Life in Sarajevo is returning to normal. Italian contractors have completed reconstruction of the city's main railway station with an impressive frontage of sandstone and plate glass. Ornate clocks on either side of the building stopped dead for years; now both work. Frank Shouldice writes
Only a handful of trains leave the station every day and several tracks are still blocked by twisted bits of debris that were once Europe-bound carriages. Commuters pass them without a glance. The resumption of normal service, however slow, is embraced like a familiar habit. For nearly five years nobody complained about trains being late because there were no trains. Now they come daily through the valley, chugging around the bend with a sound as vaguely uplifting as the whistle of a tradesman refilling the shell holes that pock the platform.
After everything, despite everything, life goes on.
Sarajevo's three-year siege left 10,500 civilians buried in its folds and five times that number maimed or injured. The savagery of that lasting nightmare even placed funerals between the crosswires of snipers in the hills. And so the only urgency of death was to bury bodies as quickly as possible and postpone indefinitely the bitter luxury of grieving.
Through biting winters and baking summers burials were quick and fearful, conducted on grass verges, in public parks, anywhere the ground was soft enough for a spade. Or simply where victims fell. You can get used to most things here - including the sight of gravestones at bus stops - and at times the city feels like a temporary cemetery. In some ways it was.
Outdoor chess
But the bustle has returned. Coffee shops and beer gardens line the main thoroughfares. The main indoor sports arena has reopened, as have cinemas, theatres, fashion and tourist shops. Games of outdoor chess have returned for pensive old men, lugging giant-size plastic pieces across the town squares.
The prevalence of hastily erected gravestones certainly jars with the city's cool sophistication but even visitors soon assimilate them as a part of city furniture in an almost surreal return to normality.
"Sometimes," remarked a physicist friend more attuned to the discipline of science and logic, "I wonder did the war really happen here at all." A Muslim acquaintance named Beslo felt the same. During the war his Serb neighbour joined snipers in the mountains and took part in the slaughter. When the war ended the man put his gun away and came home. He called to Beslo asking for help to move some furniture. "Normally I help my neighbours but this time I said no," says Beslo with a decisive shake of his head.
Even under an energetic reconstruction programme visual reminders of war abound. Many windows are still framed in heavy plastic. Buildings lie where they tumbled, tidy mountains of concrete rubble. Many areas around the city remain silent, abandoned because of hidden land-mines. Children are taught not to pick up strange objects but children will be children and mines are patient predators. As UN peacekeepers are constantly reminded, mines are the only weapons that always find a target.
Bullet-holes once disfigured every building but many have been re-plastered. The flower market where 68 people were killed and 200 injured by a mortar bomb is now splashed by colour and fragrance. Brightly coloured trams trundle photogenically across town.
Sniper's Alley
It still feels strange walking along the diagonal crossroads that became known as Sniper's Alley. The roadway links various university faculties and apartment blocks and also leads to the Holiday Inn, which then served as an expensively unsafe base for international media personnel.
On a visit to the hotel a couple of years ago I had the curious fortune to stumble across a Miss Bosnia beauty pageant. A batch of uniformly attractive models rehearsed fixed smiles for the grim business ahead. TV technicians expressed grave doubts about lighting the catwalk while po-faced organisers glued to mobile phones made urgent calls.
The sight of such frantic preparation for such inane diversion would normally invite cursory dismissal, but watching the whole exercise swing into action I was reminded of a similar event staged at the Holiday Inn during the siege. On that occasion, the Miss Sarajevo beauty contest - memorably evoked in song by U2 with Pavarotti - was a defiantly blithe refusal to cow to the bombardment and depredation all around. More than anything it reaffirmed the peculiar resilience of the human spirit in the face of numbing brutality.
Fatuous distractions
This time the post-war strut of prospective Miss Bosnias was almost as symbolic in this once besieged ballroom. For all its vacuity there was a real sense that normality had somehow found its way back to town. Even to the sceptical observer it was a joyful discovery, that something as frivolous as choosing Miss Bosnia marked a resumption of fatuous distractions, of everyday life.
Predictably, that night in Sarajevo ended in tears, this time for the winner. Air kisses all round for the beautiful people; bubble-gum balm for the war-wounded watching the event "live" on TV.
Balkan women are known for their beauty but when it comes to rebuilding the former Yugoslavia ethnicity can be more than skin deep. That same year the Miss Croatia contest was thrown into chaos when the winner was discovered to be Muslim instead of Catholic.
Organisers found an excuse to strip Miss Croatia of her title and pick a winner more acceptable to her newly independent nation.