War Tour: Sarajevo

High upon a mountain overlooking Sarajevo, our tour guide stepped gingerly off of the wide pathway and began to climb up a slope, eight cameras dangling from his arm and slung across his torso. Our group, ten travelers in all, waited at the bottom, awestruck by this risky move. We watched his careful foot placement, on tree roots and exposed rock - less likely to be hiding a landmine. Although he had climbed this hill many times, there was always still a very serious chance that a false step would set off one of the millions of mines scattered all over this mountain.

When he reached the ruins of a Serbian bunker at the top, Jasmin snapped a picture with each of our cameras. He'd found two mines a few weeks back, unearthed them carefully, and he wanted to show us what they look like. In a month or two, a mine expert he knows will come and diffuse them.

Jasmin fought in the siege of Sarajevo, which began nearly twenty years ago when the Serbian army surrounded the capital of the fledgling Bosnia and Herzegovina nation. For nearly four years, the front line wavered within a few hundred yards of its original position on the hilltop, encircling the city. The Sarajevans were unable to break the Serbian noose, while the Serbs unable to break the wills of the Sarajevans who fought on empty stomachs and smuggled weapons to evade the promise of genocide.

We walked around the mountain were Jasmin fought, a mere four kilometres from his home, where he lived with his wife and five-month-old son and where today, he runs a hostel. We saw the former observatory, now a pair of destroyed buildings covered in shell-marks and broken glass, where his thigh was ripped open by shrapnel. We found shell clips, rusting in the dirt below old bunkers, and the shelled-out cable car station, where a whole mortar shell is still embedded high up in the wall.

He showed us the hollow where he spent many nights in a tent, and then walks us uphill, a hundred yards on a thin dirt path, across no-man's land to the Serbian line.

"Don't step off the path," says his son, now a grown man, before we begin, "it was cleared by a professional. There are thousands of mines around us - do not step off the path."

And yet, as we walked, all around us lay gorgeous forest, green and untouched, spilling down the mountainside to the valley where Sarajevo stretches out, red roofs lining the shallow, bubbling river. We saw the grafittied remains of the bobsled track that was used for the 1984 Olympic Games, its concrete expanse winding down the mountain (still used today for extreme rollerblading competitions, although chunks of it were torn off to become barricades).

It is so hard to believe that something so beautiful still contains so much danger. Landmines in Bosnia are harder to find, and thus more expensive to remove, than in most other areas in the world. The thick forest, now dense with twenty years of undisturbed growth, obscures the explosives. And as in the business of mine removal, complications mean an increased chance of death, these mines will probably be here for a while yet.

Walking around the streets of Sarajevo, there are pockmarks in the pavement, sunshine-shaped indents left by falling shells and flying shrapnel. There isn't enough money in Bosnia right now to fix every damaged building, so the reminders are everywhere.

At the outskirts of the city is the Tunnel Museum, the preserved end of the tunnel into Sarajevo through which food, arms, electricity and soldiers crept for years for the salvation of the city. Here, there is a shell embedded into the cement less than two metres from the entrance.

How does a person survive such a destructive siege? When we asked Jasmin how he'd found the strength to climb the hill day after day, the answer was easy: he looked at his son. When your family, your home, and your life are threatened, sometimes there's no other answer.

S.