Ride the Train of Reintegration from Sarajevo to Belgrade

If you'd like a train ticket from Sarajevo, Bosnia, to Belgrade, Serbia, you no longer have to go via Zagreb and Budapest. The line is back up and running fifteen years since the end of the Bosnian War.

There was a time when endless suffering during the siege of Sarajevo was believed to have originated in the back rooms of security offices in Belgrade and when thousands of refugees fled Sarajevo to Belgrade with stories of counter-violence. Hopefully, the newly-open direct rail trip is an indicator that the Bosnian and Serbian divides are healing.

There is a vivid memory circulating in my mind whenever I think of these two stations. In May 1995, the ultimate year of the bloody Bosnian war, I stopped in Belgrade on the first of many research trips. Though I hadn't yet discovered the beatniks of Plato on student's square or the happy time discotheques around the horse statue, I had very much discovered the seedy, tense alleys around Belgrade Station.

What stands out most is not only the scene of buses arriving with wounded refugees who fled Croatia's storm campaign, but more sharply the image of a wounded Serb soldier, white-plaster-armed and sleepless, looking up into the dead eyes of an officer in purple fatigues who, gesticulating wildly, wore around his neck an enormous pendant crucifix.

The following year, in June 1996, I made a separate journey to Sarajevo, which had just awoken from a brutal  four-year siege organized by Bosnian Serb rebels backed by power players and recruits from Belgrade. Every building was shattered by rockets and artillery. Every set of eyes was punctuated with lightning strikes of bloodshot. Right away, curiosity drew me to Sarajevo Station. To imagine it resurrected today is still incomprehensible.

Bosnian Serb artillery mounted on the ridge line above had not simply pounded Sarajevo Station to empty it of Bosnian Army soldiers or supply trains. Like the central library and several hospitals, Sarajevo Station was the target of symbolic destruction. The facade was completely shattered and blackened, it's clock face frozen at 1:15.

Inside, the floor was cluttered with broken mortar, plaster, and trash. It had become in the beginning a site for refugees from the Drina Valley, who now occupied empty rail cars in the back, then a site for the Bosnian Army, and then a hive of wild dogs. The call board was frozen with destinations listing where they were in 1992: Zagreb, Mostar, Zenica, Doboj, and Belgrade.

For some time, Sarajevo Station stood closed as a symbol of Bosnia's paralysis and isolation. Now that the trains have started up again, the buses go everywhere, and people are crossing boundaries, it's easier to believe that there's hope for a fully integrated Bosnia, a restoration of friendship with Serbia, and perhaps union with Europe.

We'll see. In the meantime, your departing train waits on platform 1.

Photo credit: Daniel J Gerstle (Sarajevo Station, used as a rally point for Kosovo refugees in 1999)