IN THOSE years when hell marched on the city, tearing limbs from its people and torching their houses to ash, a musician sat every day in the market square of Sarajevo, playing Albinoni's adagio. "Bomb them to the edge of madness, " Ratko Mladic ranted to his forces, but this lone cellist's glorious defiance was inspired madness, a beautiful, miraculous insanity that not even ethnic cleansing could defeat.
This searing image was one of many summoned by The Reunion (Radio 4, Sunday repeated Friday), in which Sue MacGregor brought together a group of Sarajevo citizens who, like most others, chose not to run away but to become prisoners in their own city. That was between 1992 and '95, the longest siege in modern warfare's history, and, 10 years on, MacGregor's round-table guests also included Allan Little, the BBC's man in Bosnia during that time, and one of the corporation's most perceptive correspondents.
What followed in the next 45 minutes was a sequence of intensely moving and humbling reflections in which that cellist's yearning refrain symbolised a people's "tremendously impressive refusal" to surrender civility to evil.
Sarajevo had been one of the most cultivated cities at the heart of Europe, where Muslim, Christian and Jew lived in harmony, often marrying into each other's families.
For that very reason, no-one there thought that Slobodan Milosevic's ingrained contempt for moral order would actually succeed in sacrificing Muslims by the thousand. But, in Radovan Karadzic and Mladic, he had sidekicks who could match his maniacal furies. "People tried to believe that someone outside was watching and would come and help, " said one of the programme's contributors. But, "outside", the European Union initially turned a blind eye to the victims' SOS. It was one of the UK's misconceptions, said Little, that mayhem was what Balkan people did every couple of generations to vent the hatreds in their systems.
However, these atrocities, he declared, were not spontaneous but a carefully planned onslaught by Milosevic, a bid for absolute, tyrannical power Small acts of normality kept a semblance of life intact. Every morning, men and women would go to their places of work, even though their jobs no longer existed but this was a way to demonstrate the buildings still belonged to them.
Women applied their make-up as meticulously as ever. They ran from sniper fire in high heels, and, one day in the market place, they were massacred when queuing for bread.
Food shortages led to drastic weight loss but each hour was filled with shortages of some kind.
A man sold "puffs" from his cigarette on a street corner, and, as the siege continued, a sense of passive suicide overtook the elderly: a friend's father, an old man, would venture out for water in the middle of an artillery raid as if to free himself from the endless nightmare by standing in the path of death. Do we learn from the past? Almost every utterance here evoked the daily news stories from Iraq.
This has been a good series of The Reunion, reminding us of just how effective MacGregor's quiet, unshowy probing can be. But what made this latest episode remarkable was the lack of bitterness in her Sarajevo guests, despite the concentrated wickedness that they'd endured. Farouk, a young man who had "done nothing wrong to anybody" but is now confined to a wheelchair because of a sniper's bullet, recalled that his attacker "missed my heart but hit my spine."
Too bad for him, he mused almost drolly, adding: "May God forgive him."
Now for the curious tale of Prince Francis of Teck. Scandal always swirled around this philandering brother of Queen Mary.
In 1911, he died, aged 39, leaving a family heirloom, the Cambridge emeralds to his married paramour, the Countess of Kilmurray.
As Mark Thomson deliciously revealed in Document - A Right Royal Affair (Radio 4, Monday), his sister was horrified, not only demanding the gems' return - she bought them back for GBP10,000 - but that Teck's will be sealed from prying eyes, a prerogative since applied to all royal wills.
And the mistress? Well, she hung on to Teck's initialled cuff links, and elegantly left all gossip to speculation. But, as her great grandson teasingly informed, you only acquire a man's cuff links by being close to his shirt.
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