September 10, 1995
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (CNN) -- Dzevad Sabanagic is playing the "Lament for Bosnia" (123K AIFF sound file). Usually it reminds him of the shelling and the dead, but today he has a new lament: Bosnia divided. Over a nearby hill lies the state the Serbs carved in blood. Now he hears the world legitimize and pronounce its name, the republic of Srpska.
"It was terrible. It hit me hard," remembers Dzevad. "My colleague phoned me and asked if he had heard right ... and I said, 'I heard it, too, and I was about to call you.'"
Dzevad leads the Sarajevo string quartet. Every day he practices at home, from which he can see the city's mosque, its Catholic church and its Orthodox church. He refuses to abandon that ideal of co-existence, even though partition will be the price pragmatists pay for peace.
Dzevad says he won't leave Sarajevo. "It's unthinkable for me," he said. "It would be like leaving a sick parent or child. I never even think about it. ... My country is crying now. It carries a heavy burden. Can you imagine abandoning a sick child?"
Some can. For Bojan and Sanda Bahic, the dream is dead. They're packing to leave. They have lived and loved in Sarajevo most of their adult lives and throughout the war.
"The Sarajevo spirit that everyone talks about is in the people, but a lot of the people who symbolized Sarajevo's spirit have left," Sanda said.
Sanda and Bojan are artists -- born of mixed marriages -- brought up to believe in tolerance and ethnic diversity. "I'm very sad. I'm leaving because it's not the same country I grew up in," reflected Bojan. "The worst thing is people don't behave as they used to, as civilized, normal people."
And folks like Bojan and Sanda simply refuse to endure a fourth winter under siege. "Most of them didn't leave because they are not patriots," Bojan emphasized. "They left because they were hungry."
That was hard enough to bear. That and the dying. People are leaving now because the Bosnia they fought for was erased from the map in Geneva.
The Sarajevo song is ending
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