Trees for Sarajevo - includes related article on greening

American Forests, Spring, 1998 by Kemal Kurspahic

In November 1992 I found myself at a literary conference in Strasbourg, France, speaking on a subject I knew only too well - culture under siege. As editor-in-chief of the Sarajevo independent daily, Oslobodjenje, I was away from my homeland for the first time in seven months, receiving medical treatment. Europe was just an hour-long flight from Sarajevo, but worlds away.

The invitation had come while I was in Croatia to get physical therapy on a knee badly smashed in a high speed automobile crash. Our car had been hit by a speeding police car as we careered through the city at 90 miles per hour, trying to escape Serb snipers targeting anything within their sight.

Medical miracle workers at Sarajevo Kosevo Hospital toiled daily without basics such as electricity and often while being shelled. Dr. Edib Jerlagic worked four hours to repair my smashed knee. It took another four months to get permission for my family and me to fly out for the rehabilitation I was told I needed. U.N. humanitarian flights had been canceled after an Italian plane carrying food for starving Sarajevans was shot down.

When the request came to share my experiences as editor of Bosnia's largest newspaper, Oslobodjenje, I felt I owed the effort to the Sarajevans and Bosnians I had left behind. Still on crutches, I found myself at a gala dinner seated next to Strasbourg Mayor Catherine Trotman, now a minister in the French government, who asked, "What can we - Europe, the West - do for Sarajevo?"

"Do whatever you can to stop the killing, to bring about peace, and then bring us trees," I said. "There aren't any left in Sarajevo. All city trees, all parks, have been cut for wood to give some warmth to people freezing in a city with no windows, no gas, no electricity."

I returned to Sarajevo that December, still on crutches, to find the siege - and the desperation - continuing. During the three-and-a-half years that the Bosnian capital lay under Serbian attack, 10,609 people were killed - including 1,600 children - before the international community intervened and mediated an American-brokered peace agreement in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995.

During the long years of the siege, trees became our most precious commodity. People would risk sniper fire and shelling to cut any tree left in their neighborhood, although police and soldiers would sometimes confiscate the wood "for cooking and heating for the city's defense forces."

When all the trees and most of Sarajevo's once-beautiful parks were finally gone, people dug up tree stumps. In the summer of 1993, families from my neighborhood took their children and searched for stumps whenever there was a respite in shelling. An entire day of cutting and digging would yield a few bags of wood for cooking and winter heating.

With no gas or electricity, people in neighborhoods like Hrasno, where I lived, shared whatever they could. Neighbors in our eight-story apartment building found an old-fashioned stove abandoned at a nearby construction site and placed it in what had been a trash collection room by our building's entrance, safe from unrelenting sniper fire. We all contributed anything that could make fire - old papers, books, apartment floors and doors, drawers and chairs, nightstands and cupboards, bookcases, and raw wood. Then we waited in line to heat our soup or beans, or the rice and macaroni handed out as part of the humanitarian-aid effort.

Just how important trees became to Sarajevans during the war and the sense of desperation felt by a city under siege were brilliantly captured in two cartoons by one of Bosnia's finest cartoonists, Bozo Stefanovic, published in my newspaper.

One depicted a desperate Sarajevan trying to hang himself in a former city park but unable to find a tree on which to do the deed. Another shows Jesus Christ carrying his cross while around him Sarajevans carry trees up a hill. Stefanovic drew most of his black-humor cartoons by candlelight because the city was usually without electricity.

One of the ironies of war-time Sarajevo was that some of the places we loved the most in our pre-war lives became the most threatening. Sarajevo was built in a valley around the tiny Muiljacka River, surrounded first by hills and then mountains on all sides. After centuries of development - with cultural, religious, and architectural influences from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and decades of socialists' imitation of "European standards" - the city spread to the surrounding hills in narrow steep streets, called sokak, dotted with small white houses and slim minarets.

There was nothing so exciting in pre-war years as my returns to Sarajevo by the night train from Zagreb or Belgrade; city lights would spread from the valley high up the hills, seeming to touch the stars, mingling with them as far as I could see.

"Daddy, New York!" my son Mirza, then only 5, told me in the early 1980s when we made our first evening drive from the ski slopes to Sarajevo after my four-year stint as Oslobodjenje's New York correspondent. That nighttime view of Sarajevo remains my most vivid memory of the once-cosmopolitan Bosnian capital.