(SARAJEVO, Aoril 6—AP) The shots that began the Bosnian war were fired at the Vrbanja Bridge in central Sarajevo. Four years later, on the same bridge, Sarajevans remember the first victim. Suada Dilberovic was a medical student taking part in a peace rally when she was killed on April 5, 1992, by a bullet fired by one a several gunmen trying to stop the crowd from crossing the bridge. Although the bridge became better known for the young Muslim-Serb couple who died together there a few months later, the city decided to rename it for Dilberovic.
A plaque in her memory will be unveiled by city officials today, and the bridge will be officially reopened, although Sarajevans have been able to cross it for the past few days following the removal of hundreds of mines. "It is very sad for me to stand here and still not know why Suada was killed," 27-year-old Mirela Hadzic said Friday, laying flowers on the bridge in honor of her friend. "This whole war is a misery nobody should go through."
Scores of people were killed by snipers as they tried to cross the bridge during the war. Perhaps best known were a young couple who became known as Sarajevo’s Romeo and Juliet. Bosko Brkic, an ethnic Serb, and Admira Ismic, a Muslim, tried to run away from the horrors of war by dashing across the bridge in May 1993. The 25-year-old lovers were hoping to reach Belgrade, marry, and build a life. Thirty yards from safety, a machine-gunner killed Bosko. Admira was wounded. She crawled over and cradled him, then died. For six days, they lay in silent embrace, the area where they fell covered by snipers from both sides.
They, and Dilberovic, are only a few of those who died in the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II. More than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared, tens of thousands were wounded and more than 2.5 million Bosnians fled or were driven from their homes. A total of 8,017 people were killed in Sarajevo alone, 769 of them children, according to the Bosnian Health Ministry. Another 46,982 people, including 11,442 children, were wounded.
Memories of years spent dodging snipers’ bullets and running for cover from deadly shell shrapnel remain fresh. "The fear we lived with for so long cannot be forgotten that easily," said Salih Custic, 45. "Even today, the noise a tram makes as it passes by makes me always jump." For most of the war, Sarajevo was under Bosnian Serb siege, and an international airlift was its only lifeline.
Desperate Sarajevans dug a tunnel underneath the U.N.-controlled airport linking it with the rest of government-held territories, and used it for supplying the city with food, military supplies and troop movements. "Nowadays, nobody even thinks of the tunnel," said Neven Cica, 34, a doctor and former soldier. "But I will never forget how we crawled through the mud like rats." Under the U.S.-brokered peace agreement, Sarajevo has been reunified under the control of the Muslim-Croat federation, but most of the Serbs are gone.
Though scars from four years of heavy shelling linger on the city’s street as well as on the faces its residents, life has begun returning to normal. "If it wasn’t for the destruction clearly visible all around us, one might think that war was just a nightmare we all had," said 30-year-old Amela Hodzic, walking down Sarajevo’s main street.
Berserkistan's Background Briefing: Why the War?
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