Eleven Centimeters in the Dark

The Fatal Runway

Mara: In early 1993, the only opening through the siege was an airport runway patrolled by the United Nations. Sarajevo needed two hundred and forty tons of food every day, but warehouse stocks were practically empty. Relief flights supplied an estimated average of just one hundred and fifty-nine grams per person daily.

Eli: So people ran for their lives across the open asphalt just to eat. Over eight hundred people were killed out there before anyone built a way under it.

Mara: Today's angle is how the Sarajevo Tunnel was engineered and excavated by hand. Over eight hundred people on a single stretch of runway.

Eli: Eighteen-year-old soldier Edis Kolar was one of those runners. He remembered, 'You are in an open area and you are running, and they are shooting at you.' Both Edis and his father served in the army, and his father gave their house and land for the military's needs. Edis supported the decision, though he feared artillery would leave the farm completely unusable.

Mara: That gift turned the Kolar family cellar into the project's hidden southern portal. In late 1992, General Rašid Zorlak hired engineers Fadil Šero and Nedžad Branković to design a construction plan. The military codenamed it Object DB, an eight-hundred-meter underground corridor connecting Dobrinja and Butmir right beneath the runway.

Eli: An eight-hundred-meter passage under an active airstrip, without heavy machinery.

Mara: Excavation began on January 28, 1993. Eight civil defense workers started an approach trench in Dobrinja, an open ditch cut into the ground to reach the working level where tunneling could start.

Eli: On March 1, First Corps soldiers took over to excavate the first meters of the passage. They dug strictly by hand using pickaxes and shovels, lighting the freezing mud with small wicks floating in cooking oil.

Mara: Ahead of them lay eight hundred meters of raw subterranean clay under UN patrols, with artillery pounding overhead.

Pickaxes, Clay, and Igman Timber

Eli: Manual excavation hit an absolute crisis in the freezing clay when tools began running out that March.

Mara: President Alija Izetbegović stepped in directly. He ordered every shovel and pickaxe collected across Sarajevo so army crews could dig around the clock in three shifts.

Eli: Civil surveyor Nedžad Mašnić came down to the trench daily, working in shifts without modern instruments. He set the digging height and direction while wading through knee-deep groundwater, remembering it as 'U onoj vlazi, vodi, mraku…'.

Mara: Nedžad Mašnić's geodetic alignment relied on geodetic surveying, measuring surface angles and elevations so teams tunneling from opposite sides would meet.

Eli: How did diggers breathe or see anything in an unventilated ditch?

Mara: Between March and July of 1993, more than two hundred people excavated the dense clay with ordinary pickaxes and shovels, hauling mud out by hand. Because the trench had no electric fans or cables, their only illumination came from kandila, small cups of cooking oil with short wicks.

Eli: Two hundred people digging by oil lamps, gasping for air.

Mara: On April 23, 1993, a second team started from Butmir near the Kolar house, using civil defense workers later joined by miners from Miljevina and central Bosnia.

Eli: To prevent cave-ins under the runway, Butmir framed their walls with timber shoring using heavy logs hauled from Mount Igman, while Dobrinja diggers had to scavenge factory scrap iron. And with no telephone connection linking them, neither side could hear the other.

Mara: Two teams burrowing blindly toward each other through hundreds of meters of pitch-black mud, with no way to know if they would meet in the middle.

Joining Hands in the Dark

Mara: Before those crews could reach each other, they had to keep the excavation from filling up. The lowest part was 5 meters below the airport runway. When the electricity kept failing, workers had to scoop the groundwater into buckets or canisters and carry it out by hand.

Eli: Fadil Mizdrak remembered standing in water higher than his knees. He feared a shell would bring the earth down on them.

Mara: And he remembered hauling the heavy mud through that water, in darkness with no air.

Eli: They finally made contact on July 30. Nusret Halilbašić, one of the excavators, recalled hearing the Butmir crew pounding through the earth and replying with his own blows. Through a hole at eye level, the people he'd just been hearing handed over a bottle of rakija, a drink to celebrate that they'd reached each other.

Mara: The other crew was within reach.

Eli: Halilbašić put it just after 11 that night. He said he'd never forget that moment.

Mara: That was Nedžad Mašnić's surveying paying off, after those shifts in the wet and the dark. He'd kept the excavations aimed at the same meeting point. The only mismatch when they joined was 11 centimeters in height.

Eli: 11 centimeters. With neither crew able to see the other.

Mara: Mašnić remembered people wanting to do the work, despite the hardship. He said they had a fierce competitive spirit.

Eli: That same night, 12 tons of military supplies came into Sarajevo through the passage. A brigade of soldiers traveled in the opposite direction, heading for Mount Igman to reinforce the units fighting up there.

Mara: A supply route and a way to send reinforcements.

Eli: Those soldiers were going to a front where units were trying to hold against a major Serb offensive.

Mara: The city had a way through the ring now. But traveling along that flooded passage was still an ordeal. And getting permission to use it was a struggle of its own.

The Lifeline and the Siege Economy

Eli: Walking in meant enduring suffocating air with zero airflow, forcing everyone to pull on a protective mask.

Mara: Nadja Halilbegović recalled bending low beneath a ceiling barely five feet high while dirty water showered down. She hauled two bags alongside a pack, unable to pause because walkers were wedged directly before and behind her. Whenever anyone dropped from exhaustion, others tried to carry them, squeezed between live high-voltage power wiring along one side and an oil line opposite.

Eli: Live electrical cables through standing water sounded terrifying. To speed that slog, soldiers soon laid a narrow-gauge railway, putting down mini rails spaced closer than standard train tracks to run small hand carts.

Mara: Those little carts pushed up to 300 kilograms of freight through the slop. And engineers simplified fuel delivery too: tankers pulling up in Butmir pumped fuel directly through the interior pipe into waiting city trucks parked in Dobrinja.

Eli: That pipeline and rail system pushed an average of 20 tons of freight into the city each night. It was crucial, though still nowhere near the 240 tons of daily food Sarajevo required.

Mara: Army authorities ran that pipeline and every foot of the corridor. First Corps military police guarded the entrances and distributed free travel permits, prioritizing soldiers, weapons, and ammunition while allocating roughly 10 hours daily for food shipments.

Eli: Free on paper, maybe. Commercial haulers paid 15,000 German marks straight into army coffers just for a single hour of tunnel access.

Mara: Even with those fees, sociologist Hidajet Repovac pointed out that no one asked if someone was Serb, Croat, or Bosnian, concluding the route saved far more than only Muslims.

Eli: Repovac documented that shared rescue, yet the Bosnian government still took a third of the value of incoming goods.

Mara: Taking a third of that cargo cut deeply into the city's meager supplies.

Eli: According to accounts, individual sentries extorted people as well, pocketing up to $120 from civilians trying to flee. Foreign cigarettes traded as substitute cash at massive markups. And military translators reported being told the route was rented so rival mafias could divide profits from smuggled chicken.

Mara: Rival gangs profiting together off a besieged city's only lifeline.

Eli: Yet with 20 tons of critical freight moving through nightly, the entire system depended on keeping those two portals concealed beneath hostile mountain artillery.

Defense, Deception, and Survival

Mara: On the Dobrinja side, you walked two hundred meters down an open trench into a camouflaged garage, while the Butmir entrance hid beneath the Kolar family cellar. Bosnian troops ringed both portals with manned trenches and piled excavated clay outside for blast protection.

Eli: Piling up excavated clay as a blast shield, right outside someone's cellar.

Mara: To guard against enemy counter-tunnels, engineers brought in seismologist Ivan Brlek for seismological monitoring, using underground instruments to track ground vibrations and check whether anyone was digging toward them.

Eli: Vibrations underground, while peacekeepers patrolled the tarmac right above them. Under a 1992 agreement banning civilian crossings, UN patrols seized intercepted weapons, and officer Pyers Tucker recounted about two hundred French soldiers driving all night to catch civilians.

Mara: Yet a Bosnian police officer who crossed the tarmac noted peacekeepers rarely repaired holes dug under perimeter fences, and a former soldier pointed out the UN chose not to permanently light up the airfield. When Serb General Ratko Mladić demanded UNPROFOR close the passage in 1994, peacekeeper command took no action, and in communications with the Bosnian Army, peacekeepers simply called it 'the tunnel that does not exist.'

Eli: It didn't exist to peacekeepers, but Serb forces tried to drown it by diverting the nearby Željeznica River. Artillery also targeted suspected entrances until one bombardment killed twelve people waiting in line.

Mara: Striking right near the entrances.

Eli: Soldier Edis Kolar recalled three separate shelling massacres among people waiting at that entrance. Yet at that same small door, he saw couples hold weddings and mothers deliver babies. When the war ended, his father Bajro refused to rebuild the shell-scarred house, so Edis arranged the relics in the cellar, recalling, “We picked it all up and arranged it in the basement, which was empty, and that’s how the museum was created.”

Mara: Until the siege finally lifted in February 1996, the corridor served as the city's only reliable connection to the outside world. It funneled over three million kilograms of food into Sarajevo. A power line through the passage supplied eighty million kilowatt-hours of electricity, prioritizing hospitals.

Eli: It saved an estimated three hundred thousand people from starvation and defeat, keeping an entire capital alive from beneath when every surface route had failed.

Mara: You can look into timber shoring.

Eli: And follow Sarajevo with us, as the city rebuilds and remembers.

Mara: I'm Mara.

Eli: And I'm Eli. Thanks for listening. Until next time on Angle.