that I am still alive and I shall always be properly dressed in the clean clothes because I can get laundered and if they take me to hospital and somebody will see that my underwear are not very clean they will get the wrong impression about me. So it was the small things that we always count on and it was everything so unbelievable.

People who survived Sarajevo are not willing to talk about this to the people who never have been here because it looks so unbelievable that no one will believe you so nobody will understand me and that’s the reason why these stories are only for the insiders. And maybe just after Sarajevo I realized why the people who survived the Nazi camps who survived Auschwitz and then came back, they never spoke about Auschwitz because to say such things it’s so strange nobody will believe me.  Just after years years  after WW2 finished they started to open themselves  and tell us the real stories. Maybe something similar will happen about Sarajevo but now you have some books or political essays about war here and how it was stopped, what is possible to be done on the field of reconciliation  and similar  things but at the same time we still don’t have any novels or movies about inside life in such siege because maybe it will look a little bit as a fantastic story invented by some lunatic.

Finci has a case against Bosnia and Herzegovina at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. He maintains he should have the right to run for the presidency in Bosnia but under the current (Dayton) constitution he is precluded from doing so because as a Jew he doesn’t belong to one of the three designated identities: Muslims, Croats and Serbs.  He’s pretty confident the Court will rule in his favor; he hopes that in turn will add to pressure for Bosnia to change/update its constitution.

Mid-afternoon we set off on a last-day excursion to a highland village called Lukomir which is struggling to maintain the old ways in the face of rapid change all around.  Just two hours from Sarajevo and we were in an other-worldly landscape of limestone and lingering snow and shepherds tending flocks. Look for an audio portrait soon on The World.

 And finally, a lovely late dinner with new-found friends at Dveri (see www.dveri.co.ba) in Sarajevo. I had the muckalica and a glass of white wine from Herzegovina.

Sorry for lack of pics in this post; I even tried to post video from up in Lukomir, but the internet is too slow tonight and I don’t have the time or patience to wait it out.

Not sure when I’ll post next. In transit tomorrow. Thanks to all who’ve been following. 

Jeb

Eric Reeves’s take on events in Sudan last weekend:

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/05/15/a-gift-for-khartoum.aspx

Back in Sarajevo after a day in Banja Luka. And what a day it was. I’m not going to start writing about the Ferhadija mosque restoration in Banja Luka except to say a few things, because it’s so amazing once I start blethering I won’t be able to stop and I’d rather do it carefully and accurately in a radio story for The World.  That way I can get some sleep too. But the basic story is that the mosque was destroyed in 1993 during the Bosnian war. Not just damaged in the cross-fire but intentionally destroyed (with explosives) by Bosnian Serb forces intent on the destruction of Bosnian Muslim cultural sites.  Photographs of the site right after the destruction show piles of rubble. That rubble was then carted away and the remnants of the mosque were scattered in various sites including the river, a lake and a municipal garbage dump. The team of people restoring the mosque have been collecting, cleaning, scanning, numbering, categorizing and doing detective work on the fragments to figure out where they would have fit in original mosque.  It’s a giant architectural puzzle. Last year they actually began to rebuild, using as much old stone as possible but also some new dug from quarries believed to be near the original sources of stone. I’m starting to go on as I promised I wouldn’t. Suffice it to say the whole endeavor is one big human drama which demands to be told. And it is still unfolding, one chisel blow at a time. Visiting the site, doing interviews, hearing the sounds of the operation, seeing the texture of the materials,  was all incredibly fruitful. I hope I can do the story justice.

And I couldn’t resist this photo of our breakfast in Turbe about halfway there.

Polenta, yogurt and sheep feta (not sure if it’s technically feta but that’s what it tasted like). None of us touched the onion. This tray with three bowls is one portion by the way.  You spoon the cheese and yogurt into the polenta and eat the mixture. It was yummy.  One of our party wolfed his down, leaving the bowls completely empty. He said he learned to eat quickly during the war when you never knew if you’d have the chance to finish a meal. He hasn’t been able to shake the habit since.

Sarajevo - Started the day with an interview with Tito’s granddaughter Svetlana Broz, the author of Good People in an Evil Time. We’ve had her on The World  before but I wanted to talk to her specifically about how the war in Bosnia ended and what the Dayton Peace Accords have wrought here. She was feisty. Civil courage is the term she uses for what she’s promoting in Bosnia and Herzegovina, working with young people especially to help them become “upstanders” rather than “bystanders.”

Then a small sevdah concert by the Damir Imamovic Trio, promoting their second album Abrasevic Live, just out today. Look out for a global hit on The World soon (my second ever!) Damir’s grandfather Zaim Imamovic was the Frank Sinatra of sevdah here he says. Damir’s trying to keep the tradition alive by mixing it (of course) with other rhythms and styles. It was a wonderfully intimate scene today, sung the way he says sevdah should be sung—quietly to a small gathering—in this case outside the Babylon bar and café in the old town. I’m no music critic but Damir’s got something soulful and enticing going on.

Talked to various civil society types at Damir’s gathering; people who say politics here must change. There’s a sense of paralysis as a result of the ethnic designations that were reinforced at war’s end; the cynicism about democracy is palpable. And yet there’s enough progress to keep them working on the problem, and hoping for better times. Later met with a pair of documentary filmmakers passionate about the urgency of justice for war crimes victims here. Their outlook was bleak. It isn’t pretty when you dig beneath the surface here—there’s so much unresolved. There are uneven mixtures of anger, depression and optimism all over the place.

Had a late afternoon meal at Biban’s, a restaurant perched high above the city with stunning views.

It helped that the soft afternoon light somehow made the green hills stand out against the hazier cityscape below. Irfan pointed out the triangle of cathedral, church and mosque at the heart of Sarajevo.

On my plate, the tastiest trout I’ve had in years, surely plucked from a mountain stream not long before. Then cakes in a favorite place of Irfan’s near his childhood home. Afterwards he took me round the corner to show me this building which has yet to be fixed up since the war.

Tomorrow we drive to Banja Luka in Republika Srpska to witness the painstaking restoration of the 16th century Ferhadija Mosque, destroyed during the war.

Alarm is already set for 5 am. Jet lag is all in the mind.

I wanted to visit these two towns south east of Sarajevo after reading Lynne Jones’s Then the Shooting Started. Gorazde was under siege for most of the war. Foca saw some of the worst ethnic cleansing and atrocities. Gorazde is in the part of the country known as the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Foca is in Republika Srpska or the Bosnian Serb Republic. I  wanted to speak to young people in both places to see how those who grew up with the war understand it now, and how they think about the war’s end and its legacy. I wasn’t disappointed. Spent about half the day in each place (they are just 20 or 30 minutes apart by road) and heard quite a range of experience, emotion and opinion. Foca is a more tense and troubled place still and it was harder to find people willing to speak there. Here are a few photos:

Merima and Belma, Gorazde

Muslic and Muslic, Gorazde

Novak and Zeljko, Foca

 Mirjana and Andrej, Foca

I learned a lot from these teenagers and 20-somethings today. You’ll hear from them in my radio pieces at some point.

The journey out and back from Sarajevo was beautiful. You’re in wilderness in no time after leaving the city and the road winds through steep gorges and into dark mountain tunnels and above swirling green rivers. Hoped to see bears and wolves but had to settle for cattle and plough horses. There were farm yards with wisteria in full bloom and at one point a valley full of silvery-blossomed trees I couldn’t identify and my translator only knew the Bosnian word for.  Note to self: learn more fauna and flora before getting much older.

Tomorrow: Civil courage and Sevdah

Alex de Waal’s take on what happened over the weekend:

http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/darfur/2008/05/11/the-hour-of-the-hardliners/

Arrived mid-afternoon after three flights with two smooth connections in Munich and Vienna. Beautiful day all the way. I had a window seat coming into Sarajevo which is surrounded by mountains, some still topped with snow. The overall impression was lush and green. I would have been surprised if I hadn’t read Tim Clancy’s Bradt guide on the plane which goes on with some passion  about Bosnia and Herzegovina’s largely undiscovered natural resources and the urgent need to protect them. 

My guide and translator Irfan met me at the airport and whisked me off for a coffee so we could discuss the week’s plans. Then he treated me to a Sunday meal at his parents’ house!  I had my first taste of the traditional meat pastry called the burek and the thin yogurt drink that goes with it. Both delicious.  Tired though I was I even had a taste of the proffered local spirit made of plums which my guidebook tells me is called Sljivovica. Irfan and his father took me to a window in the apartment and  pointed out how close the front line had been during the war and described life in the building when Sarajevo was under siege. 

Then a meeting with a prominent journalist and a friend of his who works as a translator at the International Criminal Tribunal  for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. And after that an interview with a lawyer and sociologist and founding member of a new multiethnic party hoping to shake up the political landscape here in coming months.

Took in the sunset from a hillside above the old city in a park full of young people  chatting and laughing and wiling away what was left of Sunday.

A good conference is a boon for reporters; I came away from a day at the Nieman Foundation with a handful of story ideas and lots of new sources to pester. There was some of the usual tension between scholars and journalists–academics often feel news coverage is too simplistic and without enough context; we journalists try to explain the constraints under which we operate. But it’s always good to be reminded of the blinders one might have in approaching a story. Lots more to say on this but no time today as I pack for Bosnia. 

I’m off to an intriguing conference at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard today called Reporting Global Conflict: Uncovering the Link Between Religion and Human Rights. It’s a chance for journalists to sit down with scholars to think about the ways in which religion and human rights intersect and sometimes collide. The organizers say they have two goals:

1) To educate journalists on the basics of the human rights framework and legislation and how they relate to and are interpreted within the Abrahamic religions.

2) To engage scholars, leaders, advocates and journalists in a frank, constructive discussion of the roles religion, human rights legislation and the media each play in securing, protecting or violating human rights.

 

Sounds good. I’ll let you know how it is.