A year under siege: one survivor's account of urban collapse

Around 2010, a man posting under the name Selco joined an American survivalist forum and wrote a short account of the war years in Bosnia. Forum members responded with dozens of questions, and over the following weeks he answered them at length, in imperfect but vivid English. The thread was copied onto other sites and compiled into a long document that circulated widely among people interested in preparedness. It remains one of the most-read first-hand descriptions of urban life after a collapse.

What follows is a condensed report of that account, not his words. It describes one man’s experience in one place, as he remembered it almost twenty years later, and none of it can be checked independently. He stressed the same point more than once: he did not consider himself an expert and had come to the forum to learn.

The situation he described

He said that from 1992 to 1995 his country went through a civil war, and that for about a year he lived in a surrounded city of 50,000 to 60,000 people with no electricity, no fuel, no running water, no real distribution of food or goods, and no functioning law or government. He did not name the city, saying only that it lay in the rocky south of the country, near the Croatian border, where there was little forest.

When it began, he said, most families had food for a couple of days. Within a month or two, gangs were operating openly, the police had disappeared, and most of the hospital staff had gone home. Aid rations dropped from the air about every ten days helped, but were nowhere near enough. After three months people were dying of hunger and cold, and many more of disease, most of it from bad water. Two members of his own family died that way. He recalled eating pigeons several times, and once a rat.

He refused, repeatedly, to discuss the causes of the war or to take sides. In his telling there were no simple good and bad sides: every side did terrible things, most people were “gray,” and years later former enemies were living together again. He mentioned that his own wife was of a different faith and ethnicity.

Numbers mattered more than anything

The theme he returned to most was that nobody survives such a situation alone. His household at the time was fifteen relatives in one large house, and he believed that was why most of them lived. A person or small family alone in a house, he said, would sooner or later be robbed and probably killed. In practice, he said, several small families would crowd together into whichever of their houses was biggest.

His close group was family only; he had friends in his street, but he did not take strangers in. The city broke into small street communities. In his street of fifteen or twenty houses, residents organized their own night watch against gangs, and traded among themselves. He was also frank that armed defense was central to his household’s survival and that weapons were high on his list of priorities afterward; that part of his advice falls outside the scope of this site.

Moving around

Almost nobody went out by day, he explained, because snipers covered the streets and the front line was very close. Whatever had to be done happened at night: looking for firewood, trading, checking on someone, or simply hearing the news. With no radio or television, rumor was the only news, and he said many people were killed going out just to find out what was happening.

He moved in pairs or threes, never alone and never in a bigger group, because a big group would be taken for a gang. He kept to shadows and ruins, moved fast, and avoided open streets. Cars were almost useless, since the roads were blocked with rubble and abandoned vehicles and gasoline was precious.

There was a night market of sorts in the ruins of a sports center, about five miles away, but nobody controlled it and the chance of being robbed there was as high as the chance of trading. He said he went only twice, when he needed something badly.

Money and trade

The local currency, he said, was worthless within weeks. Foreign cash occasionally bought something from people with black-market connections, at extraordinary prices: he cited a can of beans selling for 30 to 40 dollars when its normal price was around fifty cents. Everything else was barter. Candles, lighters, batteries, fuel, antibiotics and food were the goods people fought over. He gave all his gold for supplies and said it bought far less than people expect. Salt had value, but coffee and cigarettes were worth much more.

Alcohol was the trade good he knew best. Early in the war a shell broke open a small distillery near his house, and his family took around 500 liters of rakia, a strong fruit brandy. It traded easily, since he estimated drinking went up about tenfold, and it served as a disinfectant. When asked whether others should stockpile alcohol, he suggested that compact goods such as batteries or medicines might be the better use of storage space.

He said he never traded at his own home, never traded large amounts at once, and made sure very few people knew what he had.

The collapse of the banks, in his account, went on well after the fighting. The monetary system stopped working for about a year. Afterward the currency changed name two or three times, inflation soared, and savings records were lost. Nearly twenty years on, people were still in court over their deposits. His father, who had fled his apartment without the paperwork, spent about four years in court proving he owned it.

Fire, heat and cooking

Asked why people burned furniture when Bosnia has so much forest, he said the trees inside the city were gone very quickly once there was no electricity for cooking or heating. After that came doors, window frames, floors and furniture from abandoned houses, and then his own furniture, all of which burned far faster than people expect. Matches and lighters were so precious that some people walked miles at night to carry back a burning stick from someone else’s fire.

He traded for an old wood stove, set it in the kitchen and ran the flue pipe out through a hole in the wall, using it for both cooking and heat. In summer he cooked in his walled yard. His diet was mostly flat pancakes with local herbs, which need little oil or fuel, rice when he could get it, and whatever else could be traded for. Asked whether the smell of cooking drew attention, he answered that with no sewage system, no running water and bodies in the ruins, the city smelled so bad that cooking was hardly noticed.

Anyone planning emergency heat should take one lesson from this with care: a stove or fire indoors needs a proper flue to the outside, and burning fuel in a closed room without one can kill through carbon monoxide. A battery carbon monoxide alarm belongs in any home that might rely on a stove, heater or generator in an emergency.

Water, hygiene and sickness

His family collected rainwater from the roof in four large barrels and boiled it before drinking. The river was badly polluted and was used only when there was no choice. Current emergency guidance is to bring water to a rolling boil for at least one minute, or three minutes above 5,000 feet (EPA).

He put hygiene on a level with food, and said lack of it killed many people. Diarrhea could kill within days without rehydration, especially small children. Fungal skin infections and food poisoning were common, and he saw people die from infected minor cuts. A seriously wounded person who found a doctor had, in his estimate, about a thirty percent chance of living. With no sewage, toilets meant a shovel and a patch of ground near the house, washing with rainwater, and no toilet paper, since anything like it was traded.

His list for others: soap in quantity, bleach, sanitizer, water purification tablets, gloves, masks, disposable plates and cups, and plenty of garbage bags and duct tape. He was a trained nurse, and he urged people to take real first aid or EMT training, to keep tetanus vaccinations current, and to learn tick removal and how to handle allergic reactions. He also urged people to learn about antibiotics and store them, while noting that in normal times their use is for trained and licensed people. In practical terms that advice starts with a doctor: antibiotics are prescription drugs, and the wrong drug or dose can do real harm.

Skills as currency

Goods run out, he said, but knowledge keeps paying. His nursing skill was his most valuable trade asset. He described rigging a valve on a large gas cylinder so he could refill disposable lighters, taking a can of food or a candle for each one. Refilling butane lighters from a propane cylinder is dangerous, since propane is stored at much higher pressure than lighters are built for; the lasting lesson is his point about skills rather than the method. A neighbor who knew how to make lamp oil, and kept the method to himself, never went hungry. His advice was to learn to fix things, “shoes or people,” because someone always needs a repair.

Keeping a low profile

On security, his central lesson was to look uninteresting. The best-protected houses in the neighborhood, with walls, dogs, alarms and barred windows, were the first ones mobs attacked, because they advertised that something was inside. Outside the house he aimed to look as poor, dirty and worried as everyone else.

He preferred small tradeable items to large visible ones. He said a thousand cheap lighters would serve better than a generator, which in a city would draw attention from everyone within earshot.

What he did afterward

Asked what he would do with three months to prepare, he said he now keeps about six months of food, hygiene supplies and fuel in his apartment, which has a reinforced door, and a second six-month supply in a house with a garden in a village a few miles away, among relatives who learned the same lessons during the war. His plan in a new crisis was to hold out through the first chaotic period and then join that larger group. He had since trained as a paramedic as well as a nurse.

He added that people he knew in villages elsewhere in the country had fared much better than the city, with land, grain, fruit trees and animals. He said his own city was closed off so fast, by forces people had thought were allies, that leaving was never an option.

Of the war itself, his verdict was short. Nobody won, he said; he had survived, and carried bad dreams from it.