Sarajevo is a jewel of a city. At one time, of course, it was a skiing mecca, the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics. From a distance, the city and the hundreds of other communities scattered around the countryside look like picture postcards. It is only when you get close that you can see the destruction. Some neighborhoods look like old newsreels of Berlin after World War II. Others resemble Hiroshima after the blast. The bullet holes are everywhere, as are the dents and holes in the street where shells landed and skipped before exploding.
My wife, Anne, '63, and I came here last July on a project for the U.S. Agency for International Development. We had retired from USAID a couple of years before, but this was an assignment we couldn't turn down. Anne was to be the executive officer of the new USAID Mission in Sarajevo, responsible for overseeing the complete administrative support package, and I was to oversee the implementation of the mission's largest project, a $250 million finance facility to generate employment and crank up the business sector.
The post-war USAID program for Bosnia came together with a speed and efficiency unheard of in the current world of tightly controlled and budgeted foreign assistance programs. The basic planning started in February and March of 1995. Authorization, funding and contracting for the major program elements was in place by June. By July, we had approved our first loans, and municipal infrastructure projects were under way. By August, we had more than a hundred personnel on the ground. By the end of the year, we had 44 loans approved, and scores of community infrastructure projects ready to be launched around the country. And all this with less than half of the staff normally required for such a program.
The project on which I am working with my Bosnian economist counterpart is pumping out loans to help restart Bosnian businesses and put thousands of people back to work. This is already having a substantial impact. The businesses that have been started or upgraded include everything from concrete block and roof tile factories to bakeries, dairies and furniture workshops. I have visited factories that make shoes, windows, electric motors and chocolate. One project, financed with a loan of only $130,000, put 500 women, mostly refugees, back to work in their homes knitting sweaters for export.
Work is everything, and people are desperate to land a good job. We have college graduates driving our vehicles. Our cleaning lady is an engineer, and we have an economist working in our yard. Jobs are the key to peace--for the moment anyway.
We took our first break from the hectic pace last Thanksgiving. When we returned from a few days in Naples, we found that the first snows had arrived and the temperature inside our dark flat was below freezing. It was a stark reminder of how it had been for hundreds of thousands of Bosnians during the war.
These folks are survivors--smart, hard-working and very tough. One friend told us that during the long siege, they would gather in one flat one evening and another the next, huddling around a fire thrown together from whatever could be found within walking distance. Of course, it wasn't just heat. They had no water and very little food. Then there was the constant shelling and shooting. A colleague told me that he had walked out of his apartment building to look for a missing friend, a young woman. He did find her, but blown to pieces, in the street in front of him. Yet through it all, the people of Sarajevo have somehow held on to a wry sense of humor.
These are modern, educated, European people who have been through hell and survived to rise again. They look just like us. They also look just like one another. We can't tell a Serb from a Croat, or a Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) from an American. One of our colleagues, a Muslim, told us that his best friend before the war was a Croat who now asked him not to visit because he could no longer protect him. Another Muslim colleague told us, "Call me George here, OK" when we visited a Croat stronghold in the course of our work. Names are a giveaway as they indicate ethnic origin. Ethnic integration, as it existed before the war, is probably inconceivable within our lifetime. But if we can create conditions leading to peace in the land, albeit partitioned, we will have accomplished a vitally important mission.
There is one perverse benefit from the war. The environment--the air, the water--is clean. The economy is running at somewhere between 10 percent and 25 percent of what it was five years ago. The huge industrial plants, like the massive steel mill in Zenica, are shut down. Where once the smog was so thick that one had to wear a mask to survive, Zenica and the surrounding area are now green and beautiful. But the land mines are everywhere, which means you can't safely step off a sidewalk--a rule I follow religiously as I take my morning jog around Sarajevo. A French IFOR soldier recently had his leg blown off on the outskirts of the city. We do not venture onto the dirt area in front of our flat, and we don't pull off the road to fix a tire. There are on the order of six million unexploded mines scattered around the country. It will be a long time before all the ski slopes open again.
John Heard, '63, works in the USAID Mission in Sarajevo.
