By Elsie Sze



The writer, a former librarian turned author, lives in Toronto and travels widely.

Editor’s Note: Former Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadzic recently was captured and extradited by Serbia to stand trial at the UN War Crimes Tribunal. He faces genocide charges for the prolonged siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s and for a 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica. The latter was Europe’s worst atrocity in more than 60 years.

FORMERLY YUGOSLAVIA -- “He was shot by a sniper – not sure from which side,” said Ivo, my Bosnian guide. “She was hit too, but crawled over to him. They died together. For four days, their bodies were left on the bridge. No one from either side dared to collect them for fear of being shot too.”

Ivo spoke as we stood at the Vrbanja Bridge in Sarajevo. It’s an ordinary bridge, rebuilt since the war in the 1990s when Yugoslavia disintegrated. Now the bridge is a concrete overpass with steel railings above the Miljacka River. It’s paved. You can walk across within two minutes.

But it’s been nicknamed the Romeo and Juliet Bridge since those two lovers, he a Bosnian Serb, she a Bosnian Muslim, were shot and killed on it in May, 1993, when trying to escape from Sarajevo, then under a siege by Serbian forces.

“I was luckier,” Ivo added. “By the time I fled, a tunnel had been dug.” The Tunnel of Hope, hand-dug by Sarajevo residents, linked the besieged city to a neutral area near the United Nations-occupied airport.

“I left in late 1993,” he said. “The tunnel was 1.5 metres high, 1.5 metres wide and about 800 metres long. Water in it reached up to my knees. I had to wear high boots.”

He took me to the tunnel’s exit in a shed attached to a two-storey house at the end of a residential street and near an open field. Jagged holes from exploding shrapnel still marked the walls. Tentatively, I ran a finger around a hole about three centimeters in diameter, a horrid memento of a war that had destroyed lives and ruined cities.

“The enemy never found the tunnel’s entrance or exit. No one guessed this ordinary house was a gateway to freedom,” Ivo said.

“You took a big risk to escape.”

“People took many risks to survive. There was little food or daily necessities, not even medical supplies. I weighed just 40 kilos,” said Ivo, a big man, 20 years old back in 1993. “It was leave or die.

“From the tunnel, I made my way to a village across the mountain. My family gave me enough money to get to the Netherlands where my father had business connections from before the war.”

Ivo paused, maybe struggling to continue. “When the war ended in 1995, I learned that my father had died of complications from appendicitis soon after I left. And a cousin of mine had his legs blown off by mortar fire. I was devastated, but I stayed in the Netherlands until 2003.”

He graduated from a Dutch university, married another Bosnian refugee, got a good job running a travel agency and became a Dutch citizen. He could have stayed there forever and led a comfortable life.

We went to a restaurant on a hill overlooking Sarajevo’s hub. From there, I saw bridges over the meandering river, the old town with its mosques, minarets and church steeples, and a newer section with tall glass-and-steel buildings rising from the ashes of war.

“Are you still bitter about the war?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m bitter about the war, for all the suffering it caused me, my family, my city, my country. I may have forgiven, but I can never forget. Yet you can’t brand a people for what some of them did to you. I had good friends who were Serbs living in Bosnia. The best man at my wedding was a Bosnian Serb who also made it to the Netherlands. There are good and bad people in every country, no matter where you live. It’s the bad ones I resent, not any country or people.”

“Why did you come back here?”

“This is my home,” he said.

I visited Sarajevo in 2007 when on a foreign-aid mission in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and of the former Yugoslavia. One day, I walked with two Serbian co-workers, Jelena and Milan, on a bicycle path along a promontory where the Sava meets the Danube.

Looking up away from the river, I saw the Kalemegdan Fortress, multi-tiered and beautiful, cross-sections of its ancient ruined Roman buttresses exposed. At its western corner looms The Messenger of Victory, fondly dubbed Victor by the locals. Victor’s a statue of a naked man. His right hand holds a sword. His left supports a bird. He stands on a stone column rising almost 300 feet. Officially, he commemorates Belgrade’s liberation from Austria-Hungary in the First World War.

“Victor’s such a joke these days. After all, we lost a war,” said Jelena. “True, Slobodan Milosevic’s government probably was guilty of things we wouldn’t approve, but NATO shouldn’t have bombed us civilians.”

By war, she meant NATO’s bombardment in 1999 to end the ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity by President Milosevic’s government in the province of Kosovo. By then, Yugoslavia had dwindled to only Serbia and Montenegro. Other members of the Yugoslav union, like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia, had become independent nations.

“At least peace seems to have returned,” I said.

“Thank God, it’s over,” said Milan. “My father’s Serbian, and my mother’s Croat. Every time the Serbs bombed my mother’s hometown, Dubrovnik, she went berserk. It was very hard on all of us.”

“In fact, Serbs in the region suffered a lot too,” said Jelena bitterly. “They too were driven from their homes. They too were victims of ethnic cleansing. But we have no champions. We’re the bad guys.”

Sighing, Milan said, “There was a time when we were Yugoslavia and commanded respect. We could go anywhere with our passports. The 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo were glorious. We were all one nation. My mother would fly from Belgrade in the morning, meet her friends for tea in Dubrovnik in the afternoon and be home by evening.”

“That life’s gone. Nowadays, our passports are worth shit,” said Jelena.

“In 1991, I got a scholarship to study in Berkeley, California,” said Milan. “I was so happy and excited. But the war broke out and I couldn’t get a student visa. To this day, I still think of how my life might have been.”

“Everybody pays a price in war,” I said. “People in all of Yugoslavia suffered so much in the years it was breaking up.”

I asked Jelena and Milan if they knew about the Romeo and Juliet Bridge in Sarajevo. To my surprise, they’d never heard the sad story of that Bosnian girl and her Serb lover.

The weekend after visiting Sarajevo, I flew to Tivat in Montenegro, rented a car and drove along the beautiful Adriatic coast, crossed into Croatia and reached Dubrovnik. At my hotel in Dubrovnik’s old town, I met Sanja, a visitor from Las Vegas.

“I’m from Canada so we’re neighbors,” I said.

“Actually, I’m a Serb born in Croatia when it was part of Yugoslavia,” she said. “I’m back for a relative’s wedding.”

“How did you end up in the U.S.?” My curiosity surged as we chatted at breakfast.

“By a long, hard way. I grew up in a village in Croatia. When young, I never questioned who I was. It’d have made no difference to me if I was a Croat or a Serb. I couldn’t even tell the difference from our looks or speech. We were all the same. True, my family attended an Orthodox church while our Croat neighbors went to a Catholic one, but to me, attending different churches didn’t make us different as people.

“Things began to change in 1991 when Croatia wanted to secede from Yugoslavia and declared its independence. War broke out between the Croatian army and Serb forces in Croatia. For a while, we stayed in Croatia. Then in the summer of 1995, our Croat friends warned that it wouldn’t be safe for us to remain. They advised us to leave before things turned really ugly.

“For the first time in my life, I felt like a foreigner in my own home. My family and I packed a few belongings and fled for Serbia where we lived until 1999 when NATO bombed there. Then it seemed like war followed me everywhere.

“The U.S. took refugees from the former Yugoslavia. I was admitted as a refugee soon after the NATO bombing.” With a sour laugh, she added, “First, they bombed us. Then they took us in as refugees.”

“Why did you choose Las Vegas?”

“You think we had a choice? It’s so hot in Las Vegas, but do you think they’d let us pick our dream city?”

That afternoon, Sanja and I walked together on a city wall above the old town. I looked down at Dubrovnik which had suffered so much. It had regained some charm with red-tiled roofs, old church towers, cobbled streets and lanes, squares with fountains, some ruins from Roman times and crowds of tourists.

“Since you’re here, have you gone back to your village?”

“No, the war destroyed it. I can’t bring myself to go back. I’d rather remember how it was the day we left it.” Her voice broke.

“Are you happy living in the U.S.?”

“Call me a reluctant immigrant. The U.S. isn’t home, but then I don’t know where home is anymore. I don’t know what I am anymore.” She shrugged in listless resignation.

That night, I lay in bed thinking of Sanja and other displaced people who’d lost a sense of identity. To them, only survival mattered. Survival had made Ivo leave Sarajevo. Years later, he returned and remained, but most don’t. There are more Sanjas, people who stay in a country that adopts them for humanitarian reasons, just surviving, unsure “who they are” anymore. Others, like my Serbian friends, Milan and Jelena, never leave, but also survive, bruised and embittered by the loss of loved ones, missed opportunities and shattered dreams.

“Thank God, it’s over,” Milan had said, voicing the prayer of a war-weary nation.

But is it over? Will there ever be a bridge where the Romeos and Juliets meet, strolling away together blessed by all sides? Such questions linger, unanswered.

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