Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

[Flex Mentallo]

"Scream for me Sarajevo!" called Bruce, and they screamed for him. They screamed in a hysterical Beatles style all the way through. It was a release for them. It didn't matter what we did, they just screamed.

 

 

‘After the show we had a quick few drinks with the locals and some UN soldiers. I got chatting with another British squaddie. He had a lot of respect for us.

 

"We never thought you lot would come out here in the first place then after this afternoon, we thought you'd be straight out!" he was laughing to himself, over what seemed to be a very private joke.

 

"Why, what happened this afternoon?" I asked, my innocence getting me further into trouble each time I opened my mouth.

 

"You know, when they shelled this place earlier?" he said, amused.

 

‘He told me that the Serbs had fired two mortar rounds at the front of the venue this afternoon. They didn't want to kill us, as that wouldn't look good on them (not just the bad international press but they probably had a fair few Maiden fans in their own army too). They just wanted to scare us off. They simply didn't want the people of Sarajevo to have a night of rock.

 

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‘Bruce and Alex were going to do an acoustic session at an orphanage.

 

‘These kids had all lost their parents in the war. Many of them had seen them murdered in front of them. Some were still in shock, just staring straight ahead. They'd been like that for months. Others clung to us and wouldn't let go. Maybe they knew we'd be getting out of here soon.

 

‘There were two shell holes in the playground. The people running the orphanage told us the Serbs had fired the first shell during playtime. Then they put the second one in when the ambulance crew arrived. It was a cold attack and was calculated to cause the most possible casualties amongst children and non-combatants. I wasn't emotionally prepared for this at all.

 

‘In the evening we went to a local fire station, where UN firemen and other workers were having a small party for us. I'm not sure what the real address was but our British Army hosts knew it as 'Sniper Alley'. I resisted asking how it got its name.

 

‘It was a dual carriageway that was largely deserted as dusk approached. There were burnt out cars and rubble across the road and its pavements.

 

‘The sensible route to take, we were told, was just blasting down it at full pelt while also swerving left and right. I've been in cars before when people drive too fast, sometimes because they're drunk or stupid, often a combination of the two. Somehow it's even scarier when a sensible and sober driver does it deliberately because dangerous driving is infinitely safer than safe driving in this topsy-turvy world

 

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‘At the fire station, Andy and Bob set some of our gear up for a quiet jam. We didn't bring Ampegs and Marshalls down here so one of the locals was going out to pick up a little guitar amp from his friend's house. Sponder went with them out of curiosity.

 

‘When he got back he told us that at the friend's house, all the family were in one room with a nine-volt battery running a single Christmas tree light bulb taped to a mirror to illuminate the room. They invited him in and offered him food and drink.

 

‘We felt unable to help these people. Sponder gave this household all the British money he had on him. They cried in gratitude but nothing could help them really. Back home we had lit houses, CD players, nights out and what we took most for granted, relative personal safety.

 

‘These people had none of that. They all had crippled, missing or dead relatives. They lived in squalor and fear.

 

‘Yet, you know the odd thing? They were more alive, more happy for the moment and more generous with what little they had than anyone back home. Their human spirit was unbroken.

 

‘These people smiled. They were probably not far from clinical starvation and yet they offered Sponder food. All the civilians we met out there were like that.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

‘The UN had arranged with the Serbian command that we were coming through so nothing should go wrong for us but anytime you have to meet a group of armed and drunken murderers is cause for concern.

 

 

‘We were due to pass through four Serbian checkpoints. They were imaginatively known as Sierra One, Two, Three and Four by our UN hosts.

 

‘At Sierra Four we were stopped and asked to get out and line up on the roadside.

 

 

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‘The Serbian officer in command was a woman who had aged badly but was probably in her late twenties. She spoke reasonable English and was dressed exactly like so many rock chicks at London's nightclubs of the time - bleached blonde permed hair, too much make up, tight leggings and thigh high boots. The only difference was the blue/grey camouflage Serbian Army jacket she wore over the top.

 

‘Following her were two or three soldiers in the same camouflage pattern uniforms but without the leggings and thigh boots. They had Kalashnikovs casually slung over their shoulders. She smiled at us. They didn't.

 

‘She went up and down the line of us, examining passports, asking general conversational questions and being ever so charming. Her unshaven escorts did not charm us but stayed back, smoking and eyeing us up and down, no doubt with their trigger fingers itching.

 

‘She eventually bid us a happy journey. We were keen to get out of there and quickly got back in the Land Rovers.

 

‘Back on our way, the British soldiers told us: "She's one we'll be hunting down after the war. She's had plenty of people shot on the side of the road. She wouldn't touch you guys but we didn't want to mention it before the check in case you got freaked out."

 

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‘British normal life didn't work for me anymore.

 

‘I tried telling people at home what had happened out there but they couldn't understand. They nodded and agreed but they couldn't see it and I could see that they couldn't see it.

 

‘I would break down in tears at the wrong moments, excuse myself and go to the toilet to sort myself out. It's OK. That's a normal reaction. I'm fine now. Mostly. I was only there for a weekend.’

 

 

Next: The "Help" Album.

[Flex Mentallo]

“Help”

 

 

Another War Child volunteer remembers, physically taking Bruce Dickinson's analogue studio out of his house in Chiswick, which he had donated, and taking it to Travnik (a central Bosnian town, and crossroads of the war), where it is now used every day by the biggest youth music project in Bosnia, called Alter Art.

 

Then War Child produced "Help".

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

"War Child was launched in part by an album called Help, a phenomenon in the history of rock, put together over a single week by such artists as Radiohead, Blur, the Stone Roses, Paul Weller and Oasis, under the patronage of Brian Eno. Those involved felt – unlike the politicians and diplomats, after three years of stumbling impotence and connivance with the killers – that enough was enough in Bosnia. The album was released 15 years ago this September, and despite its modest ambitions and insane timetable, remains the most successful "aid album" of all time. This was music's declaration of war on war itself. "

 

 

Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Sunday 4 July 2010

 

[Flex Mentallo]

If you look carefully you will spot Johnny Depp and Kate Moss as well as McCartney and Weller.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2010/jul/04/war-child-paul-mccartney

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The rest, as they say, is history. With the proceeds from the album War Child launched a music centre in Mostar, Brian Eno gave workshops, star tenor Luciano Pavarotti became involved, and gave his name to the music centre. He famously flew across the Adriatic in a chartered helicopter to open it. The Serious Road Trip helped to launch the Sarajevo jazz festival, now one of Europe's foremost, and set up a network of music centres and workshops across the country. War Child now works all round the world, wherever children are affected by war. But they are far more professional and strategic in their approach than in the early days. No lives are risked. Local staff are now trained to run local programmes, as it should be.

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

More from Vulliamy:

"But the War Child story really started in Sarajevo – the multi-ethnic cultural heart of former Yugosalvia – in 1992, when the Bosnian Serbs, with backing from Serbia and Belgrade, began the siege of Sarajevo. When the founders of War Child arrived in this most cosmopolitan of cities, they beheld the most remarkable cultural landscape in post-1945 Europe – strangely, and unforgivably, now airbrushed from history. The Serbs attacked and persecuted a city with an entrenched cultural life that struggled on, come what may, throughout the war. I remember on my 39th birthday in 1993, after the massacre by shelling of civilians queuing for water in a suburb called Dobrinje, going to a lunchtime concert by the Sarajevo String Quartet in the blacked-out National theatre. The Serbs would usually attack such events, and one mortar landed so close to the theatre that the building shook and the viola player's stand fell over during an especially delicate moment of Haydn's String Quartet in D Major Op. 64, No 5, "The Lark". The first violinist, Dzevad Sabanagic, waited for his colleague to replace the score, called out the number of a bar prior to the interruption, and the quartet played on."

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

The Ruin

 

 

Bobby and I returned to Hrastnik for another month with the children. We had spent everything we had by then and had no money to get back to the UK, but somehow, we knew we would manage – it didn’t seem important.

 

At the very end, Bernard declared we should have a day off, and in his clapped out old banger we drove far out into the mountains. We climbed one of them – I never knew its name.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

But high in an alpine meadow, just below the snow line, we came across the ruins of a chalet.

 

 

 

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A tree had fallen into it, and there were signs of fire. It was gutted, and had seemingly been deserted for many years.

 

 

 

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I felt as though I were on the set of a Tarkovsky movie.

 

 

 

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Then, among the debris scattered across the floor, I found some papers with nazi swastikas on them – and then an old, worn out postcard.

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

Adolph Hitler, eating strawberries and cream with a little girl named Bernile Nienau, who shared his birthday. Just before coming to Yugoslavia I had been watching "The World at War", in which one of Hitler's home movies was featured. And this was a still from it.

 

 

 

 

 

[Flex Mentallo]

I could not help thinking of the children in the refugee camp and how in many ways the Second World War had created the circumstances leading step by step to the current tragedy.