In the following article, the Bosnian journalist of the Al-Jazeera network, Alma Militic, recounts her memories of under the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war, and the
article was
published
on the English site Al-Jazeera on the 25th anniversary of the end of that hideous war.
I was born in Sarajevo in July 1991, nine months before the start of the Bosnian war.
The siege was the only people talking, so it was not surprising that Opsada, which means siege in the Bosnian language, was among the first words they uttered.
My newlywed parents, who have two young children, packed their things and left their new home to escape.
Sarajevo was under a siege that later turned into the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, and the only option available to my father was to move from one municipality to another around the city, before settling in them in one of the villages on Mount Igman near Sarajevo.
My father was an ambitious poet at the time, and the war forced him to convert his poetry into a form of poetic journalism, narrating events and reporting them on the local radio.
He has written hundreds of reports, poems and notes from the field over the years of the war.
My parents were later forced to return to their home in Sarajevo after Mount Igman was attacked in 1993.
The house under which the "tunnel of life" was dug and became a museum and tourist attraction in Sarajevo (the island)
My father had joined the army at the time, so my mother and sister stayed alone, and it was no longer safe to live in our house, so we moved to live with neighbors in the house directly opposite ours.
The neighbour's house had a basement where several families, including ours, lived.
My own memories of the war were starting to take shape at this time.
The windows of the neighbor’s house we moved in were covered with sandbags, and the only beam of light we could barely see was slipping through the entrance door, which was closed most of the time.
Often I would open the door when no one was watching, to contemplate our home and imagine what it would be like to live in our own place.
In war you may be a few meters from your home, but you are living in exile.
The longing for our old home grew over the next two years we moved in.
My sister and I used to spend many hours listening to our mother's stories of what our life would be like when we were able to return home.
There was an acute shortage of food and banknotes in Sarajevo at the time, but there were a lot of cigarettes, we would trade 5 packs of cigarettes for one kilogram of sugar, and 20 packs of cigarettes for a kilogram of coffee.
I accompanied my parents a few times on their trips through the Sarajevo Tunnel, known as the "Tunnel of Life".
The only way to get in and out of the city was, and they were carrying a suitcase full of cigarettes in the hope of bartering it for any kind of food.
The tunnel was narrow, and my head often bumped into the ceiling and the walls touched my hands, but I was in my father's arms and I didn't care about any of that.
My father brought sweets, apples, and a bunch of newspapers with his new writings every time he visited us.
By 1995, paper in Bosnia had become very scarce. My father was collecting used cigarette packs and writing on them.
On July 19 of the same year, a few days after my fourth birthday, a grenade hit our house and took with it the last hope of returning to it anytime soon.
That year saw another important turning point in my life. I joined my father for the first time in a radio interview.
I could not read at the time, but thanks to my memorization of most of his writings, I participated with him in the role of a witness to the war within 6 months.
With the formal signing of the Dayton Peace Treaty, on December 14, 1995, my father wrote his last report, and two years after the war ended, he published his first book.
I told my father later, "When I grow up, I will be a journalist," and he replied, "I hope you don't have to cover the war again."