He leaves a homeland of too many tragedies

BY CAMERON McWHIRTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - The only light inside the bombed-out airport terminal came from slits in slabs of concrete and sheets of steel put up where windows used to be.

Omar Velagic stood in the gray light with heavily armed British commandos, American paratroopers and French Foreign Legionnaires waiting for the daily military transport to Zagreb.

This building was the terminal where Omar and his family used to wait for flights to Italy or other vacation spots. Like nearly everything else in Sarajevo, the airport has been transformed into a hideous ghost of its former self by the last four years of war.

Outside the bunker-like terminal, sandbags and concertina wire surround the runway. Rocket craters scar the tarmac. Nearby apartment buildings are burned-out and abandoned.

"To tell you the truth," Omar said, his eyes darting around the terminal. "I'm glad to be getting out of here. There's no future for me here. There's nothing."

Before this trip, Omar, 21, had wondered whether he should move back to Sarajevo to help rebuild the city he loved. But the visit gave him a firsthand view of post-war Sarajevo. He didn't like what he found.

"This city is completely destroyed," he said. "I can't believe they did that to this city. It was so nice. Everyone got along. Now it's completely destroyed . . . I guess I never really thought it was this bad."

Omar always had wondered what would have happened if he had never moved to America just before the war broke out. His father, Nerman, moved the family to the Cincinnati area five years ago on what was to have been a temporary job assignment.

When the war started in 1992, Nerman and his wife, Sanja, decided to keep the family in the United States.

"If I stayed, I could easily not have a life now, or a terrible life," Omar said at the terminal. "When I get back to the States, I'm going to thank my dad for working hard to keep us there. I'm going to hug him and kiss him and love him even more than I did before for keeping me safe. I'm really lucky that I wasn't here."

For 2 1/2 weeks, Omar had visited friends and relatives throughout the government-controled sections of Sarajevo. Everyone had a tragedy to convey.

He stayed the entire time with his maternal grandparents, Faruk and Zehra Santic. This couple told him about how they didn't have enough food; how a grenade shot through their window and burst in another room; how thugs had tried to take over their apartment; how Faruk had seen people literally blown to bits by a grenade.

His paternal grandparents, also in Sarajevo, are in very poor physical condition. His paternal grandmother had been bedridden throughout most of the war.

Omar had seen old friends from high school, many who had fought for the Bosnian army. He heard about the first time they had to kill; about starving; about being so tired they had fallen asleep face down in the snow. Now these same soldiers have left the army to find no jobs and no hope of jobs in the country they fought for.

Omar briefly visited his old neighborhood, but he didn't go to his old apartment, now occupied by another family that lost their own housing in the war.

"If I went there, it would be too much," Omar said.

In Omar's eyes, the war not only wounded Sarajevo's past - a centuries-old history of multi-religious and multi-ethnic cohabitation - it crippled the city's future.

Most of those he spoke with didn't believe the Dayton peace accord will truly end the war. They thought the arrival of U.S. and other NATO troops would create only a temporary break in the fighting. Both sides in the war, the Muslim-backed Bosnian government and the Bosnian Croats on one side, and the Bosnian Serb army on the other, still are heavily armed and prepared to fight. NATO forces are expected to leave in about a year. Sniper attacks in Sarajevo, occuring almost daily, make it hard for anyone to trust in peace.

"I always felt tension here," Omar said of his visit. "Something could easily have happened with some guy with a bomb or whatever. You just never felt safe."

One of Omar's best friends, Damir Demidzic, who had fought in the Bosnian army for four years, put it bluntly.

"He told me, 'Don't even look back. Go back to America,' " Omar said.

Omar decided to take that advice. His goal now is to build a life in America.

He plans to try to get his paternal grandparents down to the southern Bosnian city of Mostar in the spring, where he hopes an aunt will be able to care for them. He wants his maternal grandparents to come to America, to live with his family. He also hopes to bring friends to the United States in the future.

"I can't wait to get home," Omar said in the terminal, as he heard the loud propellers of a landing C-130.

The exit door of the terminal opened, and a Norwegian soldier shouted, "All passengers for Zagreb."

In single file, the group walked through a winding sandbag trench, out to the runway, and toward the open cargo doors of the giant plane.

Published Feb. 20, 1996