Sarajevo Tunnel: The Tunnel of Hope

Five meters below the runway of Sarajevo's airport runs a short stretch of tunnel that was dug out during the Siege of Sarajevo to bring supplies to the cut-off city. For four years this 800-meter long tunnel was the besieged city’s only connection to the outside world, and its life support. In the spring of 1992, when Serbian forces encircled the city of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and began bombarding it with artillery and sniper fire, some three hundred thousand citizens found themselves trapped within its perimeter. The Serbs had blocked all access roads to the city, cutting supplies of food and medicine. They also cut off the city's water, electricity and heating. With people starving, the UN negotiated a deal with the Serb nationalists and secured the airport so that humanitarian aid could be flown in. But the merge supplies were not enough for the city’s population. Photo credit: rich white/Flickr Beyond the airport, lay Bosnian territory and freedom. But Sarajevo's citizens just couldn’t walk into the airport —technically a neutral venue under the UN— and then slip out of the city into the adjoining suburb of Bosnian-held Butmir, on the other side of the airport. Because all around the city, Serbian snipers had taken up positions in high rises and kept eye on the main street that lead to the airport. Through the sights on their rifles, they watched for movements and didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. More than two hundred people were killed on this street and a thousand more wounded, earning the street the name “Sniper Alley”. A Bosnian civil engineer, Nedžad Branković, drew up the plans for the tunnel that would connect the two suburbs held by Bosnian troops —Dobrinja, lying inside the Serbian siege lines, and Butmir on the outside. Construction of the tunnel began on January 1993, and continued round the clock for the next six months.