Bajram Šerif Mubarek Olsun
Kurban Bayram is the Turkish word for Eid al-Adha, the end of the Hajj. It also commemorates the day when God tested the loyalty of Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son Ishmael, and then substituting a ram instead. (For those of you who don't know: it is Ishmael -- father of the Arabs -- rather than Isaac -- father of the Jews -- who is nearly sacrificed in the Qur'an.) Muslim families in Bosnia -- as elsewhere around the world -- slaughter a sheep today and have a feast. Marina wasn't in a position to impose us on the family feasts of any of her Muslim friends today, so we found other things to do.
Bajram banner in the evening, Sarajevo
Today we visited Dobrinja, the neighborhood on the western side of town that served as an Olympic village in 1984. I took photos of the former front lines: after the initial Serb assault here in 1992, they parked themselves as far forward as a row of buildings that is about thirty yards from another row of buildings where the Bosnian (Muslim) army similarly situated its front line. And there the lines held for over three years, with the two sides exchanging fire occasionally, but where most of the time the Četnik snipers occupied their time by hunting the civilian population of the neighborhood like animals. Marina's building was the first building on the other end of a wide-open space with a parking lot -- a distance, in American terms, of about the length of a football field, perhaps less -- inside Muslim territory. I saw the spot where a grenade hit their apartment, as well as the spot just outside the building entrance (on the other side of the building) where Marina was hit by a Četnik sniper bullet (Christmas Day, 1992; she was 14). We also visited the apartment itself, where my father-in-law's name is still on the door on a stubborn piece of masking tape. The rest of the building is now inhabited, but this apartment has been abandoned for over ten years (only one other person occupied it briefly when Marina's family left); the family is now attempting to lay their rightful claim to it, since it will have resale value when it is renovated.
Dobrinja, Sarajevo, December 30, 2006. During the war, the building on the right was occupied by Serb snipers; the building on the left was occupied by Bosnian Muslim troops
Bullet holes and grenade impact craters abound in Dobrinja, on the sturdy cement-block socialist apartment buildings and in the asphalt of the sidewalks. The street names here once bore the names of great progressive figures from around the world, in the Partisan tradition of internationalism. Not anymore. Marina's own street was fortunate enough to keep its name -- Emile Zola -- but the names of Simón Bolívar (Marina's elementary school), Salvador Allende, and Martin Luther King did not survive. I recognized none of the new names, and Marina didn't know most of them, either. Yet another subject for a j'accuse in a land that has provided occasion for so many.
Dobrinja, Sarajevo, December 30, 2006. This apartment building is located about 150 yards from the former front lines, if that. The middle window is the fifth-floor apartment of the Antić family. The Serb forces fired anti-personnel grenades at this apartment building heavily populated by civilians. One of these punched through the wall below the window and exploded in the Antić family living room.
The names on the mailboxes testify to the success of the nationalists' program of ethnic cleansing: there are no Serbs or Croats living here. There is a brand-new mosque here, and it is built in the austere, whitewashed style characteristic of foreign brands of Islam.
A few blocks away and you are in Serb territory (then, and still): this edge of the city is part of Republike Srpska. The Orthodox church here was unfinished at the time of the war, but was used prodigiously by snipers who killed people from its towers. It has since been completed and is the Orthodox holy place in the neighborhood -- a statement of Četnik contempt for anyone who lived in the neighborhood during the war. We passed through the Republike Srpska area by cab on our way back to the other part of town, and it is astounding how it looks like a different country. All roadsigns and advertisements instantly switch to Cyrillic script. In Yugoslavia, all Serbo-Croatian speakers learned both alphabets and can read them with ease, but in Bosnia the Roman script was the preferred one, and that went for all ethnic groups. Not so now in this sliver of the country, but it is obviously being done for crude nationalist purposes.
We went to an Internet café in the evening and learned that they really did go right ahead and execute Saddam Hussein. They picked a hell of a day to do it. The choice of date is obviously calculated for effect, and will inevitably have gruesome -- even sacrilegious -- associations for Muslims everywhere. It will also have no effect on the Iraqi civil war.