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and kanun – a 78-string cross between a harp and a lute producing amazing har- monies. Due for release at the beginning of March on Aquarius Records, concerts are planned in Zagreb to promote it, and then in Belgium and Italy.
Talk about her record company in Zagreb leads Amira onto the difficulties facing her in Bosnia. “We simply don’t have the means. Our national museum is closed down. Can you imagine? So every- thing else is closed down, plus piracy is everywhere. We have three presidents, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim that have to be in power and it’s still the same: always this fighting over who gets what. Three presidents! It’s embarrassing! There is only one guy I would vote for the office, Zelijko Komsic. He sort of represents Catholics, Croats, but really he represents all of us Bosnians, that’s why they want to destroy him politically.”
Amira will vote for him partly because “He was there during the war. I remember him in my back garden protecting my fam- ily’s house. Our garden was the front line. There were trenches in my garden that he helped to dig through the night, when war broke out in April ’92. There was a trench with our Bosnian army in it, then there was no man’s land for 100 metres only and then another trench with the Ser- bian army in it. But Komsic is a Catholic Croat and he was defending me, a Bosnian Muslim. I’ll never forget that. That says to me what kind of man he is.”
the centre of Sarajevo. On her way into town nothing suggested the horror that would so swiftly ensue. But she recalls: “On the way back home, it was about 1 o’clock in the morning, there were barri- cades blocking the road and soldiers ask- ing me for my ID. I thought it was some military rehearsal or practice. I didn’t have any ID on me: nobody had ever asked for it before. I asked ‘what’s happening?’ And the guy standing there in front of me with a kalashnikov said ‘Don’t worry everything is fine.’ It was the first time in my life I saw a rifle.”
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She didn’t have a mobile, but man- aged to call her mother from a phone box. Everything was not fine. Her mum was in tears. “There is a problem around the house. The roads are all blocked off. How will you get back?” Amira managed to get back on foot the following morning. She returned home that day to move with her family into their basement. They hid there for the next four years.
“At first, when we still had electricity we had news coverage, saying we have an ‘extraordinary situation’. Then: ‘Bosnia is trying to get independence.’ Croatia got independence in ’91. I cannot remem- ber the whole fall of Yugoslavia, I have a black hole in my memory. All of a sudden
mira’s life overturned during one night that April. A few days before her 20th birthday she went out to see a band from Belgrade play a gig in
we were at war, overnight, just like that, totally mad. We thought, ‘OK, it’s going to last two months, three months like in Croatia.’ We thought ‘people cannot allow the horror that happened in Vuko- var to happen here, we are mixed, totally mixed in Bosnia.’”
The Serbs soon took control of Saraje-
vo’s power and water supplies. Amira says matter-of-factly that living without water was the biggest problem. She had to walk four kilometres under sniper fire – “you don’t know what’s happening, all of a sudden there are bullets all over you” – to a well in town and bring back water in canisters. “So at least you could wash yourself, eat, cook…”
Snipers were shooting directly into their front door so they couldn’t go through it into the house. In emergencies, searching for supplies, they would sneak through a side window: “One day my father got fed up and said ‘I don’t want to go through the window. This is my own house. I’m going to go in through the main entrance.’ And so he walked to the front of our house. Our neighbour was 20 metres away. He called to my father ‘Go away, I will have to shoot you!’ My father swore back at him. The neighbour said ‘I have to shoot you. I’ve got orders.’ Our neighbour! We were living next-door, we had had din- ner in each other’s houses. My father ignored him and he went inside the house. But he came out through the window.”
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