ONE FAMILY'S OR DEAL

By MASSIMO CALABRESI/GRBAVICA

WHEN A DETERMINED RAbija Osman Oprhal recently walked across a Sarajevo bridge from the ruined Serb-held neighborhood of Grbavica, a Bosnian soldier at a sandbagged checkpoint stared in astonishment at her identity documents. Hers is a Muslim name, and for more than three years Grbavica had been an "ethnically cleansed" stronghold of Serb extremism. "How is it that you have come from over there?" he asked. Rabija, 52, fixed the man with her gray-blue eyes. "I live there," she replied.

Until Rabija and a tiny handful of other Muslims appeared out of the rubble in recent weeks, few had thought it possible that any of its once large Muslim population could have survived in Grbavica. During the long siege of Sarajevo, this modern metropolitan area had been a haunt of Serb bands like Vojislav Seselj's White Eagles and Zeljko ("Arkan") Raznatovic's Tigers, who used it as a base for snipers and mortar attacks on the government-held center. Muslims who failed to flee at the start of war in April 1992 found themselves trapped inside the enclave, facing death at the hands of "ethnic cleansers." In short order, the place was left almost entirely to the Serbs.

Last week Serbs and Muslims were once again supposed to start living together in Grbavica. Under the Dayton peace accords, Serb-held parts of Sarajevo and its suburbs were to be turned over to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Muslim-Croat Federation. A new multiethnic police force would take over security, and Muslims would start going back home. When Grbavica was handed over on March 19, the reunification of Sarajevo was complete, and the occasion should have marked a tremendous achievement for the Dayton negotiations. The noblest dream of the agreements was to restore Sarajevo to its prewar condition as a proud cosmopolitan city where Muslims, Serbs and Croats all lived together. But since the peace was signed, the Serbs have been fleeing Grbavica and other suburbs, looting and burning the buildings they have left behind. Now they are virtually all gone. Sarajevo has been reunified; its people have not.

In one small apartment off Branka Surbata Street, however, they have never been divided. The story of Rabija Oprhal, her husband Kruno, 53, son Alen, 26, daughter Irma, 19, and their Serb friends provides heartbreaking evidence that a fraternal feeling between Muslims and Serbs survives. The family's experiences during the war and now in the midst of this vengeful peace prove that members of the two groups can live together and care for one another, even under the most dangerous circumstances. For the Oprhals were saved, they say, by their Serb neighbors and by sympathetic Serb soldiers. "They were nice. They were kind," Kruno says of the family's benefactors. "If there was a God, it was as if he created the situation in which we lived."

The situation for the Oprhals was a second-floor apartment in a building halfway up a hill that gives a fine view of the city. Before the war they had everything they needed. "We were very satisfied," says Rabija, who worked as an administrator for the large electrical utility Energoinvest. "If we wanted to go anywhere, we had money for it. We would go skiing or on picnics every weekend." Kruno, who served as a director of technology at Energoinvest, says he turned down offers of high-paying jobs in Libya and Iraq because he and his family could not consider leaving their beloved Sarajevo. "We are Europeans," says Rabija. "Who would want to live where you have to keep your face covered?" Kruno called his wife a Sarajevo patriot. "When we would go to the coast for vacations, we would stay only three or four days, and then it was back in the car, back to Sarajevo," he recalls. "When we got close to the city, she would curl her legs up on the seat and start singing."

Despite months of war rumors, it came as a shock when the first explosions shattered Grbavica's peace on April 4, 1992. "Around noon the shooting started," says Rabija. "Alen was out, and we were afraid because we didn't know where he was." To her relief, he made his way back home through sporadic gunfire, and the Oprhals spent the next few days indoors, making and receiving telephone calls filled with worry and rumor. "Nobody knew what was going on," says Kruno. In fact, Bosnian Serb nationalists, backed by the Yugoslav army, were firing the first shots in their campaign to divide the newly independent Bosnia along ethnic lines. By April 6, Kruno continues, word went out that people should report to work, though friends called to warn of roadblocks manned by ominous-looking civilians with stockings over their faces. "But some people who took the tram that day did not know," he says. "Many were never heard of again."

From those earliest days the Oprhals found Serb friends willing to take risks to help them. When Kruno and Rabija finally ventured out to buy food, they chose a time when a Serb acquaintance was doing duty as a guard at the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity, leading into Sarajevo's center. He passed them through, no questions asked. "We spent our last money on cevapcici," says Kruno, referring to the spicy sausage that is a Bosnian specialty. "That," he says sadly, "was the last time I was in town."

They returned that day to their Grbavica apartment, certain that the fighting would be confined to armies and that civilians would be safe. "I could not know that there would be tanks outside my apartment firing into Sarajevo," Kruno said. By the time the realization of danger set in, it was too late: tanks, guns and barricades would seal off Sarajevo for the next 43 months. The Oprhals, trapped inside their apartment, suffered a smaller-scale version of the city's long torment.

"People nobody knew were wandering the streets," says Kruno. "But six [Serb] families stayed in this building, and that saved us. Other buildings cleared out; the minorities who remained had to leave and were not seen or heard from again." Only Rabija and Irma went into the streets to seek what little food could be found in the marketplaces and fetch water from a communal tap. Even there, guards examined identification documents and refused water to Muslims. Irma, too young to have such papers, avoided the ban by lining up with Serb neighbors who called her by the Christian name Olga.

Within a few weeks the Bosnian Serb army began quartering troops among civilians, and the family faced a potential crisis when two newly mobilized soldiers from Sokolac, a midsize town 20 miles east of Sarajevo, took over empty apartments in the Oprhals' building. But the men proved more than tolerant. One, who had connections in the army bureaucracy, told Kruno that he would see to the family's safety. "He said, 'While I am here, no one can touch my neighbors,'" Kruno recalled. "If not for him, who knows what would have happened?" For more than a year the soldier used his influence to keep Kruno's and Alen's names off the lists used to call up non-Serb men for forced labor.

One of the Oprhals' staunchest protectors was a Serb neighbor, "Mira," who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisals. Mira lied to authorities about the presence of Muslims in the building. Sometimes she risked her own safety. In a September paroxysm of violence, armed men marched through the area shouting, "Are their any Balijas [a derogatory word for Muslims] here to slaughter today?" Most non-Serbs in the area disappeared that month, but Mira risked the wrath of the gangs by assuring them that no Muslims lived in her building. For 15 months, Alen did not once cross the threshold of the apartment. Kruno sometimes went downstairs to help carry up water and supplies, but he never dared to go outside.

In the summer of 1993, the Ophrals' Serb soldier neighbors were ordered elsewhere, leaving the family without protection. Within days Kruno and Alen were drafted onto work squads. "Our first duty was to build antisniper barricades and bunkers," said Kruno. They worked more than 20 hours a day, with only fitful rest in trenches that turned wet, then bitter cold as the winter of 1993 set in. Much of the labor involved carrying sandbags to bunkers along front lines that in some places were little more than 40 yards apart. "Bosnian soldiers on the other side would shout, 'Stop carrying that or I will kill you,'" Kruno says. "The Serb soldiers could hear them, so they would shout, 'Keep working or I will kill you.'"

In November all the non-Serb men of Grbavica--no more than 300 by then--were herded together into an elementary school, where the youngest and strongest were called out of line and sent away. Kruno was left behind, but Alen was drafted into some of the most dangerous and grueling labor of the war: digging trenches through minefields on the slopes of Mount Trebevic, overlooking the city. "Every time he lifted a shovel he had a chance to hit a mine," says Rabija. "That is what happened to others in his squad." In the end, she says, Alen was saved by another Serb friend, who hid him in his car and drove him to Belgrade. Alen now lives in Canada.

The peace of the past three months, says Kruno, has been in many ways worse than the war. As the March 19 turnover date approached, thousands of Serbs--either fearful of Muslim reprisals or threatened by Serb hard-liners--began to flee with their belongings and anything else they could take with them. At night, firebugs and looters took over the streets, stripping apartments of everything from TV sets to parquet floors and setting fire to what remained. As in the first year of war, the Oprhal family huddled in their apartment, fearful of going out. Trucks loaded with loot prowled the fire-flecked darkness, and gunfire rattled in the empty streets.

Even on March 18, the last day before the arrival of federation police, six men armed with hammers and chisels and drinking plum brandy pounded their way into apartments in the building next door and began hauling furniture to a truck outside. This time, a contingent of French troops from the multinational Implementation Force arrived and sent them scattering out a rear door. After the troops left, though, the looters returned and finished the job, pausing for swigs from the brandy bottle. The Oprhals were dismayed by how little the ifor patrols had done to protect the neighborhood in the previous week. They had roamed about, but rarely intervened directly. "All they had to do," said Rabija, "is show up two or three times a day and cock their weapons, and all the bandits would run away."

On the afternoon of the 18th, two Serb friends from the neighborhood dropped by the Oprhals' to say goodbye. All the Serbs in their building except Mira had fled. That evening, she joined Kruno and Rabija in what, over the months, had become a nightly ritual of conversation and coffee around a small dining table. The Oprhals did not take part in the celebrations next day by returning Muslims outside. There was no joy in their diminished circle. Mira is now the one who faces an uncertain future, the one who needs protection. "Tomorrow is freedom for us, but Mira has nowhere to go," sighs Rabija. "The three of us will just stay here together."