TURNING GOLD INTO GREEN.

DEBBIE ARMSTRONG AND THE RELEAFING OF SARAJEVO

On that Monday morning in February 1984 Sarajevo was covered in snow and the Winter Olympics were in full swing. Debbie Armstrong, then a 20-year-old unknown from Seattle, was among those vying for a medal in the giant slalom.

It was a good time to he in Sarajevo. The opening ceremonies had been spectacular, the games were going well, and the world watched admiringly. There was little to hint at the troubles to come. In a few years, Serb forces would lay siege to the city and use those same ski hills to shell the city. The Olympic stadium would become a graveyard, its benches coffins.

But on this snowy Monday Sarajevo was a proud, cosmopolitan city--a crossroads between East and West, a European melting pot.

The weather was good on Mt. Jahorina, and Armstrong was in the first seed, the 15th skier down the hill. At the bottom, after what one reporter called "a nearly flawless first run," she found herself in second place, just behind her teammate Christin Cooper. Several hours later Debbie Armstrong took the gold with her second run. Cooper ended up with silver and teammate Tamara McKinney finished fourth, almost making it a U.S. sweep.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," Armstrong recalls. "It was the time of my life."

Debbie Armstrong left Sarajevo on top of the world--20 years old with a gold medal on her chest and her face on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Back in Seattle, there were interviews to do, questions to answer, and autographs to sign. Slowly, the fanfare died.

Armstrong kept racing with the U.S. Ski Team through the year, and for four more after that.

She competed in the 1988 Calgary Olympics and finished 13th. After that, she hung up her racing skis and went to the University of New Mexico to get her history degree. She now spends her winters in Taos, New Mexico, as ambassador for Taos Ski Valley, working with the ski schools, the lodges, and with guests. Summers are spent back in Seattle, where she has a job at a kids' camp in the San Juan Islands.

It's a world far from Sarajevo, where the end of the Olympics proved to be the end of an era. A few years later Yugoslavia began to fall apart, and in 1991 it unraveled completely. Late that year, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence. Six months later, Serb forces under Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic pushed into the new country, trying to carve out a 'Greater Serbia." They cut Sarajevo off from the world and started bombing.

For three and a half years. Sarajevans lived under siege. Shells whistled in and exploded apartment buildings. Snipers in the hills shot people walkling down the street. Faucets ran dry, and electricity and gas were cut off. In the winter months there was no heat.

Most of the city's 500,000 people survived by turning to the only resource they had: trees.

Desperate Sarajevans stripped the city's parks and boulevards of trees and later dug out the stumps, using the wood to cook and stay warm. When they had used up the city's trees, they ventured into the hills to cut what they could. Around Sarajevo today you can trace the war's front line by where the trees begin.

But with more than 200,000 people killed in the war, news reports seldom mention the trees of Sarajevo.

When Debbie Armstrong read about the war, she says it made her feel numb. When people asked what she thought, she had a hard time answering. It was difficult to reconcile the place she remembered with the place it had become.

In December 1995, the presidents of Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia met in Dayton, Ohio, and signed an agreement to stop the fighting. Bombs stopped falling on Sarajevo and, at the Hague, a U.N. War Crimes Tribunal began working with the Bosnian government.

When roads around Sarajevo reopened, tens of thousands emigrated while others remained to pick up the pieces and rebuild their shattered lives.

Now windows and buildings are being repaired and mines are being dug out from the surrounding slopes. People walk down city streets without fearing they'll be shot. Sarajevo is even making a bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

But much work is yet to be done and the war's scars remain everywhere, especially where the trees used to be.

Sarajevo's lost tree cover was on the minds of Sarajevo mayor Igor Gaon and Bosnian Foreign Ministry official Nazif Kadric when they came to the U.S. last year for diplomatic training. During the course of their visit, trainer Nancy Forbord introduced them to Susan Mockenhaupt of the U.S. Forest Service's Urban and Community Forestry program. The conversation turned, naturally, to trees.

The Bosnians told Mockenhaupt that trees were one of the things Sarajevo needed most; the basic things were slowly being repaired, but no one was planting trees.

Mockenhaupt and Forbord looked deeper into the problem and began making contacts in Sarajevo and the United States. Familiar with AMERICAN FORESTS' earlier effort to plant a tree in Sarajevo for each of the 1,600 children who died in the war, Mockenhaupt brought the situation to the organization's attention.

With the enthusiastic support of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, the Clinton administration's White House Millennium Council, and the U.S. Embassy in Bosnia, AMERICAN FORESTS revived its "Global ReLeaf Sarajevo" campaign as a Global ReLeaf partnership to restore Sarajevo's urban forest. Gaon and Kadric helped make sure the city took up the program.

Late last year, Debbie Armstrong got a call that turned her thoughts back to Sarajevo. Asked if she'd like to be involved in the second run of "Global ReLeaf Sarajevo," she said yes without hesitation. In fact, just the weekend before, she had been planting trees on her own property.

"It has to do with trees, which I love, and, as corny as it sounds, I'm really passionate about giving something back to Sarajevo," Armstrong said in an interview from Taos. "It was a perfect match."

In October, she spoke at a White House press conference to launch Global ReLeaf Sarajevo, which has a long-term goal of planting 300,000 trees in and around Sarajevo.

"Planting and caring for trees may seem simple, but it can do so much for the quality of people's lives," Armstrong said at the launch. She mentioned her own tree planting efforts on her property, saying it was "kind of a nice coincidence."

At that ceremony, Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Games, announced an urban forest advocacy program that the committee hopes will, among other things, stimulate the planting of 2 million trees in Utah and around the world.

Each of those trees would be registered as having been planted in the spirit of the Olympics.

"Now, in order to make a symbol that perhaps will draw the attention of people around the world for this Olympic plant-a-tree program, we've decided to make a gift of our own," Romney said. "To make sure we plant trees in places where they are most needed, we are going to be donating the cost of planting some 15,000 trees on the hillsides and 100 street trees in our sister Olympic city of Sarajevo."

The hillside plantings, as U.S. Ambassador Thomas Miller noted during the ceremony, are critical to shoring up the city's denuded hills. Landslides are threatening to do $100 million in damage to city infrastructure.

"We want to show, both on a substantive basis and a symbolic basis," Romney said, "a contribution to help rebuild the forests in that part of our planet."

That thought was echoed by Sven Alkalaj, deputy ambassador to the U.S. from Bosnia-Herzegovina. "I am thrilled to be part of this very important activity to plant trees not only in Sarajevo, but in Utah and around the world," Alkalaj said. ". . . this gathering-- and this symbolism of sister Olympic cities--is something that binds us together and should be a driving force in moving this action forward."

After the White House ceremony, Armstrong and other project partners were invited to the Embassy of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Washington, where they planted a tree to mark the launch of this effort to regreen Sarajevo.

The regreening effort took root in Sarajevo in late November, just before the first snows of winter. Scouts and volunteers from the U.S. military forces stationed in the area joined city officials to plant 20,000 black pine, sylvester pine, and black locust.

As Armstrong makes plans for a return to Sarajevo this spring-this time to plant trees-she remembers prewar Sarajevo well. She remembers a beautiful city filled with old mosques and buildings. She remembers people laughing and drinking slivovitz plum brandy. She remembers the rainbow of color of the volunteers dancing in the opening ceremonies. She remembers the lift attendant on Mt. Jahorina giving her a good-luck charm before her race.

"Sarajevo rolled out the red carpet to the world. They were so proud," Armstrong says. "I remember the people and how warm and friendly they were."

As a spokesperson for Global ReLeaf Sarajevo, Armstrong is getting a chance to give something back to the city that gave her so many memories. Perhaps by helping bring back Sarajevo's trees, the world can show the city that it, too, remembers. AF

Frank Bares is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.