Remember Sarajevo?

By ZLATKO DIZDAREVIC/SARAJEVO Zlatko Dizdarevic, an occasional contributor to TIME, is the author of Sarajevo: A War Journal. This article was transated from Serbo-Croatian by Ammiel Alcalay.

If war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, what to make of Sarajevo? As the first snows fell on the nearby mountains, NATO fighter- bombers hit Bosnian Serb positions just outside the capital for the fourth time since February in retaliation for attacks on U.N. peacekeeping troops. The NATO aircraft dropped bombs and directed cannon fire against a Bosnian Serb position seven miles west of Sarajevo; they destroyed a tank. The NATO action was authorized after two French soldiers were wounded in four separate attacks. The peacekeepers had placed themselves between opposing Bosnian Serb and Bosnian government troops when heavy fighting broke out Sept. 18 in the Sarajevo suburb of Sedrenik. Lieut. General Sir Michael Rose, the British commander of U.N. forces in Bosnia, blamed the besieged government forces for having provoked the battle and warned that they, like the Serbs, would face a NATO reaction if they violated the cease-fire.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council lifted some of the sanctions leveled against Serbia after Belgrade closed its border with Bosnia. A ban on civilian air traffic will be lifted for 100 days, and the Serbs can resume international sports and cultural contacts. The council also condemned Bosnian Serbs for renewal of their ethnic-cleansing campaign in northern Bosnia, where about 3,000 Muslims have been driven from their homes.

What of Sarajevo itself? As Bosnian Serb units once again tightened their grip on a city to which they have denied water, gas and electricity since Sept. 14, TIME received the following report.

We heard on the radio last Thursday night that NATO planes had struck again somewhere on the outskirts of Sarajevo. Bato Cengic, the director of Silent Gunpowder, a film made just before the war that depicts precisely what has been and, moreover, was about to come, was listening to a foreign station and gave us the details.

We heard about it at Asha's, otherwise known as the Indy Cafe. That's where we also found out that UNPROFOR troops -- United Nations peacekeepers -- and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic's boys were mixing it up, apparently because one side had attacked the other. No one takes the gloves off to mix it up because of Sarajevo or Sarajevans.

Afan Ramic, one of our wonderful artists, cynically said, almost to himself, "Why the hell don't they just go off somewhere by themselves and fight it out like men instead of bugging us? They're disturbing our peace." Sarajevo simply ignores these battles among strangers because they really make no difference to us. We've long got used to the idea that nothing around here -- nothing, that is, except our intimate, bare suffering -- has anything to do with us. For months now, all the NATO pilots have done above us with the blood-curdling sound of their planes' engines has been to scare away the pigeons that have gathered for an odd crumb of our meager but collective lunch.

At any rate, nothing's been settled by this NATO tactic of occasionally spitting a bomb down here and there. The other day someone tallied up the damage that's been done until now: two old army trucks and a small hideout near Gorazde, a museum-quality half-track from World War II and, finally, a T- 55 tank. Three bombs, near Gorazde, didn't even explode. Before that, Karadzic's soldiers had shot down a Sea Harrier, also near Gorazde. While we aren't great tactical mathematicians here in Sarajevo, this seemed like a big price to pay for such little return.

Maybe something significant was said on the radio about us in Sarajevo. Maybe in that great big world out there they promised one another to do something about us again. We don't have a clue though because we've got other things to worry about. The sun is still doling out some miserly rays here in town, but up there, above the city, on Mount Igman, the first snow has already fallen.

No one in town is saying a word about it, but no one has anything else on their mind. With more snow and new waves of fog on the way, we'll be left alone in our misery, left alone to wait endlessly for more overcast mornings, forcing our eyes open to face another day. My nine-year-old son told me this week, through the crackling of Sarajevo's last remaining telephone line: "This is the third birthday I'm celebrating without you, and you promised to be here every time." My older son, already becoming a young man, says, "Don't worry, Dad; I understand." My wife doesn't say anything. She's just angry.

Should I be happy that my older son understands, that this 14-year-old boy knows very well what this is all about? It means that he understands he is no longer a Sarajevan, that he no longer knows what forgiveness is, that soon he'll understand precisely what hatred is too. It also means that he's become part of that wretched world out there, a world to which Sarajevo no longer belongs and in which Sarajevo no longer has any faith.

Sarajevo has been abandoned precisely because it doesn't hate; that's why it's understandable that the Pope didn't need to come here. We don't need forgiveness. For that, one has to go to New York, Geneva, Brussels, Paris, London and Moscow. There one has to pray for the salvation of the soul. , Unfortunately, though, one day prayers of forgiveness will be needed by our kids who've "understood."

We don't need prayers. We're only waiting to see how the commander of the U.N. troops, Lieut. General Sir Michael Rose, will bomb Sarajevo. After all, he's been told that this is part of the objective of his mandate, as if the violations of the cease-fire by poorly armed Bosnian government forces could ever equal the massive firepower of Karadzic's forces surrounding the city. Everything must be done to make us equal with those besieging us on the hills. This means that the whole story of genocide, of blame and aggression must be dismantled completely; then we have to be dragged out onto the battlefield as one of "the equally armed sides in the conflict," even though we might not actually have any arms, and let ourselves be attacked by NATO planes.

Poor Rose. He just doesn't seem to get the point. It would have been better for him to come and hang out at Asha's, where we sit around and talk about our plans for the upcoming day. Should we go for water first, or to the new exhibit by Braco Dimitrijevic, the world-renowned conceptual artist from Sarajevo? Should we take some pleasure in the performance, which features a bicycle and a potato, or shall we first go have a drink near the French Bookstore, where there are new books from New York, Madrid and Paris.

To tell you the truth, we see in every book we look at these days something we might eventually be able to cook a little lunch over -- and only then as something to read if we can't listen to the radio. And when there aren't any books, when we've hauled the water in and darkness falls, then we can just sit back and listen to UNPROFOR and Karadzic's boys pointlessly bombing each other in the hills above Sarajevo. And then we hear how Rose wants to turn those planes on us since we're all the same.

We don't really take it personally. What really gets under our skin is that Rose wants to do this to us because we're "all the same." We won't even put up much resistance to his threatened bombing mission; we'll survive that the way we've survived everything else, but we would like to make it clear to him that we aren't like those up on the hills who've been killing women and children indiscriminately, shutting off the water, electricity and gas whenever it suited them.

We are not alike. We never were nor will we ever be like them. We would love to explain all this to the general over a cup of coffee or at the exhibit, and not on the battlefield. If there's no other way, though, we won't even mind doing it there. The only thing is that he will have to let us walk a fair distance to our water sources so that we can get into the long lines and fill our water bottles, since that's the way Radovan Karadzic and his friends want it. Then, he'll have to give us a little time to go look for some wood so we won't have to burn our remaining books.

While he's waiting for us, he can stop by the exhibit to see the bicycle, the potato and Kafka. We'll be glad to explain to him precisely what this bicycle and this potato mean to us, and what Kafka is doing there. In fact, he wouldn't even have to go to the show. We can tell him what all this means to us right now, today, because this is a live performance, our very own concept. After all, in Sarajevo we're all conceptual artists. Those who don't believe it should pay us a visit -- if they can still remember where Sarajevo is.