SCARRED BY SIEGE, A CITY

By ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER SARAJEVO

On the sunny Monday when the downtown market area exploded, the people of Sarajevo fell back into the mourning that for three years they have rarely left. But on Wednesday, when the night sky brightened with bombs and the hills around the city rocked with destruction, grief gave way to joy. "I had lost hope that it would ever happen," said Alija Abaz, a modern-languages professor who woke to the sound of nato planes, scooped up his children and joined his wife at the apartment window to watch the smoky haze of the blasts turn orange and red over the city. "We had been disappointed so many times before," he said. "But the world's conscience has finally started working. We stood there and just felt happy."

More than three years of siege and massacre have scarred this city. More than 10,500 Sarajevans have been killed, and the living who did not flee long ago have survived with only intermittent supplies of power, water and fresh food . They have been shelled and shot at almost daily. Virtually all of them have lost someone they knew or loved. Only once in the past 41 months have they enjoyed a period of relative peace, and it took a massacre in the same area to bring it about. When a Serb shell killed 68 people and wounded an additional 200 in February 1994, nato established a 12.5-mile heavy-weapons-exclusion zone around the city and forced the Serbs to put their guns under U.N. control. For a few months, Sarajevans could even travel into and out of the city by using the U.N.-controlled "blue routes." But by July of last year, the exclusion zone had began to crumble.

When the Bosnian Serbs' 120-mm mortar shell fell on the crowded shopping area last week, few residents believed the U.N. and NATO would live up to the promise they had made earlier in the summer to respond harshly if the Serbs attacked Sarajevo. "I am skeptical. So many people have died, and so many empty threats have been made," said hairdresser Admir Savic, 30, on the day after the massacre. "You can fool somebody once, maybe even twice, but nobody is going to believe you the third time. If they wanted to help us, they would have done it much earlier."

Even the swarming of NATO planes over the city the following day was not enough to convince desperate residents that rescue was at hand. The streets were empty; state radio urged people to stay home to avoid retaliatory shelling by the Serbs. The few who ventured out to fetch water or buy food stared at the sky and debated the latest events. "This is the beginning of the end of the war," said Zaim Alic, 48. But his friend Vahida Fazlagic, 64, interrupted him bitterly. She was driven from her home in Grbavica, a Serb-controlled suburb of Sarajevo, by Bosnian Serb forces. "NATO has been bombing the Serb positions. So what? That doesn't hurt them, they are sitting in their bunkers. NATO should bomb Pale [the Bosnian Serb stronghold near Sarajevo] to show them what it is like to have a massacre like we had on Monday."

Then, in a reflex that testifies to the toll that brutality has taken on this once most gracious and cosmopolitan city, Vahida apologized for her anger. "I no longer trust anyone or believe anything," she said. "I just don't have any hope left."

For others, though, the arrival of the NATO bombers, however belated, inspired daydreams. "My son has basically been under house arrest because we have been too afraid to let him play outside," said Cazim Corovic, 30. "I want to go out with him, show him a zoo and an amusement park, give him fresh fruits to eat. This has been no life for him, and I feel guilty for it." His wife Snezana is a Serb from Belgrade, and she was offered the chance to escape several times, but she did not want to abandon her husband, a Bos nian Muslim, who had to fight in the army. They decided to leave together or not at all. "I have spent the happiest years of my life with Cazim," Snezana said, "and I was afraid of losing our love if I left." After the air raids, she actually let herself imagine what could happen when peace comes. "We will go down to the Croatian coast--my husband, my little son and all our friends," she said, remarking that the family had not seen the outside world for four years. "Then we will return and have a normal life."