The line drawn at Dayton goes right through buildings and apartments. Lt. Gen. Michael Walker, commander of NATO forces in Bosnia, conceded the point. A few hardy souls are getting on with postwar cleaning. On a recent sunny afternoon on the Muslim-Croat side, Meijra Drugovac and her neighbors were raking out the shrapnel and bullet casings from the dirt in front of their buildings. But such elbow grease can do little for the desolation inside.
Apartments are only marginally livable.
Jerveta Mulic, Drugovac's neighbor across the street, has pasted her children's drawings over the bullet holes in the walls and races to put pots and pans down when rain leaks through the roof. Upstairs, Goran Desanic, a Bosnian Serb who chose to fight with the Bosnian army, returned from his post to discover that his furniture, bathroom and kitchen fixtures had long ago disappeared. His apartment doesn't have radiators, or windows. Unemployment is a growing problem, as men are demobilized from the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian armies only to find there are no jobs. He is standing in the neighborhood outdoor marketplace, William Shakespeare Square, trying to peddle chocolate bars and pistachio nuts.