The virtues of Sarajevo: reflections of a city dweller.

Most of my adult life I have believed that the last "good" war was World War II, which, of course, didn't end well. The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki very clearly did not meet the just-war criteria I assiduously studied as a junior in college (though our ethics professor very definitely thought otherwise). Vietnam was the war of my young adulthood. By 1964, it was clear--to me anyway--that it violated all the just-war principles so carefully laid out in that ethics class. Ditto American adventures in the Dominican Republic, Central America, and more recently Grenada and Panama.

So why? Why? I keep asking myself do I see Bosnia so differently? And before that, to some extent, Kuwait? I am still not sure. In trying to decide, painfully, fallibly, whether any given resort to armed force is morally prohibited or called for, we sift through many factors, from geopolitical considerations to complicated calculations about available means and likely consequences. Much in this process is unavoidably subjective (which is true, of course, about most of life's important decisions). Historical memories and associations--ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust, for example--play an important part. And though the just-war calculus may ultimately prove negative on U.S. action in the Gulf and potential action in Bosnia, I have been reflecting about one of those more elusive elements that contributed to my hesitant agreement that the effort to liberate Kuwait was justified and to my stronger conviction that our failure to relieve the Bosnians and the siege of their cities is not.

My conviction rests, in part, on the fact that both wars were (are) wars against civilians and more specifically against cities. The Iraqis and the Serbs did not primarily engage their foes on the military plane, but launched and continued their aggression respectively against civilians in Kuwait City and in Bosnian cities, especially Sarajevo.

In addition to watching the Serbs' unrelenting attacks against civilians (last year in the walled city of Dubrovnik, this year in Sarajevo), perhaps my passion on this matter is part of a deep-seated belief that cities and city dwellers are not only particularly vulnerable to the kind of no-holds-barred warfare the Serbs practice and to the terror that goes with it, but that cities and city dwellers are the very places where tolerance and acceptance, albeit sometimes begrudging acceptance, of "strangers," of "others," are practiced in ordinary and everyday ways--ways that become available to a whole society when they are needed.

Sarajevo itself seemed such a place to me. In 1968 with a group of students from France, I stood on the spot where a Serb, Gavrilo Princip, shot Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, an act that precipitated World War I. The guide referred to Princip as a "patriot." When the information was repeated by one French student to a less attentive member of our group, Princip was referred to as an "assassin," and finally another student, of a very conservative cast, retold the tale using the word "terrorist." Three words, three versions of Princip's motives. We students were reminded that history is complex and not easily settled as to cause or consequence. But in 1968, we could reflect on and discuss all of those interpretations peacefully and with a sense of irony at our experience of "living history," all the while admiring the city's charm and its urbane attitude toward this past. It was in Sarajevo, I realize, that for the first time I woke to the sound of the muezzin's call to morning prayer.

To destroy Sarajevo, its citizens, and their way of life is to destroy the very means upon which negotiation, accommodations, and ultimately peace can be reached among the tribes and wafting factions of the former Yugoslavia.

Those means include the everyday civilities that make life possible among city dwellers; for example, the New Yorkers I see every day--the ones that don't make the headlines holding doors open; giving way in pedestrian gridlock; maintaining a flower garden in the park for the enjoyment of the neighborhood; carrying a pregnant woman down the fire stairs at the World Trade Center; taking the extra half-step to placate, to accommodate, to negotiate the irritations, the confrontations, the injustices--small and large--of public life. And of course, civic life includes the more elaborate political, social, and physical infrastructures that keep a city humming. Destroying cities and city dwellers destroys all this.

Sarajevo reminds us that New York or Chicago or San Francisco could be in similar straits. The siege of Sarajevo reminds me, a city dweller, how siege and snipers, how hauling water and foraging for food, how death and privation would shift the physical and spiritual landscape of my everyday life. (Certainly one of the most disturbing and contested points of American policy remains the degree to which Iraqi civilians were subjected to death and disease by the bombing of bridges, electrical grids, and other infrastructure in Baghdad, seemingly for military purposes but with significant collateral damage.)

Sarajevo under siege shows how fragile our civilities are even in the presence of great personal courage. Under sniper fire, the Sarajevo zoo keeper fed the animals until the last bear died. A cello player defied the mayhem and the snipers by performing daily in a public square. Nurses and doctors work to stem the flow of blood, but they cannot stop the shells and the bullets. These are people who have lived for generations, sharing a city and a form of life that are being tom from their mooring, from the civilities of everyday life by the demons of tribalism and nationalism.

However history finally weighs the morality of the war against Iraq, the liberation of the citizens of Kuwait City ought to weigh heavily in passing judgment on our decision to go to war. The continuing international failure to end the siege of Sarajevo and other cities and towns in Bosnia-Herzegovina should weigh on the consciences of all those who continue to argue against military intervention.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For over a year now, we have been printing a column, "An Editor's Notebook," written and signed by a member of the editorial staff. Our purpose: to break from the anonymity of editorial writing and permit the expression of personal views on a variety of matters. Some readers have taken these columns to represent the editorial position of Commonweal. They do not, and in order to underline this distinction, we are changing the title to "Notebook." Hope that's clear! Margaret O'Brien Steinfels