Wary Sarajevans Enjoy Taste of Normal Living : Bosnia: Despite a new truce, most are skeptical that peace is near. But resumption of tram service is welcome.

If there is a symbol of life returning to normal in this besieged capital, it is the cross-town tram that resumed service Tuesday, three days after the Muslim-led government and Bosnian Serbs signed a winter truce.

For the first time in a month, the orange-and-yellow streetcar rolled through downtown and along Marshal Tito Boulevard--known as “sniper alley”--to the other side of the city, packed with Sarajevans taking advantage of a calm that experience tells them will never last.

“You cannot believe them,” 18-year-old Armin Skanderovic said of his Serbian enemies. “Maybe they will obey it for five minutes, but in the sixth they will start again. Today is better, but what about tomorrow?”

Skanderovic stood between his market stall and a crater left by the shell that killed 68 people in the market in February, and listened to the trolley passing by. His neighbor, 43-year-old Camila Doga, cocked her head and said, “If the tram goes through, the situation is normal.”

But normal is a relative term in a sandbagged city of ruins.

The government and Serbs began a cease-fire on Christmas Eve and signed a four-month cessation of hostilities agreement Dec. 31--Sarajevo’s 1,000th day under siege. On Tuesday, the shelling and sniping had largely stopped, and there was a feeling that the streets were moderately safe.

Yet this largely Muslim enclave remains encircled by Serbs, with no way out for most Sarajevans.

Although U.N. officials say they hope roads into and out of town will open within days, it is clear in Sarajevo that a cage is still a cage as long as the door is closed.

“It has been three years,” Doga said. “I go from my home to the market and from the market home, nowhere else.”

Sarajevo is a snowy landscape of charred automobile carcasses and barricades against sniper fire, of soccer fields turned to cemeteries and barren parks whose trees have gone to firewood.

Homes may have gas every other day and electricity every nine or 10 days. Their windows are mended with packing tape or shot out altogether, the empty frames covered with plastic against wind and snow.

Most of the heavy shelling stopped last winter after the market attack, when NATO ordered heavy guns withdrawn from around the capital and threatened air strikes if both warring sides did not comply.

Cross-town trolley traffic has long been a barometer of fighting in the city; about a month ago, service was cut after too many riders were hit by sniper fire.

Now, the cease-fire has quieted most sniper attacks. Riders pushed into the packed rail cars Tuesday as if the government was giving away something delicious inside.

Hamdo Jasic, a 45-year-old metalworker, waited in front of the shell-damaged presidential building for a streetcar. Asked if he feared the cross-town ride, he shrugged and said: “How can you still feel fear after all these years? We try to live as human beings, to have culture and sports and be fit. We try to live as normally as possible.”

A normal day in Sarajevo may include a trolley ride and even a job, but no living wage. In this war economy, a doctor in a government hospital earns one German mark, or about 65 cents, per month. A kilo of cured meat costs 28 marks.

Sarajevans live off aid sent by international organizations or hard currency sent by relatives abroad and used for black-market goods.

Now, in the calm of the cease-fire, Sarajevans have received their first electric bills since the war began--bills for hundreds of German marks that many say they cannot pay.

The truce has brought other signs of normal life too. Street lights have been relighted on “sniper alley,” and cars drive the icy boulevard with their headlights beaming, rather than race under cover of darkness.

Across from the concrete and marble ruins of the national library, where opera singer Placido Domingo performed last spring, a small crowd waited for the tram in Sarajevo’s old town.

“Every day is the same. We wait for the gas, go get water, prepare food. I go to market if it is a day without fighting,” said Dina Delic, a 29-year-old widow.

With silver earrings, a stylish haircut and makeup around her blue eyes, Delic looked like an expression of optimism. But she is jobless and raising a 4-year-old whose father was killed at war.

“The war will end before I run out of makeup,” she said with a laugh, quickly adding that she had far more makeup than confidence that this was the end of the conflict.

“I have enough reasons to be angry, but I don’t want to think about the situation,” she said. “I am very patient.”