Free Rock and Hard Places by Andrew Mueller Page A

over. I initially assume that this is some obscure craze, like the wallet-chains or baby pacifiers that occasionally become regrettably popular with the kids back home, but when I mention it to someone, they say no, people used to do that so it would be easier to get their shoes and trousers off if they were hit. More than once, I’m nearly run over by cars coasting silently downhill, according to frugal wartime habit, with their engines switched off.
    My other narrow failure to become the single most pathetic casualty of the Bosnian conflict occurs in the monumental ruins of the library. The
library, or what’s left of it, totters near the spot where, on June 28, 1914, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist called Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. This assassination preceded a train of events—world war, lopsided peace, world war, cold war, collapse of communism, rise of nationalism—that may well have happened anyway, but the symmetry is eerie. It’s as if the echo of Princip’s pistol, gathering momentum down the decades, somehow rebounded on its point of origin, magnified a millionfold. Along this street, the 20th century began and ended.
    The library is—or was—a magnificent Austro-Hungarian building, a repository of thousands of priceless documents, books and treasures. It was destroyed in August 1992 by Bosnian Serb Army incendiary shells—a deliberate act of vandalism, a cultural genocide to serve notice of the attempted human one to follow. As I walk out onto the remains of the first floor balcony above the entrance, I hear an enormous crash immediately behind me. When the dust settles, I see a lump of exquisitely carved ceiling masonry lying on the floor. It has missed me by about three feet.
    There are almost certainly other near misses—Grbavica on the day of its handover finally seems like too interesting a thing to pass up, and we figure if we stick to the footpaths and don’t go barging into closed flats and opening cupboard doors, we should be fairly safe from mines and booby traps. Photographer Kennedy and I go to visit the ravaged suburb with Chris Watt of The Serious Road Trip, also visiting Sarajevo for the first time, and Jim Marshall, a Scot who spent most of the siege in Sarajevo with the Road Trip and now works for the Office of the High Representative (OHR). Jim offers to take us to see Grbavica because “I want to see where those fuckers were shooting at me from” (they hit him once, wounding him in one leg).
    Grbavica is unbelievably creepy. There isn’t an undamaged building in the suburb, and few blocks lack the scars of fires, some of which have been deliberately lit over the last few weeks by Serbs determined that the Grbavica that they hand back to Bosnia should be of as little value as possible.
    These sorts of scenes were supposed to have faded from history along with 1945-vintage newsreel footage of liberated Europe. The buildings all look like they’re waiting for demolition teams to come back from lunch and finish the job. Trenches fortified with rusty hulks
of wrecked cars connect the high-rise ruins. A steady drizzle of clothes, books, furniture and other household flotsam flutters from balconies and windows: the possessions that the departing Serb population didn’t want to carry. Some of this stuff is being flung overboard by people who were evicted from these apartments before the war and are now returning, some of it by opportunists hoping that perhaps the original owners are dead, or refugees, or emigrants, yet more of it by looters. From below, it’s as if the wrecked buildings are vomiting their diseased, hungover innards into the streets.
    These blocks of flats were notorious throughout the siege as high-rise Bosnian Serb Army positions—not for nothing did the expanse of trunk road that runs past Grbavica on the other side of the river become internationally infamous as Sniper Alley. As recently as two months ago—which is to say two months