THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506180049
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY BILL SIZEMORE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 166 lines
Sanja Omanovic is taking a respite from a life that would be unimaginable to most Americans: a life of daily fear and deprivation in the middle of a war zone.
And she can't wait to get back.
Who she is and why she feels that way are clues to understanding the brutal warfare in the former Yugoslavia - a region that, with its hard-to-pronounce names, multiple combatants and shifting alliances, seems so impenetrable to many in the West.
Her story of dogged resilience in the face of unrelenting terror and misery offers a glimmer of hope that her country may yet manage to recapture the peace she longs for.
Omanovic, 32, a journalist for the Sarajevo newspaper Vecernje Novine, is spending four weeks at The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star as part of a three-month visiting fellowship awarded by the National Forum Foundation. She is due back home in Bosnia-Herzegovina in early August.
In a sense, she is caught between the sides now battling each other in Bosnia - the predominantly Muslim government of the self-declared republic of Bosnia and the Bosnian Serb rebels who have seized much of the country and laid siege to Sarajevo.
Her father, a newspaper editor, poet and novelist, is a Serb. Her mother, a teacher, is a Muslim.
She is not unusual in Sarajevo, a city with a long history of harmony amid ethnic diversity. The Serb rebels' dream of creating an ``ethnically pure'' greater Serbia is anathema to her.
``There are many people in Sarajevo like me, and many people that have different combinations - Serbs and Croats, Croats and Muslims,'' she said in an interview.
``I don't like the idea of a pure nation. I don't like it. There were so many mixed marriages in Bosnia before the war. It wasn't important. For instance, my parents never told me, `Be careful when you have a boyfriend, take care what his name is.' Never.''
Three years ago, when the war began, her parents and her brother, now 14, fled the city. She has not seen them since.
They are living in a town in one of the Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia. Omanovic reached them by telephone on her way out of the country last month. It was the first time she had spoken to them since they left.
``It's hard for me to talk about them,'' she said. ``I miss them so much. So much. I don't like to cry, you know, but the only situation when I can cry is when I am talking about them. I can stand anything else.''
The pain of separation doesn't lessen her conviction that she and her husband, also a journalist, made the right decision when they elected to stay in Sarajevo.
``Nothing has changed between us,'' she said. ``Perhaps my father has different political views than I have, but it cannot change anything. I love them, and I know they love me. They made their choice, and I made my choice. .
``When I was thinking about leaving Sarajevo at the beginning of the war, I thought I can just be a refugee, one more refugee somewhere. And that's what I didn't want to be. I didn't want to be a refugee.
``And the other reason was, it's my town, you know? I didn't want anyone to force me to leave my town. That's the town where I spent all my life. I have my friends there. I have my husband there. I know each street, each building, everything. . . .''
``I'm just Sarajevan and nothing else. I have never felt that my name or my background or my father, that it was important to anybody. And I think that's hope for the future. . . .
``That's why I don't want to leave Sarajevo. And that's why I think that we can live together again like neighbors.''
Her decision to stay in the besieged city has meant a daily struggle just to maintain the basic necessities of life.
The city is without electricity, gas or water service most of the time. Food, provided by international relief organizations, is generally limited to staples like beans, rice and macaroni. Sarajevans desperate for firewood have stripped the city of trees.
``Last summer, I took the door from my bathroom to make bread, because I was hungry and there was nothing,'' Omanovic said. ``I had no firewood, no paper, nothing. . . .
``Many people burn their books, closets and - oh, old shoes, that's good. One and a half shoes to bake bread. You cut it in three pieces, and it's enough. One and a half is enough for bread. . . .
``If it's winter, you go to bed in the afternoon about 4 or 5 o'clock because it's cold and dark and you can't do anything, and candles are expensive. . . .
``Can you imagine in the middle of winter - and we have very cold winters; it can be very, very cold, about minus 20 degrees Celsius - and you have to go wash your laundry, as I had to do, in the river? That's why I have arthritis. I suppose I will always have it to remind me.''
A daily ritual for Sarajevans is the trek from home to the city brewery, laden with plastic jugs, to get water.
``My personal record is 30 liters of water on me - on my back, in my hands, in some bags,'' Omanovic said. ``That's pretty much. I was so proud! . . . I used some belts to connect some plastic cans and then I put them on my shoulders. . . .
``Once I went to bring some water and I was just carrying one plastic can, just one - it was 5 liters, it was nothing - and I had wool gloves and they were covered with ice, and I started to cry. I just couldn't - it was so cold, and my hands were completely frozen, I couldn't move, and I just let the plastic can fall on the ground because I couldn't grip it.''
In three years of siege, Omanovic has learned too much about the brutality of war.
``Yesterday I didn't feel good,'' she said. ``I saw pictures from Sarajevo. I saw pictures of people running from snipers.
``You can't imagine how humiliated you feel when you have to run across the street in your own town - in your town - and you know somebody is there on the hill and he is thinking, `Should I kill this person or the next one?' . . .
``My mother-in-law, she was wounded several months ago. It was a sniper. She had completely white hair, and she got a bullet to her back. The man who was shooting, he saw that she was an old woman, and he shot at her back. That's something that I cannot understand, and I will never understand.''
Omanovic's mother-in-law was lucky. The bullet passed through her body and she recovered.
``In the beginning of the war, in some strange way, it was - I cannot say beautiful. I can't find the words for that. It was some kind of terrible beauty, when buildings were in fire completely, and there was no electricity, so the whole city was completely dark, and on the dark sky you could see just shells, and they are red and orange and yellow.
``In the beginning I was not afraid because I didn't know what shells can do. I didn't know what shells are. Now, according to the sound, I can tell you if it was a 120mm shell or a 32mm shell - now I know. . . .
``Nobody who lives in Sarajevo now, we are not the same persons. War has changed my life completely. . . .
``We had a period when it was peaceful last summer. It was like vacation, like holiday, you know? Everybody said we will not be able to stand it if the shooting starts again. And now, it's shooting again and shelling again.
``I think a lot of people will have psychiatric problems. In such moments you think that it's better to die immediately than to suffer any longer.
``I'm trying very hard to avoid such thoughts. What I'm always thinking about is, when I go to bed in the evening, I think that is one day less - one day of the war less. If the war lasts 10 years or 15 years, it's one day less. And I'm one day closer to the day when I will see my parents and my brother again.''
That's the key to survival, Omanovic has found: taking one day at a time.
``I'm trying very hard not to be pathetic,'' she said. ``I hate that. Many stories which are made about Sarajevo by foreign reporters are pathetic, because reality in Sarajevo is so cruel. . . . It's fighting for life every day. Every day you have the question of life or death. . . .
``Many things seem silly, unimportant. You know, who cares about that? It's not important when you don't know in the morning if you will be alive in the evening.
``When you are in Sarajevo, you know that you are alive only in this moment, in the moment when you are thinking about it. . . .
``From time to time I think if the Serbs can be happy alone in an ethnically clean country, we should let them, leave them alone. But I would like them to let us live as we want to live.
``I don't hate them. I really don't. I don't hate them. I'm just so sad. . More than two years is a long, long time.''
Ultimately, Omanovic believes, the warring sides will have to negotiate an end to the conflict. But she is not optimistic that it will happen soon.
``Unfortunately,'' she said, ``it doesn't depend on people. It depends on politicians. If somebody asked the people, I'm sure there would be no war. . .
``We don't have to love each other, but we have to live like neighbors. There's no other place. We cannot send away Serbs somewhere or send away Muslims somewhere. You cannot destroy a whole nation, a whole people.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
Sanja Omanovic, a visiting journalist from Sarajevo, talks about her
life in a war zone during an interview in her hostess' Hampton Roads
home.
KEYWORDS: BOSNIA CIVIL WAR by CNB