Sarajevans mark siege anniversary with thoughts of Ukraine
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Sarajevo was paying a subdued tribute this week to the resilience of its citizens who survived the longest military siege in modern history, and commemorating thousands of others who did not.
Many of the survivors said they found the 30th anniversary of the start of the siege of the Bosnian capital particularly hard because they were marking it against the backdrop of what they described as similar suffering being inflicted on civilians in Ukraine by Russia’s occupying army.
Bosnian Serb forces, armed and backed by neighboring Serbia, laid siege to Sarajevo on April 6, 1992, during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. For the next 46 months, about 350,000 residents remained trapped in their multiethnic city, subjected to daily shelling and sniper attacks and cut off from regular access to electricity, food, water, medicine and the outside world. They survived on limited humanitarian supplies provided by the United Nations, drank from wells and foraged for food.
“The world used to watch us suffer and now we just watch (Ukrainians) suffer and there is nothing we can do to help them,” said Arijana Djidelija, a 52-year-old primary school teacher. “It is a very strange and difficult feeling,” she added.
Djidelija was a newly employed, young teacher when the siege of Sarajevo began, and she immediately joined a local volunteer effort to educate tens of thousands of children who remained trapped in the city.
As Serb gunners took positions on the hills surrounding Sarajevo and trained their guns at its schools, hospitals, markets and residential buildings for nearly four years, Djidelija and her colleagues held classes in improvised classrooms, set up in basements and abandoned shops or apartments around the city, risking their lives for education.
In the winter of 1993, a mortar slammed into one of Djidelija’s school’s improvised classrooms in the Sarajevo suburb of Dobrinja, killing her colleague Fatima Gunic and three children, all under 10.
But the war schools, classroom friends and teachers were the only “semblance of a normal life” Sarajevo children had at the time, Djidelija said, so
“after crying and honoring our dead, we continued to teach, such was our will to protect the sanity of our young, to give them an education.”