Still Waiting for a Better Life

Sabira Pazarac’s strength and persistence went a long way in keeping her family together. The Muslim seamstress opened her store almost every day of Bosnia-Herzegovina’s 3 1/2-year war and furiously sewed clothes custom-ordered by the wives of the men who were, essentially, her Serbian captors.

“People were saying: ‘How can you work? They are rounding people up and shooting them, and you just sit behind your sewing machine,’ ” she said. “That is what sustained me. I was in a Russian roulette every day. If I wasn’t sewing, I would have gone mad.”

Pazarac’s work for the Serbian elite kept her family safe in Bijeljina while most other Muslims were driven out--or worse. And she formed part of a tiny, tenacious wartime network of Muslim women who biked through the neighborhoods each morning to check on who had been picked up or killed overnight. One night in June 1992, the dead would include her husband Sadik’s best friend, Salko Kukic, shot in front of his children and wife even as she paid gunmen to spare his life.

It is only now, with the war over and tensions easing, that Pazarac questions why she fought so hard to survive. Was it really worth staying for the sake of staying? She thinks of leaving, and she weeps.

Blond, stylishly dressed and serious in demeanor, Pazarac, 46, served coffee to a visitor on the back porch of her mother-in-law’s home. Encased by grapevines, fruit trees and a mammoth, ancient oak, this sanctuary hid her family during the war while friends and neighbors were disappearing.

(As recently as 1996, Bosnian Serb authorities--this time with clipboards instead of guns--attempted to seize the house. Maritza Pazarac, Sadik’s 73-year-old mother, chased them away.)

Part of Sabira Pazarac’s frustration is a postwar adjustment that is typical of many survivors. Adrenaline-pumped determination to defy the murderous odds has given way to an emotional letdown, where the daily monotony that sustained war’s artificial normalcy is now simply monotony--uninspiring and perhaps futile.

“I still feel like I’m in a cage,” she said. “. . . We all expected when the war ended that things would be better. But this ‘better’ never comes. The steps are so small, like you’re walking in a swamp.”

Her biggest regret involves her children. Staying in Bijeljina may have robbed them of a future, a chance for a full, prosperous life. Their education has included compulsory courses in the Serbian Orthodox religion and in the Serbian version of history. Son Zlatan, 15, has few options for continuing his studies; daughter Jasna, 17, used to be a good student but has lately been flunking her classes. There are scarce extracurricular activities--theater, sports, clubs--for any children, much less Muslim children.

“Theirs is a lost generation,” Pazarac said. “All they do is go to cafes, nothing else.”

Jasna is sipping juice and smoking cigarettes in one of the dozens of cafes that dot the streets here and in most Bosnian towns. She is a rambunctious teen wearing 10 earrings--her right ear is pierced seven times, the left three--who enjoys an equally bubbly clique of girlfriends, all Serbs.

Madonna is blaring on the stereo. “A ma-ter-i-al girl . . .” The girls talk about birthday parties and summer vacations and school, and they congratulate one of their group for passing a language class, although with a D.

Perhaps Jasna spends so much time in the cafes because there is so little privacy at home. She lives in a single room with her parents and younger brother--which is not easy, even in peace.

Jasna says she and her friends deliberately avoid talking politics, although it often intrudes. She wants desperately to fit in and seems to have achieved her goal.

“I don’t like to think about the war,” Jasna says. “It is too complicated. We are teenagers, and we have the problems of teenagers. . . .

“I was in [the Muslim-Croat half of] Bosnia-Herzegovina last year, and people are so . . . Muslim. Seven years ago, we were all the same, but today people are so Muslim or so Serbian or so Croat. . . . I am not. I just don’t care.”

For all her studied casualness, Jasna is clearly disturbed by some of the things she hears at the cafe. She grows somber when her best friend parrots the wartime propaganda that the Serbs never did anything to the Muslims.

“There were lots of lies about what the Serbs did,” says the friend, Jadranka, 17. “Reception centers for refugees were called concentration camps. [Foreign] television edited it to look like camps.”

Jasna looks down at her fingernails, recently painted black. “But there were camps,” she says softly.

“Well, I don’t know what happened to all the Muslims who used to live here,” Jadranka continues. “They just left. I don’t know how or where.”

“There were camps,” Jasna repeats, still softly.

Later, Jasna says Jadranka and all her friends have always supported her. They cried with her when her own relatives were taken away. But there are some things they will never understand.

“They did not live the war the way I did,” she says.