May 5, 1996

In Bosnia, Paint and Plumbing Alone Cannot Heal

By KIT R. ROANE

LIDZA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Sanija Mulic was in her garden transplanting flowering tulips. Emin Koca was trying to fix the wiring in his home. Across the street, Mera Kosovac was working on some plumbing, and Jasna Hadzimehmedovic stood nearby calculating the costs of repairs to her family's house.

There was plenty of work to go around the other day along this tree-lined street in a suburban-looking neighborhood. Where families had celebrated birthdays and anniversaries, now lay charred walls.

The gardens that were once the scene of barbecues had been uprooted. Graffiti covered what was not burned or reduced to rubble, and litter was blown aimlessly by the wind across the way.

"I'm the electrician, plumber, yard man and painter," said Ms. Kosovac, a 58-year-old widow. She moved back into her dilapidated home on March 12, the day Ilidza, a suburb of Sarajevo that had been controlled by the Bosnian Serbs, was transferred to the Muslim-Croat federation. "But what can we do? Unless we put our block back in order, it will never return to what it was."

Koca added while wrestling with a knot of measuring tape that he was reminded of 25 years before, when he moved into the neighborhood as a young man. "This is a new beginning for all of us and I feel great," he said, wiping his brow. "Only thing lacking now is water and beer."

The quiet life on Gavrilo Princip Street -- named for the Serbian nationalist whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off World War I -- died four years ago with the torture of several Muslims and the expulsion of them all, residents said. It came at the hands of what were sometimes close Serb acquaintances from down the street.

And now many of the original Muslim owners return here in their spare time to work at putting their homes back in order, splicing cables for electricity and replacing plumbing taken by the squatters. As they worked, most peppered their talk with recollections of the street, a row of town houses that include one- and two-family homes, in happier times.

"This street used to be profiled on television every spring because of all the beautiful flowers that bloomed here," said Ibro Karup, a 49-year-old economics professor, as he hoed the dirt. "We all worked together to make it beautiful and there was no division among us."

Looking next door to where his elderly Serbian neighbor, Stanko Pokrajic, still lives, he added, "I hope it can be like that again."

Pokrajic, 74, has begun to rekindle his old friendships, offering tools to his former neighbors and congratulating them on their progress in sprucing up the place. It was a nice change, he said, after watching Serbs he said he could not understand, mostly from outside the neighborhood, rip up the block.

"I was never very close to the new people who came when the war started, " Pokrajic said. "They built army trenches in my garden and kind of kept to themselves. Then when they left, they started burning everything."

"I couldn't believe it," he added. "My old neighbors would have never done that."

Pokrajic is the only Serb left on the block, which once held a mixture of Muslims, Croats and Serbs. Most other Serbs fled when the neighborhood was transferred to the Muslim-Croat federation, joining nearly 60,000 refugees from the five Serb-controlled suburbs that changed hands.

Few here saw the war coming in late 1991, even as their childhood friends took sides and some Serbian neighbors began to parade under their nationalist flag. And of those that finally fled to Sarajevo, most only packed enough for a weekend.

Haris Pehilj, 22, remembered that his best friend, a Serb who lived three houses down the block, began to talk about "Greater Serbia" a couple of years before fighting broke out in March 1992. But they still went out to the disco together. He never thought the talk would turn to action.

"Then, one day, he and other Serbs took over my mom's home and began holding militia meetings there," he said. "One of them had helped her fix up the place when we first moved in, but all of these people began to see differences in stupid things. And finally they made us leave."

Koca, a close friend of Ms. Hadzimehmedovic's father, added that he and Hadzimehmedovic stayed around long after things got bad. Neither was in the army, so it seemed safe, at first.

"Muhamed and I were just sitting there in the yard when the Chetniks began to roll into town," he said, using the common name for the Bosnian Serb fighters. "We couldn't believe the looks we were getting and we couldn't go anywhere so we just sat there and drank. It killed the fear but, boy, we were scared."

While Koca later escaped to Sarajevo, Hadzimehmedovic found himself in police custody and being interrogated by the Serb authorities. After two weeks of being beaten and burned by cigarette butts, he said, he was saved by an old Serb friend and exchanged as a prisoner.

The Muslims and Croats on Gavrilo Princip Street are part of a lucky few who will see their homes again. Tens of thousands of refugees from both sides of the conflict remain displaced, with little hope of ever returning to their former homes. And that those in Ilidza have realized their dream has left the residents of Gavrilo Princip somewhat open to forgiveness.

They speak of inclusion and the return of Serbs who have not committed war crimes, and say how pleasant it is to chat with the one Serb who stayed.

But there is skepticism in their words. And like the homes they now sweat to renovate, their block is no longer on a track aligned with the past.

Ms. Hadzimehmedovic, 24, now often comes to Ilidza to sit in her garden. When she moves back, she said, she will change the flowers and make the house new by knocking out some of the walls.

Just a few years ago, it had been a place of parties and first kisses, where her parents provided all the drinks and food necessary for a good time. Then her friends were not known by their ethnic make-up, and she never asked.

But something changed in the war, she said, looking at the crayon markings now scrawled across her home and the burn marks left by Ognin Glogovac, the 16-year-old Serb youth who claimed her room after she departed and wrote his name all over the house. She doesn't like to talk to Pokrajic, just across the street, and like most, she is leery of all Serbs who left.

"I had so many friends who I never thought would expel us, or kill us, and they did," she said. "We were always the ones shouting that people should live with one another. But now I think maybe that was stupid."

"It's like I had this picture of my house in my mind during the war," she added. "But that picture no longer exists. Everything is different now. So when we rebuild here, it will all be different. Nothing can be like it was before the war."