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Muhamed Gafić, defending Sarajevo to the roof of the world
In 1997, Muhamed Gafić (center) led the first Bosnian expedition to the summit of Mont Blanc.
© Personal archive of Muhamed Gafić.
Text by: Jean-Arnault Dérens Follow |
Simon Rico Follow
5 mins
He is one of the most famous mountaineers in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
During the siege of Sarajevo, this special forces fighter defended the city and even tried to raise the Bosnian flag on the peak of the Himalayas.
Muhammed Gafić is fighting today against the nationalist drift of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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From our regional correspondents,
Muhammed Gafić is a man who likes to get high.
Even in Sarajevo, he lives in Bistrik, one of the oldest districts of the Bosnian capital, housed on the hill where the first Ottoman fortress was established in the middle of the 14th century.
To reach his home from the valley, where the heart of the city beats, you have to go up a narrow and steep street, like an access route to one of the 800 peaks he climbed during his career as a mountaineer, more than half a century long.
Born in Sarajevo in 1948, Muhamed Gafić, still displays an Olympic form and willingly lets go: “
I have been retired since 2005, if this continues, I will end up sinking the Bosnian pension system!
»
Graduated in sociology, professor of Marxism in the 1970s, Muhamed Gafić joined the Yugoslav special forces in 1985. He was in charge of physical training and remained there until their break-up in March 1992, after the declaration of independence. of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Thirty years have passed since the implosion of Yugoslavia, but the pill still won't pass.
"
I am convinced that the imperialist powers wanted to sacrifice our country, the last in Europe where we lived somehow a socialist system
", indignantly the old man, taking up the rumors which still circulate in Sarajevo, Belgrade or elsewhere in the former common state of the South Slavs.
On April 6, 1992, as the siege of Sarajevo began, Muhamed Gafić was in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia, with his wife and two children.
Without hesitation, he immediately set off for his hometown.
“
Yugoslavia was my homeland, but I knew I had to defend Bosnia and Herzegovina, my family's land, where my home is.
If I had to do it again, I would come back to Sarajevo.
»
Muhamed Gafić quickly puts on the uniform and ends up becoming deputy commander of the Bosnian special forces for the defense of the homeland, one of the highest ranking officers in besieged Sarajevo.
The living conditions are then terrible: the city is pounded daily by the Serbian artillery, the snipers make reign of terror and the food shortage.
But Muhamed Gafić holds the shock, accustomed to extreme situations.
"
Mountaineering forces those who submit to it to always push their abilities to the extreme limit, to live in unbearable situations
", he explains, he who considers this discipline as a real philosophy.
“
We fight above all against ourselves.
In 1979, he climbed Everest for the first time with a Yugoslav expedition, at the top of which temperatures drop below -40° or even -50° C and where oxygen is scarce.
“
At home, in Sarajevo, I am an atheist.
But as soon as I start climbing, I start reconsidering my faith.
At
5,000 meters, I'm already a good believer and at
7,000, I become downright fundamentalist
,” he laughs, his eyes laughing behind his glasses.
In the spring of 1994, his wife Fikreta returned to Sarajevo with their children, Zijah and Zaina, long before the siege ended.
All three had found refuge in Florence.
The Croats and Bosnian Muslims had just signed the Washington agreement in Vienna.
This ceasefire also organized the territory held by the two forces into ten cantons, which paved the way for the creation of the current Croat-Bosnian entity.
It was just after the signing of this Washington Accord that Muhamed Gafić had the idea of mounting an expedition bringing together Bosnian and Croat fighters in the Himalayas.
Objective: climb K2, the second highest peak in the world.
"
We met Americans, Japanese, British, Italians and Spaniards, they all wanted to bivouac with us
," he recalls, moved.
“
The Americans gave us 30 kilos of chocolate, more than could be found in all of Sarajevo during the siege.
»
They didn't manage to go all the way to the top: when they were leaving the last base camp, at 7,400 m altitude, one of the members suffered a stroke and the whole team came down to support him.
His main regret remains above all "
not having been able to invite [his] former colleagues from the Yugoslav special forces, who were fighting in the camp opposite, on the Serbian side
".
During the siege, Muhamed Gafić also published his first novel,
Sarajevski Rulet
(Sarajevian Roulette), which was a great success locally.
Two more volumes were subsequently published in 1996, shortly after the fighting ended.
Muhamed Gafić believes he has "
won the war
", since the borders of the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been preserved, but he bitterly regrets the concessions made to the nationalists during the Dayton Peace Accords, which ratified the partition of the country on an ethnic basis.
“
Whether they are Serbs, Croats or Bosnians, they had already all agreed before the fighting to destroy socialism
”, plagues the one who remains attached to the values of unity and fraternity, the Yugoslav motto.
In recent months, the mountaineer has joined the Restart group, which wants to make the voice of citizens heard in the crisis that Bosnia and Herzegovina is currently going through, calling on local politicians as well as Western diplomats.
In 1989, when the Socialist Federation was trying to introduce a little more capitalism into its economy to get out of the terrible crisis that had paralyzed it for several years, Muhamed Gafić set off to attack Pic Lenine, in the Pamir, on the current border between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
But his expedition had to turn back, close to the summit.
“
We ended up like communism: failing very close to the goal.
»
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