April 21, 1996
A Postwar Shortage in Sarajevo: Space for Graves
By PHILIP SHENON
ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- When Zijadeta Perisic returns home to her apartment from a morning spent scavenging for the little food she and her husband can afford, she walks past 16 reddish mounds of dirt. They are lined up in a narrow space of earth bordering the playground where the neighborhood children gather each afternoon to skip rope.
Her pace usually slows as she passes near one of the small rectangular mounds. "We buried her in the playground because we were surrounded -- it was the only cemetery that we had," Mrs. Perisic said of her 16-year-old daughter, Sanjina, who was killed in a shelling attack on the neighborhood in August 1992.
"Even during the funeral, they would not stop the shelling," said Mrs. Perisic, 56, a nurse who was born to a family of Bosnian Muslims but who now calls herself an atheist. "People had to risk their lives to pay their respects to my Sanjina."
The teen-ager was laid to rest only a few feet from the back window of her parents' apartment, one of an estimated 4,000 people who had to be buried in makeshift graveyards during the four-year siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs.
"Parks, schoolyards, gardens, alleyways -- people were buried wherever there could find space, usually late at night so that the Serb snipers couldn't see the funeral and open fire," said Maj. Sion Harrington, a U.S. Army reservist from Erwin, N.C.
A member of the Army's 353rd Civil Affairs Command who in civilian life is an archivist for the state of North Carolina, Harrington has been assigned by NATO to help Sarajevo's municipal government prepare for the exhumation of thousands of corpses and their reburial in proper cemeteries.
The U.S.-led NATO peacekeeping force has been notably reluctant to involve itself in civilian reconstruction projects in Bosnia, describing its mission here almost exclusively in military terms -- keeping the peace by separating the factions and guaranteeing freedom of movement along roadways.
But in finding a proper burial place for the corpses of Bosnian civilians now buried haphazardly throughout the shattered capital, NATO has agreed to become involved, if only because the situation in Sarajevo is nearing a crisis.
"It's like you discovered that someone has buried thousands of people in the middle of Central Park," said Harrington, who speaks in the slow, melodic cadence of his native North Carolina.
"I don't understand how you can have all the bodies in the middle of this city without it being a health hazard," he said, explaining that ground water beneath many of the makeshift graveyards runs into the city's water supply. "A lot of these bodies were buried without coffins."
Dr. Samir Lukic, a physician with the Institute for the Public Health of Bosnia, said: "There can be some problems when the people are not buried at least two meters deep, or are infected with some agents. It can also be a problem if burials are happening in populated areas or if there is more than one corpse in a hole, if there are too many people buried in a small area or if they are buried near water supplies."
There is almost no space left in official cemeteries near the center of Sarajevo, and the large municipal graveyard on the outskirts of the city was left a shambles in the hurried departure of its Bosnian Serb caretakers in February.
"The Serbs took everything that wasn't nailed down, including the earth-moving equipment and the cemetery records," Harrington said of the Serb exodus that began as their neighborhoods came under the control of the Muslim-led Bosnian government under terms of the Bosnia peace plan.
The Serbs also took with them the bodies of more than 350 Serbs who died during the civil war, most of them Bosnian Serb soldiers, leaving row upon row of four-foot-deep holes where the coffins had been.
The NATO peacekeeping force, known here as the Implementation Force, or IFOR, will not become involved in the exhumation of bodies or the reburials. "I don't think IFOR has any intention of getting into the burial business," said Harrington. Instead, he said, NATO is acting as a intermediary between the city government and international charity groups that might be able to offer money or equipment for the project.
"The Americans are our friends," said Vlado Raguz, a prominent Sarajevo funeral director who has been recruited by the city to oversee the reburials. "The American military has been a big help. They are taking this very seriously."
In a city in which sudden, violent death has been commonplace for so long, morticians have gained a remarkable celebrity, and Raguz is hoping to turn his fame into votes when he runs for Parliament later this year.
"Sarajevo is the biggest graveyard in the world," said Raguz, a barrel-chested, silver-maned Bosnian Croat, jabbing the air with his cigarette when he wished to make a point.
"Every day during the war, we would have 50 to 55 funerals, and sometime we would have to dig the graves with our bare hands," he said. "We did not have wood for coffins, so we had to ask families to give up their wooden closets. We used the closets as coffins. Sometimes the gravediggers would be killed by a sniper as they worked, so we would bury them in the hole that they had dug for someone else."
After the Serbs looted the city's main graveyard on their departure, Sarajevo was left with a single, 15-year-old earthmover, so the city is depending on charity groups to help pay for new equipment. The city is hoping to clean up the main cemetery and use it as the burial site for the bodies now scattered in makeshift graves.
"We don't have a Christmas stocking full of money," said Raguz, who estimates that the cost of the reburials will be more than $1 million. "It's a question of having enough wood for caskets, a question of having vehicles to transport the bodies."
The scale of the project is apparent in what used to be a large leafy public park on the mountainside that rises behind Sarajevo's oldest Muslim neighborhood.
In 1992, the park was declared Martyrs' Cemetery. The shade trees were stripped for firewood, and today hundreds of graves fill the mountainside vista. At last count, 780 bodies were buried there, most of the dirt mounds covered with with bright plastic flowers. (Fresh-cut flowers are still an unimaginable luxury to most Sarajevo mourners.)
The city says that if it will move the bodies to the main cemetery as soon as enough money is raised for shovels and trucks.
"Because of the shelling every day, we were too frightened to go very far from our homes to bury our people," said Munevera Bukva-Setich, 52, who stops by the cemetery each week to pay her respects to the graves of six of her relatives buried there during the war.
She stopped in front of one grave, her hands extended over the headstone in offering a Muslim prayer for the dead. "We had to pull up the rosebeds in our parks and outside our homes to bury our sons," she said. "We had no choice."
The shelling of the western Sarajevo neighborhood of Dobrinja went on for nearly three years. The concrete apartment towers built there for the 1986 Olympics are today a pockmarked testament to the savagery of the civil war. During the siege, the gardens were sacrificed to make way for more than 500 bodies.
Hafizovic Eldar, a 19-year-old student from Dobrinja, pointed to a row of graves dug into a track of dirt along the perimeter of a parking lot.
"Some people park their cars next to the graves of their relatives," said Eldar. "We buried the dead right here. There was no place else to take the bodies because we were trapped by the snipers and the shells."
A group of young boys from the neighborhood played soccer nearby, the ball occasionally bouncing against one of the headstones. Eldar shrugged, seeing no disrespect for the dead.
"The children are used to living among these graves, so they play games among them," he said. "The graves have always been part of their lives."
