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heir house was almost com- pletely destroyed. She says: “It looked like a Swiss cheese with the bullet holes. Two mortar shells landed on the roof. It’s
funny, when I was growing up my father was building that house: every single penny was invested in it. When I was a kid I wanted to have Levi 501 jeans, but they were really expensive for us. Every month he needed something for the house. So every time I asked for Levi 501s I was told ‘next month, I promise.’ So when they were shelling and the house was almost gone, we were sitting in the basement and I said ‘You remember when I asked you to buy me Levi 501s and you didn’t, you wanted to get a new roof? Well look at your roof now!’ And we laughed like crazy for hours. He said, ‘You see, if I had bought you those jeans maybe there wouldn’t be a war!’”
Amira now has no memory of spring or summer during the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. She says she only remembers it being four years of win- ter. But while she wishes she could just delete all the bad things from her mind, she’s grateful for the good things. “Singing in the basement, making very dark jokes. A Monty Python humour. Sharing one egg, in six pieces. If you got one egg, it was so exciting and we would joke about it, joke about being full. How friendly we were. That’s the beautiful side of it. It’s a very good school. No money in the world can pay for what you learn like that. It really taught me to be a normal person, not to care about idiotic stuff. There is very little that every human being needs.”
Apart from water and food what is that? I ask her.
“Apart from water and food? You need your loved ones, your family, that’s it and… oh god…” She pauses, tearful, then takes a deep breath. “My biggest concern all those years was my brother. He was thir- teen when the war started. I was constantly worried about him, and my parents of course. But something really weird happens in your head, you say ‘Protect the kids.’ If people lived 50, 60 or 70 years, you start to think it’s OK, they get… can you believe it?… it’s OK they get… killed. It’s horrible, but when you hear the news – that neigh- bour, he got killed, in a way you think OK, the quota for that day is filled. So there will be no more kids killed that day. It’s so frightening, but that’s how we thought at that time. If there’s a certain power ‘up there’ deciding how many people will go – if it’s five and if it’s older people, it’s OK as long as young ones are spared.”
Towards the end of the siege Amira and her brother made a dangerous escape over the mountain, partly on foot and through paying to get onto the back of a truck. She felt that to stay a moment longer would mean losing her mind. They made it to Split. It was a shock for them to see the sea, to see that much water. Hav- ing started smoking during the war (“idi- otic,” she says, given that cigarettes were worth their weight in gold) the first thing she did was to buy a pack, sit at a café by the water and order “a litre of coffee. Cap- puccino! Coffee you could only dream about. I sat there for three hours. It helped me a lot. If I hadn’t, I would now be com- pletely insane.”
She got a job in Split, working for the British Royal Engineers at the North Port, checking all the nuts and bolts on the pon- toon bridge parts being sent into Bosnia to
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rebuild the broken infrastructure. She would take fresh scampi back to her par- ents once a fortnight in a military Chinook helicopter (which has left the smell of kerosene in her head), but left her job before a year was out, unable to stay so far away from them. She helped rebuild the house, though she has not been back to the basement and says: “When people say it’s beautiful to have a romantic dinner with candles, don’t mention candles to me please! I want neon, like they have in hos- pitals, that bright white light! No candles, not for this woman!”
he war left an unexpected lega- cy: “When it started I was a kid. It started in April and my 20th birthday was on April 23rd. The best years were just robbed.
That’s why my mother says to me nowa- days: ‘Oh god! That war! You’re still act- ing like you’re nineteen!’ even though I’m 42 now almost. She jokes about it. I say I feel like I’m nineteen. Time for me stopped then. Great! I’m forever young, forever nineteen!” Perhaps this is a clue to Amira’s boundless energy and her sur- prising (given the circumstances) optimism about finding and bringing out the good in everyone.
She says: “A lot of people are full of hate, unfortunately. It’s understandable that they hate. They lost family members. It’s normal, it’s human. They are another reason why we’re all doing this. To try and heal people.”
“No matter what happens I simply cannot hate, that’s not how my parents brought me up. I lost my family as well; many members of my close family were killed in the war. But what’s the point in spending the rest of my life hat- ing? I don’t want to do that to myself. It’s stupid. But I do under- stand completely how people hate the Ser- bians. I just don’t know how I would survive that mentally.”
It was a gig in the Serbian capital not so long after the siege that Amira says showed her that she was on the right track. “When I did my first concert in Belgrade I was overwhelmed. The whole hall – we were all crying, the audience and myself, it was sevdah in all of us, not just Bosnian sevdalinka. That’s when I realised we are still the same people. It was real- ly special. It was impor- tant to send that mes- sage to people outside of our region as well. To tell people the war is over, we want to contin- ue with our lives.”
It is a matter of sor- row to her that
although geographically Bosnia is in the heart of Europe, the country does not meet all the demands for EU mem- bership and she is wor-
ried that forthcoming elections will make the situation worse. She is desperate for the “politicians to come to some sense and realise that we don’t have much time on this earth and we have to start living a normal life. We’re just tired, all of us, tired of bad things. Life is gone in a split of sec- ond – gone.”
And she doesn’t want to waste a sec- ond of it any more worrying about idiot politicians. She says: “I want to bring good to people: simple as that and if that’s through music, if that helps, then that’s what I’ll do.” And aside from learning Japanese and travelling the world in a camper van, it’s Amira’s greatest desire simply to be able to do what she does now “until the very end”.
She says: “I’m very lucky to find musi- cians who share the same ideas, who are not there to fill stadiums – to fill pockets with money is not important. If you have people in Belgrade who come to see me and we share emotion, that’s important. If we go to Zagreb, and I feel the same as the audience, that’s an achievement. That’s the idea. Just to be normal again, not crazy.”
So how many pairs of 501s does she have now?
“Two!” she laughs. “I love jeans, I’m very comfortable in them. I bought these ones in Zagreb, but I wish I didn’t need a passport to go there.”
www.amiramedunjanin.ba F
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