The Trigger (20 page)

One Friday afternoon word went round that the Mount Igman road would be opened for a few hours that evening. Desperate not to miss the chance to get out, I skittered around gathering my gear, begging fuel and loading my Land Rover. Other journalists needed a ride, so just before twilight we set off, with me at the wheel next to two colleagues, a man and a woman, squished into a driving compartment designed for two, creeping across the runway of Sarajevo airport and along the potholed, cratered lanes that led to the mountain trail snaking to safety over Mount Igman. We knew that the Bosnian Serbs could shoot at vehicles on the road – we all remembered the British soldier killed there a year or so earlier at the wheel of a supply truck – but if we timed it right there would be enough light to make it safely across. We were out of luck.

By the time we got to the bottom of the trail, all up-traffic had been stopped. We were told the road was too narrow and too hazardous to allow two-way traffic, so a cyclical one-way system had been imposed: for an hour only upward vehicles were allowed, after which the flow was switched to downward. We had just missed the upward flow, so would have to wait an hour for our turn to go. This meant it would be completely dark by the time we set off – a worry, given that we were not allowed to use lights. To turn on a headlight was to give the Bosnian Serb gunners a target, so all lights had to be disconnected. I had even taken off a panel from underneath the dashboard of the vehicle and removed the fuse, so that my brake lights would not show when my foot touched the brake pedal.

When our turn eventually came, I remember being so wired with adrenalin that I was in a transcendental state. It was pitch-black, a moonless, cloudy night, but my senses were so alive that I managed to coach the vehicle through the darkness up what would become known as ‘The Most Dangerous Road in Europe’. This disturbing soubriquet was bestowed by Richard Holbrooke, the lead American diplomat responsible for eventually bringing an end to the war in Bosnia. During his negotiations he got to know all about the dangers of the Mount Igman road. Some months after I drove it, Mr Holbrooke was in a convoy on the track when a vehicle carrying three of his close colleagues got too close to the edge. The hillside gave way and the vehicle tumbled down the forested slope, killing all three Americans.

As I drove that Land Rover up the trail, my two journalist friends responded in very different ways as we sat crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the driving compartment. The man, an American, was utterly silent, while my British colleague talked non-stop. It made no difference. I did not care. I was too alive, too fixed on staying so. Night on Mount Igman was ‘hideous’ for Princip, but for me it was something quite different, a life-affirming thrill.

After crossing the mountain into safe territory we drove through the small hours to reach a hotel down on the Croatian coast, where I fell into a delicious sleep. When I woke I turned on the television to witness an event of great significance to the country I now call home: South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. It was a moment made magical by Nelson Mandela’s grand gesture of forgiveness. Rugby had long been associated with South Africa’s white community, the dominant minority that had so cruelly exploited the black majority, yet there was Mandela willing on the Springboks, even wearing a Springbok shirt. It was a rare but inspiring example of past hatreds being buried, people looking to tomorrow and letting go of yesterday, breaking the cycle of victimhood and vengeance.

The memory of that life-affirming drive kept me going as I explored the mountain on foot seventeen years later. As if guided by a vapour trail of 1995 adrenalin, I made the correct turnings in the forest and chose the right way from a maze of footpaths and trails that star-burst across the hilly plateau. Every so often I was passed by a carload of holidaymakers exploring the mountain and the old sporting facilities dating from the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Olympics, when Mount Igman hosted several of the main events. At one point mountain-bikers whooshed past me. I came to an old mountain lodge, where the housekeeper made me tea brewed with leaves picked from mountain bushes. He kept a loaded rifle near the door, but it was for bears, not combat. This is how a mountain should be used, I thought, for recreation, not as a desperate battleground for control of Europe’s most perilous road. At one point a car of Bosnians stopped and the driver asked me the way to Hadžići. After two weeks’ hiking, improving my Bosnian language skills and getting to know the layout of the country at peace, I was rather proud to be able to direct him.

The track I was on finally began its descent, eventually making a sharp hairpin that I remembered well. I was near the bottom of the trail, once the most dangerous part of the most dangerous road. It was near here that the three diplomats fell to their deaths and the British soldier was killed by Bosnian Serbs. All of a sudden the trees parted and a view opened up in front of me. There in the near distance was the airport, and beyond that rose the bar-graph of skyscrapers from the city’s modern suburbs. I had reached Sarajevo.

First school report for Princip at the Merchants’ School in Sarajevo, student Number 32, his first name given as Gavro

Tourist postcards of central Sarajevo, circa 1910

From the foot of the mountain I took a tram into the centre of Sarajevo, a twenty-minute journey that reminded me of perhaps the most surprising feature of a city that has had such an impact on global history: it is tiny. Passing strata of architecture gave clues as to the development of Sarajevo through the ages. First, there were buildings constructed since the war of the 1990s: brightly lit shopping centres set amid dense residential areas, some large, modernist mosques and one particularly striking new landmark, a twisted tower of mirrored glass that dominates the skyline of the city not far from the site of the old railway station, where Gavrilo Princip would have arrived. Then there were the massed ranks of buildings I recognised from the war: bland apartment buildings constructed during the communist era, still with a smattering of tinny, locally made Yugo cars parked outside. As the valley narrowed, we came to the first structures that would have been familiar to Princip: neo-colonial constructions from the Austro-Hungarian period of occupation, solid European-looking office blocks adorned with carved stuccowork on their façades and hefty wooden doorways. And finally I saw buildings dating back hundreds of years from the Ottoman occupation: bridges, minarets and storerooms roofed with turtle-shell domes.

Sarajevo was founded where a narrow gorge cut by a small mountain river called the Miljacka blooms into a full valley protected by steeply sided slopes. The oldest part – dwellings, mosques, hammams, shops and hostels ensnared by a web of alleyways – grew where the valley was still at its tightest, easiest to control from fortresses built on high bluffs that to this day still define the city’s easternmost limits. As the centuries have passed Sarajevo has crept both down the river and up the hillsides to create a city bowl snug within the contours of its highland setting.

When the Ottoman Empire swallowed Bosnia in the late fifteenth century this defensible valley was the strategic site chosen by its commanders for their new capital. It led to a golden age of construction in the first half of the sixteenth century, when some of Europe’s most elegant mosques were built and the Miljacka was laced with fine stone bridges. ‘The Bosnian countryman gapes with as much wonderment at the domes of the two chief mosques as an English rustic at the first sight of St Paul’s,’ wrote Arthur Evans when he trekked here in 1875 at the end of Ottoman rule. Established as a hub on trade routes across the Balkan Peninsula, Sarajevo grew quickly through commerce, with one seventeenth-century visitor reporting that the population had already reached 80,000, making it a true metropolis for that era, one of the largest cities in the Balkans. It was a city then dominated by Islam, the faith both of the Ottoman colonial outsiders deployed to Bosnia and of the growing cohort of local Slavs who converted to the religion of the occupier. Evans echoed others when he noted that Sarajevo’s ethnic heritage was writ in ‘a skyline of a hundred minarets’.

As the city’s commercial power grew, so Sarajevo drew many from beyond the Islamic world, earning a name for inter-ethnic tolerance. Local Catholics (forerunners of today’s Bosnian Croats) and Orthodox Christians (the original Bosnian Serbs) established sizeable minorities in a city that became so mixed it was known as the ‘Damascus of the North’. One of the oldest Ottoman structures spanning the Miljacka was named the Latin Bridge, because it linked the small Catholic district where the Latin liturgy was observed on the south bank of the river to the main body of the city over on the north. There was also a significant community of Sephardic Jews, who made their home here after being expelled from Spain in the late fifteenth century. The city’s original Jewish cemetery was one of the most fought-over pieces of land during the war of the 1990s, with trenches that burrowed between bulky, trunk-shaped gravestones used by local Jewry for hundreds of years. I once listened as soldiers from the two sides shouted abuse at each other, separated in places by only a few feet of no-man’s-land.

The racial egalitarianism seen in Sarajevo was typical of Ottoman pragmatism, the most efficient way to develop an imperial outpost in land heavily populated by ‘non-believers’, although this period was not without friction. The Sultan’s regular feuds with his always reactionary and occasionally mutinous military elite, the Janissaries, sometimes spread from Istanbul to Sarajevo, just as it did to other cities in the empire. Furthermore, leaders of the Bosnian Muslim community in Sarajevo grew so wealthy and powerful that they came to clash with the Pasha, the Sultan’s representative sent from Istanbul. After winning exemption for Sarajevo from imperial taxes, the increasingly haughty Slav elite grew ever more dismissive of the authority of the Sublime Porte. Friction with the Pasha became so acute that he was effectively ousted, and for many years around 1800 he was not welcome in the city, being obliged to move his capital elsewhere in Bosnia. Tradition had it that the Pasha could visit Sarajevo safely for just one night, but beyond that his security could not be guaranteed. Such an arrangement was never going to last, and the Turkish commanders who eventually arrived to put the upstart Slav Muslims back in their place did so bloodily and ruthlessly. Wider Ottoman military ambitions also cost Sarajevo dear, with raids by the empire’s traditional enemies from Hungary and Austria that saw large parts of the city burned to the ground.

With the Ottoman Empire ailing through the nineteenth century – ‘the sick man of Europe’ – so Sarajevo declined, and by the time Austria–Hungary sent its troops to occupy Bosnia in 1878 the population had roughly halved from its peak. When Arthur Evans arrived on foot he described it as ‘dark, fanatical and backward’, noting that there was not a single bookshop in the entire city. His description of street sanitation was particularly base, recording that it was not safe to go out on the streets at night because by then they belonged to rough, lawless, malodorous gangs of cleaners, sweepers and human-waste collectors. A city map from 1908 shows that even though Sarajevo was 400 years old, it still only nosed about a mile or so westwards down the valley. Beyond lay open country, although here the map showed grand colonial plans for a large development zone marked as ‘New Sarajevo’. At the time of the map’s publication this huge plot remained empty except for the railway station and a vast military barracks, both newly built on orders from Vienna.

Within the city limits of Sarajevo proper, the Austro-Hungarian occupiers had sought to project order on the muddle left by the decaying Ottoman Empire. While the new authorities left alone the main bazaar quarter, they laid out an ambitious grid of government offices, courthouses, colleges, museums, theatres and other more Western buildings. In 1895 Sarajevo became the first city in central Europe with an electric tram system, technology so cutting-edge it would be replicated in the network eventually installed on the streets of the imperial capital, Vienna.

The Miljacka was not spared the attention of the Habsburg urban planners. A Sarajevo city map from 1880 shows the river meandering past gravel reaches and islets between uneven muddy banks lined by a higgledy-piggledy assortment of gardens and houses. The Austro-Hungarians moved to impose order on the Miljacka and after several years’ work it ran, as it does today, ramrod-straight through the city centre, apart from two faint kinks. A stepped series of weirs still keeps the water shallow and slow-moving, canalised between masonry-lined banks with buildings on the entire length of the northern side, separated from the river bank by a wide, busy boulevard named Appel Quay by the Austro-Hungarian colonial authorities.

On occasion the clash of styles could grate between classical Ottoman and expansionist Habsburg designs. Indeed, Rebecca West described witheringly the faux-Moorish town hall that went up next to the old bazaar soon after the Austro-Hungarians arrived in Sarajevo. ‘The minaret of the mosque beside it has the air of a cat that watches a dog making a fool of itself,’ she wrote. In 1914 the town hall would be the last building Archduke Franz Ferdinand would enter alive.

In spite of all this work, the city’s mostly Muslim population lived at the start of the twentieth century as they always had, in dwellings of medieval simplicity that lapped up the steep valley sides, with none of the modernist rigour enforced downtown. To reach them you climbed narrowing alleys of cobblestones that snaked ever upwards, speckling the city’s contoured surrounds with grey shingle roofs and the occasional splash of headstone-white from tumbledown Muslim graveyards. ‘The numerous minarets and the little houses standing in gardens give the town a very picturesque appearance,’ enthused the 1905 Baedeker. A less benign description of the city comes from John Gunther, an American author writing in the 1930s. He wrote of Sarajevo as a ‘mud-caked primitive village’.