“The verses too are happy when people meet”. This is what Kiko Sarjelic, ghost and absent numen of the city, thought and wanted for the rebirth of Sarajevo. What is left when a war, a siege, ends?

Sarajevo in the mirror. The anwer unfortunately is not “nothing”. The answer is: memories, fear, ghosts, grievances, anger, rubble, ruins, poverty. In Sarajevo there is a silence, empty but fraught with all this. With all that remains. It is necessary to keep on going. God knows how, but many manage to. Many manage not to turn to Mount Igman with horror, to live a normal life. To smile, to have children, to fall in love, to play. Even to see pyramids (yes, pyramids) where there used to be only Serbian posts. So Sarajevo, ten years after Dayton, is a capital where “international” does not only mean peace force or UNO agencies, but also turism, intellectual exchange, meetings. The International Poetry Meeting, the Jazz Festival, the Film Festival, the Kletzmer Festival, the “Sarajevo Winter” Festival. The International poetry meeting (in October) was an important occasion to organize an big, brilliant, amusing event. People attended from all over the world (or from some parts of the world at least). From the Uniteds States, from Cyprus, from Lebanon, from Spain, from Italy, from Croatia. Four days during which it seemed to make sense to declaim the verses of Ungaretti, Bekett, or to have  Jerry Aronson’s documentary, The life and Times of Allen Ginsberg, shown. Hearing the old beat of drug and delirium, peace and destruction, artificial paradises and real hells sung in Sarajevo is odd, it sounds like the umpeenth oxymoron, the umpteenth contraddiction, the last folly and, at the same time, the last (and most of all, the only) hope.

The proposal of culture. Possibly the same spirit inspires all the cultural events that fill the evenings in Sarajevo: an attempt among others to try and be a normal city, a place like others, an unremarkable capital. But when, after a few days, the events close down, a slight bitter taste is left in the mouth. As always, after all. But in Sarajevo it’s a little different. Only here, when the loudspeakers fall silent, you can hear once again the heavy silence of a city that is still  stunned and incredulous. Where people feign a normality that really still does not exist.
The city still looks wounded, the memory of the horror still alive and the smell of fear still pungent. The dismay, the surprise for what suddenly was happening is still alive:”my best friend made me drink my blood as though I were a soup”, Marko Vesovic recited. Ten years later it still is not easy to turn over a new leaf, it is not easy to really meet each other, and when the noise stops the silence is deafening.

Looking at Sarajevo. A western world that wants to get closer to the Balcans and understand its dynamics meets quite a few obstacles. First of all it is necessary to overcome the sterotype, the prejudice: the image of the Balcans as the chosen land of irrationality and suspention from (and of) reality in favour of a dream-like dimension where everything is clouded, incoherent, discordant. Once the prejudice has been overcome, there is the reality. Which is indeed difficult and never looks you in the eye. Those who are twenty years old in Sarajevo today very probably spent their childhood abroad. More or less at twelve, thirteen years of age they had to escape to Italy, to the United States, to Germany, countries which had suddenly become the refuge for those who managed, more or less eventfully, to leave the dead end that Sarajevo had become. When the war ended almost all of them came back, convinced that this would be it. It was their turn: if they believed in their country, their country would believe in them. Big mistake. Bosnia today seem to have no use for its young people. Data relative to the rate of unemployment have a convulsive element about them. We’re speaking of unemployment rates of 50-60 percent.

A generation at the window. There are no investments, structures, capitals. The unemployment rates are probably approximated by defect because they take into consideration people who are actively looking for work, who are written up in the unemployment lists, who lost a job, but not those who never had a job, nor those who work in the informal economy, nor again those, and there are many of them, who, disheartened and tired, do not even look for a job. Although most of the time they are qualified young people, the likelihood of their finding even a short-term job is small. The result is that many quite simply wait. They don’t do anything. “I read books, I watch films” is the answer to the trite question “What do you do?”. In the meantime pubs are already full on Monday morning. In Bosnia, like in Italy and anywhere else, unemployment can only bring two main results: a practically unexaustible supply of manpower for petty crime and organized criminality, and, on the other hand, a haemorrhage of young people, both intellectual and work force, who are ready –once again- to leave Bosnia. Surveys carried out in the Balcans show, again and again, that 50-70 percent of young people would leave their country at the first occasion, driven by poverty or unemployment.
The reasons? Too many. It’s perfunctory and superficial to lay all the blame on the war which, although devastating, ended ten years ago. The local economies were not able to rebuild themselves in efficient ways and they were not able to give themselves an impulse that could in its turn create new jobs. The work that the war took away was never replaced and the rebuilding that was actually carried out only involved few, a very few, privileged people. So every morning there are many who queue in front of consulates to ask for a visa (which they have very few possibilities of obtaining) that might open for them the doors to Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain. In the meantime they wait.