The Washington Post
February 26, 1993
SARAJEVO, Feb. 25 – Today’s burial of Almedena Seta was like most others here, except that she was only 2 years old when she was killed by a Serb tank shell while napping, and so the coffin bearing her body was no bigger than a pillow.
Funerals in Sarajevo, aside from being immensely sad, are dangerous — because Serb riflemen in the hills have a clear view of the city, and they shoot at crowds of mourners.
“When a lot of people are gathered together, it makes the massacres bigger,” said Mohamed Seta, Almedena’s uncle.
The funeral took 19 minutes, about as quick as a Muslim service can be conducted and the cold earth shoveled into the grave. A light snow moistened the linen-draped coffin before grandfather Nazif Seta stepped into the grave and placed the infant’s body to rest at his feet.
Almedena’s father, Senadin, could not bring himself to do it. He had spent a few minutes stroking the sides of the tiny coffin. With each passing moment, his face became more contorted. He hunched over and kissed the coffin once, cried and then shuffled aside with the support of friends.
She was his only child.
The imam offered prayers and wished aloud that Senadin and his wife, who was wounded by the tank shell that hit their home, would be treated well by God since they had suffered so much.
Shoes crunched the snow, shovels grated into dirt, and grown men cried. “Let us pray that this is the last innocent victim of the war,” said grandfather Nazif, trembling. It is a phrase repeated often at this site.
A wooden marker was put into the ground, and the 30 or so mourners bent their heads as Senadin knelt and kissed it. He got up slowly, as though his bones ached. As the snow fell more insistently, he turned and walked away. The others followed, including three neighborhood children who had watched in silence.
There was no lingering. A few rifle shots had echoed in the background during the funeral. The Seta family was fortunate in one way this week — they were able to bury their daughter in a small, out-of-the-way cemetery that is not nearly as exposed to Serb snipers and mortarmen as the main Lion cemetery.
“As far as I’m concerned, that cemetery is like the front line,” said Osman, who hauls coffins to the cemeteries in a shrapnel-punctured van. He has lost track of the number of times that he has seen a funeral service attacked.
“Now I wait for people to take the coffins out of the van, and then I drive away quickly,” he said.
The purpose of the cemetery shootings seems to be to terrorize, perhaps to push Sarajevo’s largely Muslim population into capitulation, but today was a good day for a funeral because it was snowing. The Serb militiamen who have surrounded and shot the city to pieces for 10 months have difficulty seeing through it and usually don’t bother. If the day is sunny, funerals often are postponed.
Burials used to be held only in the morning, but now the services are staggered throughout the day. Similarly, funeral schedules used to be announced in advance in the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje. But that practice has been halted.
Old cemeteries around town are safer because they are small, surrounded by buildings and have large old tombstones that can fend off bullets or shrapnel.
The Lion graveyard lies in an unprotected valley. Services there often are conducted in a protective shed; brave mourners then briskly take the coffin to the grave.
If a mortar shell falls nearby, mourners dive into vacant graves for cover. Should the coffin in question be still above ground, the grave prepared for it becomes a shelter as well.
“If it’s just sniping, they don’t jump into the graves,” said Hansi Krauss, a photographer with the Associated Press who has attended a dozen funerals in the last two months and has been shelled or sniped at during all but three. “They only jump into the graves when there is shelling.”
For Sarajevo, there is no such thing as resting in peace.
