OPINION
DOCTORS Lounge
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UNDER Siege
S
Mary G. Barry, MD
Louisville Medicine Editor
[email protected]
arajevo used to be a city of friends,
a lively capital in the Yugoslavia
born after World War II and
shaped by the partisan Tito. We
went there in May because it was
both an Olympic city and an Ottoman city,
a rare combination.
In Sarajevo, religion was a part of life,
but not the reason you lived or died. In a
mile-long stretch of the street in the old
Ottoman part of the city they called “Little
Jerusalem” stood the Gazi mosque, the Ser-
bian Orthodox cathedral, the 16 th century
synagogue serving as the Jewish Museum,
and the Catholic Croats’ Sacred Heart ca-
thedral. Both cathedrals always had people
spilling out into the street at the celebratory
midnight services for Easter and Christmas,
packed to bursting with Sarajevans of all
faiths, a city tradition. You often neither
knew nor cared whether your buddy was
a Serb, a Croat or a Bosniak Muslim. You
grew up together regardless.
All that changed with the fall of the Ber-
lin Wall in 1989. Soon after, the countries
trapped under Soviet dictatorship since
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
1945, followed East Germany’s lead, and
threw off the yoke themselves. Yugosla-
via had been formed of six equal states in
1945, but with the center gone, each state
now looked at the other and some Croats
thought, “I want that Bosnian coastland.”
The Serb nationalists said, “Over my dead
body will a Muslim rule me.” The Slovenians
managed independence quickly with a 10-
day uprising. In 1991-92, Croatia fought
Mr. Milosevic of Serbia first (in 1993 the
Croats turned against Bosnia). For years,
Milosevic had been stoking the fires of na-
tionalism and ethnic hatreds, whipping his
fellow Orthodox countrymen into a lather
to absorb Bosnia into a “Greater Serbia.”
His Catholic Croatian counterpart wanted
the opposite, Bosnia inside a “Greater Cro-
atia.” When in March 1992 Bosnian Croats
and Bosnian Muslims together voted for an
independent Bosnia, and it was recognized
officially by other countries, Milosevic acted
swiftly. In May, the former army of Yugosla-
via deserted Sarajevo and instead became
the armed forces of the Serb nationalists.
They took to the mountains, hauling out
of the city all their armored vehicles, comm
gear, food and fuel stocks, MASH units - all
the weapons of the modern military. Many
Serbian officers and men went with them;
some who identified primarily as Sarajevans
stayed. They had their personal weapons
only. It would not be a fair fight.
Milosevic’s men began mass rape and sys-
tematic murder of non-Serbs in the prov-
inces, burning and destroying villages, and
within a month they controlled nearly 70
percent of Bosnia. That June they started
shooting in Sarajevo’s streets, and from the
mountains ringing Sarajevo, they besieged
the city. The people lived under constant
artillery attack, as many as 3,000 shells a
day. No place was really safe. Snipers terror-
ized the main street; it became Sniper Alley.
From tall buildings in Serb-held neighbor-
hoods, from the hills, snipers shot Saraje-
vans in their yards, in the market, while
standing in their own windows. They got
shot while scavenging for bread, or water,
or wood. They ran to a child who had just
been shot, and got shot themselves.
Kosovo Hospital, the main university
center, got shelled every day. Patients who