DAY FOUR
"Go to the city bakery, Madame Ambassador. The people who work there are the true heroes of the war." And taking my cue from Bosnian President Izetbegovic, I head out for the bread and pasta factory, the continuous source of sustenance for this city during the siege.
We drive through the neighborhood, past commercial buildings ripped apart, their metal roof parts now hanging like Spanish moss. Windows have been systematically shot out - rows of targets at a carnival.
At the bakery, I'm met at the front door with ceremony, including a very modest bouquet - the only fresh flowers I've seen. Bread and roses.
My hosts at the factory are six managers - all men between 40 and 60. But that's where the stereotype ends. For, like the rest of Sarajevo, they represent the ethnic diversity that made this city a symbol of multiculturalism in Yugoslavia. Two are Muslims, two Serbs, one Croat, and one from a mixed marriage.
That ethnic spread has been a critical feature of this war. Rebel Serb propaganda has painted this war as one among ethnic groups. But the capital of Bosnia has long belied that myth. The real struggle is between the notion of ethnic purity and the ideal of multiculturalism.
And so I sip coffee from a diminutive MiddleEastern cup, and sample
cookies from the bakery, literally tasting the blend of East and
West that makes this place more like an American-style
melting pot than most cities in Europe.
I don a clean jacket and enter a world of dusty white. The building has little to distinguish it architecturally: a hundred-year-old mill house, a cavernous box with three small assembly lines, and four large silos, all grouped around a yard piled high with bags of flour. But enclosed within this industrial compound lies the heart-wrenching story of Sarajevo.
Virtually every pane of glass has been shattered by gunfire. Some are taped; most are replaced by thick plastic. Two of the silos have gaping holes. The mill tower has collapsed. And the walls behind the assembly lines are pocked with bullet holes. Still, the vapors spiraling out of hooded smokestacks on the snowy roof testify to a spirit not defeated.
It is in this environment that 400 women and 200 men have risked their lives to report to work each day for the past four years. Large numbers have been wounded, many losing limbs. And 20 have been killed - 2/3 of them women. Drivers have been picked off by snipers as they've made deliveries to over 170 sites across the battered city. At one point, shelling was so heavy the workers could not return home for a week.
This factory is nestled in the city - not on the front lines. It was not caught in some line of fire. The targeting was strategic, an attempt by the rebels to starve the 300,000 citizens of Sarajevo, about half of whom are refugees from a terrorized countryside. With the airport under siege and roads blocked, the city's humanitarian supplies were cut off for months. For over a year, there was no electricity, gas or oil. The bakery used a 62-year-old Sherman tank motor to run its generator.
Flour supplied by the United Nations has kept the factory in operation, stacks of bags doubling as barricades in doorways and windows. Add to that the powdered "Truman eggs" (as the Bosnians say, harkening back to another time of war). In two and a half years, no spare parts have been supplied. As a result, production is limited by equipment breakdowns. But in spite of the damage sustained by workers and machines, 800,000 baked items and thousands of bags of pasta have been produced daily.
As I watch the noodles being poured into simple clear plastic bags, the manager mentions how important even that packaging has been for Bosnians, a reminder of civilization during this time of wretched barbarism.
In a city in which the very infrastructure has collapsed, the provision of 600 jobs is, in and of itself, a major contribution. Granted, many of the employees are seniors, who receive about $2 a day - and a loaf. But most people in Bosnia have been working without wages for several years. Life has been simply survival, at the most basic level. On January 1, 1996, the bakery workers would take their first day off since the war began.
There's something reassuring about the warm, fragrant brown loaves, twisted and twirled into small works of art. Across cultures, bread has been a symbol for sustenance and nourishment - rich in sensory pleasure and religious meaning. And so it is with the bread of Sarajevo.