Horror of ‘Sarajevo’ Not Exactly Welcome

A cold-eyed soldier calmly uses a handgun to shoot one man after another. Each falls, dead, hands still tied, onto a pile of bodies. Another soldier spray-paints walls with the name of this Bosnian Serb killer: “Zivko.”

Some of the moviegoers watching these scenes applaud.

They applaud, too, at the opening of “Welcome to Sarajevo,” when dazed refugees stream from the Croatian city of Vukovar as it is bombed to smithereens by Serbian forces. And a few cheers ring out when Radovan Karadzic--whose wartime leadership of the Bosnian Serbs earned him a double indictment on genocide charges--speaks into television cameras about his willingness to respect the international treaties he routinely flouted.

“Welcome to Sarajevo,” welcome to Belgrade.

Screening this movie--a jarring account of journalists covering the Bosnian Serbs’ war on the multiethnic capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina--here in this city, the capital of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, was an intriguing thing to do.

British director Michael Winterbottom’s production, starring Woody Harrelson and Stephen Dillane, hurtles through a Sarajevo under siege at the start of a 3 1/2-year war that shattered a nation, displaced an estimated 2 million people and killed as many as 200,000.

Belgrade, by contrast, is the headquarters of the very masterminds of Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II. It is where the policy of “ethnic cleansing” was hatched and where notorious warlords still live openly and affluently. Many Serbs in Belgrade remain in serious denial about what happened next door in Bosnia, refusing to accept any of the guilt or responsibility placed on Serbian shoulders.

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For them, a film like “Welcome to Sarajevo”--shown Friday as part of this year’s highly popular Belgrade Film Festival--is another piece of Western propaganda aimed at smearing the Serbs. Soaked for the last seven years in their government’s nationalistic propaganda, they reject as fabricated the world’s (and the movie’s) accounts of atrocities committed against Muslims, such as the gruesomely fatal Bosnian Serb shelling of people waiting in line to buy bread.

“Typical lies,” fumed Robert Matic, a 29-year-old architect, as he emerged from Belgrade’s Sava Center theater complex.

But perhaps more important than the misguided applause during the premiere was the silence that characterized most of the audience reaction most of the time. Anger? Shock? Disgust?

Aleksandar Kostic, a movie critic with Nasa Borba, one of the most liberal newspapers in Belgrade, said viewers around him were stunned. Friends asked him, “Did we do this?” Kostic decided he could not write a review for his paper. The content of “Welcome to Sarajevo,” he concluded, was just “too heavy.”

“This is hard to take,” Kostic said. “It’s sad for us. . . . This is something we will have to deal with for the next 50 years.”

Despite the potential controversy, “Welcome to Sarajevo” was brought to Belgrade with the idea of wider dissemination, film festival organizers said. The liberal-minded in Yugoslavia--a minority who were branded as traitors whenever they tried to mount antiwar protests--are hoping it may force their countrymen to face the truth, or that at least it will generate debate.

Film festival organizers said they had no qualms about including “Welcome to Sarajevo” in their schedule.

“It is extremely anti-Serb, but that’s all the more reason to show it,” said Srdjan Koljevic, a film critic and festival planner. “People here have every right to see it and should see it.”

Koljevic’s father was a senior Bosnian Serb leader during the war.

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If one role of a movie is to make people see clearly things that they might otherwise ignore or distort in their minds, however, I am not sure “Welcome to Sarajevo” will accomplish this.

It’s a good idea to try to show the story of the Bosnian war theatrically, in a way that is compelling for American audiences. If the exploits of American and British journalists are the chosen vehicle, so be it.

And I understand the need for oversimplification: Most Americans’ eyes tend to glaze over when you start talking about Muslims and Serbs and Croats and who hates whom and when and why.

But “Welcome to Sarajevo” goes for the visceral without explanation or context. Authentic, gory newsreel footage, interspersed with actors’ scenes, is shocking, horrifying, unsettling. The crazed despair of survivors picking through bloodied men and women after the bread line is shelled; the sickness induced by the sight of two dead babies on a hospital gurney; the panic of driving zig-zag through Sarajevo streets to avoid a sniper’s aim--all of these ring true.

But who is who and what is what? I think the story line must have been confusing for American viewers, and, in its use of simplified stereotypes, it does little to disabuse Serbs of any pre-held notions. You won’t glean much from this movie as to why the war happened.

Many facts have been changed, events condensed. The movie re-creates a wedding party fired upon as members walked through the streets. In reality, this was a Bosnian Serb wedding, not a Catholic one as in the movie--an important distinction because the incident was used by Bosnian Serbs to justify an armed response. Journalists did not rescue the felled body at that wedding, as in the movie; on the other hand, many journalists throughout the war certainly loaded wounded into their car trunks for a dash to the emergency room. And they put out fires set in people’s homes when peacekeepers wouldn’t.

“Welcome to Sarajevo” tells the true story of a British television reporter who smuggles a girl out of Bosnia so that he and his wife can adopt her. For some reason, the movie changes the girl’s name from Natasha (probably a Serbian name) to the decidedly Muslim name Emira. The questionable ethics of taking the girl out are mentioned, in passing, but the fact that Bosnia does not allow its children to be adopted by foreigners is never addressed.

The film does portray with authenticity the gallows humor of journalists who can joke during the bleakest of times, and the vulture-like voyeurism of photographers who staked out the spots where Sarajevo residents would attempt to cross the thoroughfare that became known as Sniper Alley. An especially poignant device in the movie is repeated glimpses of a young altar boy who, running from a shooting, screams at the journalists pursuing him: “Why are you looking at me?”

Images of survival during the war are realistic: the near-darkness as journalists work (or drink) without much light or electricity; collecting water in plastic bottles and washing one’s face by splashing small handfuls from a saucepan; the conversion of a piece of hotel soap or a pack of cigarettes into currency; huddling in basements to escape shelling.

When this movie debuted in Sarajevo in the fall, Sarajevans booed at appearances by various United Nations bureaucrats and ineffective peace mediators who, Sarajevans felt, did not do enough to end their city’s anguish. The journalists in “Welcome to Sarajevo” also express frustration with editors who are not paying enough attention.

“This isn’t the lead story?” one journalist asks in disbelief after finding the war’s latest atrocity trumped by a report on the duke and duchess of York filing for divorce.

The war was not the lead story that day in London. And it certainly wasn’t in Belgrade.

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Vienna bureau chief Tracy Wilkinson covered the siege of Sarajevo for The Times.