SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The white blossoms of plum trees now dot the surrounding hills instead of the smoke of artillery blasts, and the few gunshots that occasionally crackle through the air are often drowned out by the roar of a NATO jet.
Water runs from the tap a few hours a day, and most of the time there is electricity. Spring gardens are sprouting fresh vegetables. The trams are running. And the price of such precious items as sugar and coffee has come down.
But the siege of Sarajevo continues. Its 300,000 residents remain prisoners, still dependent on airlifted supplies, United Nations demands and, ultimately, the continued peaceful behavior of the Serbian armies that continue to encircle the city.
"It looks like peace but it is still war," says Vladimir Jovanic, a 20-year-old architecture student. "The problem before was not just the shelling. It was the people. You can look at them on the trams and see how they have changed from before the war. It is in their faces. And every one of us still wants to get out."
But, yes, he says, it is a relief no longer to worry about shells screaming overhead, sometimes hundreds of them a day, or snipers firing into the streets.
Occasionally a sniper still strikes. Two men were shot and wounded a week ago. But such incidents are rare enough that no one thinks twice about strolling any street.
In Dobrinja, a neighborhood surrounded on three sides by Serbian forces, people once traveled through trenches or not at all. Now they fill the sidewalks on sunny days, or tend the gardens that seem to cover every open tract of land in the city.
In former fields of fire, old women in scarves stoop with plastic bags in hand, plucking dandelion greens for salads.
But the people most dramatically affected by the cease-fire may be those who lived in the hills a few miles from the city center. On one of the rutted dirt lanes leading north to the now-quiet battlefront on Zuc Hill, the scores of homes scattered across open meadows and valleys took a pounding in almost every bombardment. Fields and pastures here are pocked and scorched from shell impacts. Nearly every home has been blown apart. Virtually all are roofless. Some have only the stumps of walls. Others have been reduced to piles of bricks and mortar. There isn't a glass window intact for miles.
Yet residents have begun to return. Ermina Metrlic stands outside a house tending a stubborn cow that keeps straying into a patch of onions in her vast vegetable garden.
The Metrlics have survived with two cows and some chickens. Now they have patched the walls of their cinder-block home and covered part of the roof with plastic. Smoke from a wood stove pours from a small pipe sticking out of a side wall.
"The summer will be good, because with what we have planted we will have plenty to eat," Mrs. Metrlic says. "The soldiers are not shooting down into this valley any more, so we can let our cows graze and know they will not be killed. We have milk from them, and eggs from our hens."
Peace that could end
But Ms. Metrlic knows this fragile peace could end at any moment. And even if the hills stay quiet, she expects more rough times as long as the Serbs keep the city cut off from the rest of the world.
"We will try to fix our house while the weather is good," she says. "But if next winter comes and nothing here is changed, then it will be hard for us again."
Rebuilding will be hard all over town. Even apart from the thousands of destroyed buildings and homes, the city needs an estimated $125 million to repair its infrastructure. Much of the water system and power network remain damaged.
One can get an idea of the magnitude of the task by spending a few hours with Robert Rowe, the gas project manager for the U.S.-based International Rescue Committee.
Mr. Rowe, who recently completed work on a master's degree in international politics at Morgan State University, is overseeing reconstruction of Sarajevo's natural gas network. The task is complicated by the thousands of people who, desperate for heat and cooking fuel during the days without electricity, tapped into the gas system on their own. They often used garden hoses and plumbing fixtures. These free-lance efforts added 30,000 to 50,000 customers to a system that served only 20,000 before the war.
Not only are the rigs dangerous -- 30 people have been killed in gas explosions during the past two years -- they're wasteful.
"BG&E; would not expect to have more than 1 percent losses from inefficiency," Mr. Rowe says. "Here, as a conservative figure, we say that at least 30 percent of the gas is wasted, and the real figure is more like 50 percent."
Mr. Rowe hopes to replace up to 25,000 of these homemade systems by the end of the summer, but that won't be easy with the prewar work force of 350 now down to 50. Most of the departures have been pipefitters and installers, and hiring men to fill the vacancies is virtually out of the question. Able-bodied men must serve in the Bosnian army.
So the rescue committee has placed an ad on Sarajevo radio for 60 women to take a six-week crash course in gas installation.
Other obstacles include the local utility system's bureaucrats -- not just one set but two, one for the Serb-held part of town and one for the neighborhoods held by the Bosnian army.
Mr. Rowe finds himself acting as peace negotiator at times because either side could disrupt the other's gas network. One reason there have been so many explosions is that the gas in the city is no longer injected with the distinct odor that makes it easy to sniff out a leak or a dangerous buildup of gas. The "odorization" facility is in a Serb-held neighborhood.
Whenever Mr. Rowe needs to order new equipment, he must wait for delivery via the U.N. airlift. Recently the flights was halted for two weeks because of tension over the recent Serbian bombardment of Gorazde, 35 miles away. In the meantime, food supplies dwindled, and now they're the priority.
"I'm not going to get anything now for maybe three weeks," Mr. Rowe says. And that's the way it goes now for everybody's needs. The whole city is still at the mercy of its tenuous lifeline, which the Serbs could disrupt at any moment.
"I think the rest of the world has lost sight of the fact that Sarajevo is still under siege," Mr. Rowe says.
But it is different if you live in the few Serb-held parts of the city. More and better food is available, and prices are roughly one-tenth of those in the main part of the city.
Serbs have it better
Some examples: Eggs cost from 60 cents to $1.20 apiece in the city center, but you can get a tray of three dozen for only $3.50 in the Serbian community of Ilidza. Gasoline is still about $70 a gallon in most of Sarajevo and as scarce as ever. In Ilidza it's $6 a gallon.
Not long after the local cease-fire took hold in mid-February, some people were allowed to move back and forth between the Serbian and Muslim sections of town, and there was talk of even greater freedom of movement in the weeks to come. That has disappeared with the recent tension, and now the city is as divided as ever.
Still, the streets of the city center are slowly coming back to life. Clothing shops and jewelers have started to reopen. There are even some ice cream stands -- for people who have money.
Those who do have enough money to spend -- and there seem to be plenty -- puzzle everyone else. Once such people were assumed to have unsavory connections to the black market. Now there are simply too many for that to be the case. Ask them and they usually mention someone else in their family, or shrug, or say they have been saving.
"Nobody knows how to explain this," says Slobodan Kosanovic, a computer engineer. "You cannot say that relatives mail it to them, because they have no mail. You cannot say they get it from UNPROFOR [the U.N. Protection Force]. And you cannot say that they have been keeping it in a sock, because there is so much of it."
Those without much money -- still the vast majority -- are left to subsist on the same rice and beans they ate during the 22 months of shelling while wondering if they'll ever be able to leave the city.
The Bosnian Serb army isn't the only force making people feel trapped these days. The Muslim-dominated Bosnian army won't permit any man who might serve the army to leave. And some people, such as Mr. Kosanovic, fear greater restrictions may be coming soon.
"There is talk that anyone with technical knowledge or any skill that would be useful in rebuilding the city will be forced to stay here by the government, even if others may begin to leave," he says.
Nor are the Serbs alone in keeping the war going. With the front lines around Sarajevo now manned by a minimum of soldiers, it has become a common sight to see busloads of Bosnian soldiers leaving the city, bound for a route of small roads that lead out of the city across Mount Igman, without crossing any Serbian lines. One soldier says he's been told he'll soon be moving out for Breza, a town about 12 miles northwest of Sarajevo.
Such things keep the locals aware of how fragile peace is in their city.
"We were very afraid about the [NATO] ultimatum over Gorazde," Mr. Kosanovic says. "Everybody is still suspicious. For two years we were disappointed so many times that we don't really believe that this is peace."
Demonstration's end
A group of local students, intent on reminding everyone of this, staged a peace demonstration last week. It was playful and innocent as such things go. They draped a pink band of paper across a bridge over the Miljacka River in the middle of town, scrolling messages of peace on it. They then set afloat a raft with a small paper sail scrolled with more anti-war slogans. Others tossed bottles into the river with peace messages stuffed inside.
As the raft was cut loose, about 100 teens cheered from the bridge. But it and all the bottles quickly foundered 100 yards downstream, at a two-foot drop across a concrete spillway. The current caught the entire flotilla, and by the next day the raft had sunk and the bottles -- like so much here -- were still trapped in the current.