Free Rock and Hard Places by Andrew Mueller Page B

after the signing of the Dayton Accords—a rocket-propelled grenade launched from one of these buildings hit a crowded tram, killing one person and wounding several others. We climb up the dark, damp staircases to the top of one of them for a sniper’s-eye view of Sarajevo. Even without a telescopic sight, it’s sickeningly easy to imagine how simple a job it must have been for whoever sat up here with his rifle. I look out over the city, and the people walking around it, through the windows and the holes in the walls that he fired from, and I wonder what he’s doing now.
    Grbavica’s principal landmark—there’s about enough of it still standing upright to qualify as such—is its football stadium. Before the war, it was the home ground of Zeljeznicar FC, one of two teams from Sarajevo that used to compete in the Yugoslavian League. This afternoon, it looks like it’s just hosted an especially exuberant Old Firm derby, right down the splintered Celtic FC mirror in what used to be the bar. Scraps of shrapnel litter the terraces and the stands are spotted with bulletholes. On on the concourse behind the burnt-out snack bar, Martin finds a spent Bosnian Serb Army mortar casing.
    The pitch is on fire. Half of it, anyway. The blaze has been started by troops from the NATO-led United Nations Implementation Force (IFOR) patrolling Bosnia’s peace. It’s a reasonably risk-free way of clearing any mines that might have been laid in it by thoughtful Serbs as they departed.

    “How big a bang will they make if one goes off?” asks Chris, worriedly.
    “Not that big,” says Jim. “We’re okay.”
    Martin has noticed something infinitely more distressing. At the end of the pitch that isn’t ablaze, the goalposts are still standing, and around those goalposts, some kids are playing football. Martin sprints off towards them, waving his arms and bellowing frantic warnings in strangled, Scots-accented Bosnian. They ignore him.
    “That’s the most frightening thing about this city,” says Jim. “It’s full of people who just aren’t scared of anything anymore.”
    Outside the stadium, there are more children clowning around in the rubble. These children are, as children will, playing at soldiers, which in these wretched surroundings is both saddening and kind of funny. One of them has found himself an even more impressive souvenir than Martin’s mortar round. This kid is maybe eight or nine years old, and he’s equipped with all the usual kids-playing-war stuff—a yellow toy pistol tucked into his tracksuit bottoms, a black toy rifle in his right hand—but it’s what he’s got slung round his neck that has attracted my attention: a khaki, and very real, rocket-propelled grenade launcher. As any primary-school-age boy would, he looks utterly delighted with it.
    My reasons for calling Martin over are not, initially, entirely journalistic: while there’s a hell of a picture waiting to be taken here, Martin also knows more about this kind of hardware than I do, and I’d be happier about life in general if I knew the thing wasn’t loaded.
    “No,” says Martin. “We’d have noticed by now. There’d be one less building around here, for a start.”
    Martin crouches in front of the kid, whose smile by now is almost wider than his face, prepares to shoot, and lowers his camera.
    “Bollocks,” he says, laughing.
    Problem?
    “It’s too good,” he says. “Do you really think anybody, anywhere, is going to believe I didn’t set this up? I’ll take it, okay, but you have to buy it.”
     
    THE VISIT TO Grbavica Stadium reaps an unexpected bonus: back in Trust, I mention it to someone, who mentions it to someone who
knows something about football coaching classes that were run for Sarajevo’s kids throughout the siege, and a few days later I find myself sitting down to lunch with someone who played in a World Cup. Cool. Pedrag Pasic, known as “Paja,” represented Yugoslavia in the 1982 World Cup Finals in