Peace is a struggle for Sarajevo

Ethnic conflict devastated Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but some exiles are returning to rebuild their homeland. DARIA SITO-SUCIC reports.

A Bosnian Serb shell tore Sanda Jaksic's left leg out from the hip. Her boyfriend Svetozar Pudaric, walking beside her down a Sarajevo street, felt shrapnel gouge his left thigh, taking with it a chunk of bone.

But the September 1992 blast did not kill the couple's unborn child, and their walk to work that morning began a personal odyssey that ended with a defiant return from exile to start life anew in Sarajevo.

Their rejection of ethnic politics and their faith in the future put them among a tiny minority in a country bitterly divided by the legacy of a conflict begun 10 years ago this month - a conflict in which Serbs, Croats and Muslims set upon each other and 200,000 people died.

But the couple represent a seed of hope for Western politicians who believe the patterns of wartime aggression and ethnic partisanship, which have persisted strongly since a 1995 peace deal ended the fighting in Bosnia, can be overcome.

"The war shattered the illusion that we could trust our neighbours," says Svetozar, who later married Sanda.

"But we came back because we thought we had some chance to work and live normally still in this city."

They carefully sidestep questions about their ethnicity, although they are both non-Muslims in a city where refugee inflows and Serb flight have doubled the ratio of Muslims to about 80 per cent.

They insist that the issue is irrelevant.

The shells that rained on Sarajevo from the surrounding mountain ridges transformed a picturesque provincial city known for tolerance into a miserable prison that exemplified the brutality and tragedy of Bosnia's war.

The blast that catapulted Sanda and Svetozar across the street put them in hospital for months.

Sanda's leg could not be saved. Doctors battled to stem infections taking hold in Svetozar's thigh.

They married in hospital - Bosnian television showed a wedding video of the happy couple in their hospital beds.

They set up home in one ward, showing their walking sticks off to visitors while artillery boomed outside the window.

"We had stayed in Sarajevo because we were not afraid," says Sanda, now 38, a trained architect.

"We never missed a single day at work until we were wounded."

Svetozar, 43 this year, studied at Belgrade University to be an archaeologist.

Their first child, Marija, was born in May 1993. Two weeks later, a humanitarian airlift - which public opinion shamed Western Governments into starting - flew the family to Germany, away from the besieged Sarajevo with its water, food and power shortages.

Svetozar's wounded leg, held together in Sarajevo for months by huge metal pins, was repaired, although it is now 4cm shorter than the other.

A boy, Mirza, was born in Germany in 1995. Two years later, the couple decided to go home.

"We had a wonderful life in Germany but that is a society where we don't belong," says Sanda, adding that as refugees they could not get work.

"I came back to Sarajevo to work for peanuts, but to do what I've been educated to do," she says.

The Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, a building preservation agency, offered Sanda her old job back, and the moderate Social Democratic Party, of which Svetozar was a member, offered him a job as an administrator.

The couple's secular principles would be harder to sustain outside the capital. Ethnic identities are more marked in the countryside and in Bosnia's Serb Republic, where minorities were forced out by violence and have only just started to return.

Hundreds of thousands of Bosnians are scattered across Europe. School reunions take place in London, not Sarajevo.

Life is far from easy for those who have returned. Bosnia's economy is largely moribund. Registered unemployment is at 40 per cent, and welfare payments are minimal.

Aid, a large international civilian operation and a Nato-led military presence sustain some growth.

Rubina Buco, a 38-year-old Muslim who returned from Prague with her husband, says their two children will probably live in better times, "but we are the generation who surely will not have half of what we had before the war."

Others found life in exile too limiting professionally.

Physician Alija Agincic, a 39-year-old Muslim, returned to Sarajevo with his non-Muslim wife Aleksandra after he was told he could not sit an exam to work as a plastic surgeon in Paris.

"It was much nicer there, but we can accomplish more here," says Aleksandra, a language teacher, who could only find work as a shop assistant in Paris.

She hopes for a good life for their two children, both born since their return.

The Pudarics, like most parents in the city, struggle to make ends meet and lament that Sarajevo, paradoxically, is a meaner place now than in wartime.

"There was so much solidarity and generosity," says Sanda, remembering the kindness of hospital staff.

She complains that as civilian victims of the war they are not entitled to the housing subsidies offered to Army invalids.

But the couple have never regretted going back to Sarajevo, and express hope for the return of relative harmony and modest well-being as the scars of war fade.

"I hope that in the next five to six years most pieces of the Bosnian mosaic will be back in place," says Sanda.

"There will be peace and a better society if things keep improving."

- REUTERS

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