WILL THERE BE A SARAJEVO AGAIN?

AIM, LJUBLJANA, February 4, 1994

When they killed his brother, just like that, in the street he was passing through, walking along, looking for water, food or cigarettes, who knows why he was there that day at the exact moment when the grenade fell, Dzevad Cabanagic did not curse, he did not draw a gun, he did not seek revenge. He took his weapon - a cello - and on the spot where his brother was killed and later, at the cemetery at which he was buried, he played someone's Concert for the Cello without the Orchestra, for as many days as his brother had years. He cried while he was playing and in tears were also those who listened to him and watched him, first the residents of Sarajevo, and then numerous journalists from the whole world, who had smelled out an attraction, so that the pictures and articles about a cellist who plays and cries circled the world, and many a reporter earned his yearly pay on those photographs. This is the other side of the picture of life in Sarajevo - the citizens of Sarajevo are dying because they have still not learned to defend themselves with hatred, while those who have come to defend them earn money on them.

When he heard the word war, Cabanagic grabbed his cello, unlike the successors of Dr.Goebells, who grab not their guns, as their teacher did when he heard the word culture, but their cannon, snipers, mortars, rockets...

And he is not alone in this - Gradimir Gojer, Art Director of the Chamber Theater 55, recently reported on their work in the past year: 625 multimedia performances, two every day, five opening nights, he does not even know the number of second showings of: "When Musa Skins the Goat" by Zlatko Topcagic, "In Agony" by Miroslav Krleza, "The Lilies" by Mak Dizdar, "Ghali's Transfiguration" by Antun Coljan, "The Lovers" by an unknown writer from Dubrovnik, "The City" by the Mehmedinovic - Pasic team.

The National Theatre showed "The Mother" by Ahmed Muradbegovic, "Run Away from Your Wife" by M.Koni and the musical "Hair".

Susan Sonntag was welcomed in Sarajevo by the company of the Youth Theatre "Obala", she watched actors faint from hunger and was hungry with them, went to their funerals, visited them in hospital when one of them lost both legs when hit by a mine on his way to rehearsal, but who recovered and appeared on stage in a wheel-chair, and when the first performances were held, she left when someone stole somebody's sandwich from his bag behind the scenes, which is a much greater crime than when someone in normal times steals someone's car, wife, flat and credit card, all at the same time, but that theft of a sandwich is such a human act because one had and the other was hungry, so it didn't take much time for both to be hungry, like all of them together and each one individually.

That is Sarajevo.

The tenth anniversary of the Sarajevo Winter Olypmic Games is approaching these days, in February. Stjepan Kljujic, President of the Olympic Committee of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina reports that Huan Antonio Samaranch will visit Sarajevo and proceed for Lillehamer, everyone knows why. On that occasion the Sarajevo String Quartet will organize the 100th war concert dedicated to Suada Dilberovic, a student of Sarajevo University , from Dubrovnik, the first victim of the war. The Vrbanja bridge, on which she was killed by a sniperist from the hill, today bears her name.

Three feature films were made last year in Sarajevo, and new ones are in the pipeline. Abdulah Sidran and Ademir Kenovic are completing preparations for their film "The Tabut" ( a coffin in which Moslems are traditionally buried, without an upper cover, wrapped in white cloth). Because there is no timber, the denizens of Sarajevo, irrespective of religion, race, nationality, age, sex... are buried in it, or even without it. Abdo Sidran recently said that Sarajevo, from a bird's eye view, has the shape of a tabut.

Everything is happening in Sarajevo as in peacetime

• exhibitions of paintings are being opened and visited, also the first war cinema, which regularly (when there is electricity, oil for the generator and when the cashier manages to open the box office before being aimed at) shows films in a hall with 50 seats, exhibitions of war photographs and caricature are being staged, poets publish books, and even the Child Festival under the well known name "Your Song of the Season", opened in the cellars of Dobrinja, and then through some mysterious channells came to the 8 kms distant city to close there with a grand cellar finale.

Everyone is pretending that there is no war and everyone wants to live normally, but everyone is also less and less confident that they will be able to endure for long. For long - in Sarajevo - means one day, often a whole life which can, in Sarajevo, last less than one day.

That is Sarajevo.

Papers are being published, the "Oslobodjenje" (Liberation) comes out every day, journalists are killed every day, but - both the radio and TV, as well as private radio and TV stations, broadcast, private books and papers in and about Sarajevo are published.

Even those outside Sarajevo give their contribution. The culture of Sarajevo in exile is perhaps not so important for the citizens of Sarajevo in Sarajevo, but it is important for all those who are friends of Sarajevo and B&H. Perhaps it is not important for the residents of Sarajevo that Josip Osti and Boris A.Novak, together with the PEN and Association of Writers of Slovenia, organize in April each year, for the third time now, the Sarajevo Evenings of Poetry, but it is important for all the writers who thus show that they care.

For Sarajevo it is (perhaps) not important that at an auction in America American publishers bid for the diary of the Anne Frank of Sarajevo, the 13 year-old Zlata Filipovic and paid the fabulous sum of US $ 560 thousand for publishing rights on the American market. This was paid by the "Viking" Publishing House.

That is Sarajevo,to which the people of Ljubljana have dedicated a large exhibition, which later on toured Europe, under the title "To Sarajevo in the Heart of the World" thus showing that Sarajevo is in their hearts. In their very hearts. The Sarajevo they know and remember and wish it to be as they remember it, not as it is now.

There will be precipitation in Sarajevo today, reports the Meteorological Institute of B&H. From PAMs and PATOs from the Jewish cemetery in the morning, and from mortars from Mts. Igman and Trebevic from 4:15 p.m. There will be no sniper precipitation due to the dense fog.

That, too, is Sarajevo.

ZORAN ODIC