Sarajevo

Lillehammer, Norway--Scott Hamilton remembers the smell of cigarettes and fresh paint, the disco at the Holiday Inn and the smog that hung over the ancient city like a blanket.And the snow.Goodness, who could forget the snow?First, there wasn't enough. And then, there was too much. And finally, the skies cleared, and Hamilton, the gold medalist in men's figure skating, walked around the cobblestoned streets of Sarajevo."You realized this was one of the most beautiful places you had ever seen," he said.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The Bosnian government and Bosnian Serb leaders signed an agreement yesterday easing the Serbian stranglehold on Sarajevo for the first time in 23 months.The pact would allow limited movement for people, food, and medicine across siege lines beginning Wednesday morning."This is a first, modest, and very important step," said Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. military force's civil-affairs chief, after witnessing the signing by Hasan Muratovic, a Bosnian government minister, and Momcilo Krajisnik, president of the Bosnian Serbs' Parliament.

IN MAY, the Clinton administration arrived, after long and tortuous internal debate, at its moment of decision concerning American policy toward the dismemberment by Serbia and Croatia of the new state of Bosnia. It decided, in effect, to do nothing -- to leave Bosnia to whatever fate the force of arms and atrocity would bring.What the administration literally did was send Secretary of State Warren Christopher to "consult" with European nations regarding an American proposal to "lift and strike" -- to lift the arms embargo against the Bosnian government and to strike at certain Serbian targets with air power alone.

We have two combat veterans living with us. They are 12- and 14-year-old sisters, Nadja and Djana Kazic. They like stuffed animals, TV and Keanu Reeves. While in most ways they seem like normal teen-agers, they have clearly been traumatized by three years under fire in Sarajevo.Last summer we read the following letter, one of many published by the Soros Foundation's ''Pen Pals for Peace'' program:Dear Unknown American Friend,My name is Nadja. I am 11 years old; I have a 12-year-old sister.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- A bearded man holding a child by the hand suddenly bars the way as two people prepare to make the final -- to their destination in central Sarajevo.Usually safety comes after a headlong sprint up a flight of steps, half leaping and half stumbling over the broken roadway of a once-pretty avenue. This week it wasn't enough."You can't go down there just now; it's been terrible all morning," the bearded man says urgently."Snipers."Groups of people huddle in doorways, waiting for a lull when they can run to home, office or shops.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Hours after unilaterally declaring a cease-fire, Bosnian Serbs resumed their shelling of Sarajevo's airport yesterday, preventing Bosnia's Muslim president from attending peace talks in Germany with the president of Croatia.The cease-fire had been called by the Bosnian Serbs after the United Nations Security Council issued a statement late Friday condemning the Serbs, Muslims and Croats for the recent surge fighting in Bosnia. It particularly condemned the Serbs' "relentless bombardment" of civilian targets in this besieged city last week.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- After a lull of several weeks, Serbian nationalist forces resumed their heavy artillery bombardment of Sarajevo yesterday, setting off panic on the city's streets and raising fear that the siege could take a sharp turn for the worse just as winter approaches.The Serbian forces on the slopes of mountains overlooking the Bosnian capital began their barrage before dawn, hitting the city center with at least 30 152-millimeter tank shells, the most destructive weapon in their arsenal.

Michael Lutzky, a photographer for The Sun, spent 26 days in January in Sarajevo shooting 5,400 pictures of people living under daily siege of shells and gunfire. Editor John S. Carroll had told him, ''Don't come back with war stories;'' be a ''visual correspondent'' of life, not death.Although snipers shot at him from 250 yards, it wasn't until the last day that he met the war in Bosnia close-up. He was leaving Sarajevo to fly home February 5 when he heard the now-famous market shell that killed 68 people.

Stockholm. -- The Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodenje was given an award last weekend by two Scandinavian papers, Dagens Nyheter of Stockholm and Politiken of Copenhagen. The award consisted of money and newsprint, both needed by a newspaper whose story is one of the remarkable ones of Sarajevo's siege.Before the Yugoslav war, Oslobodenje was a large metropolitan daily like thousands of others around the world. It had been founded during World War II as a resistance journal (its title means ''liberation'')

Why stay?It's the logical question to put to any Sarajevan who has had a chance to leave the city during its 20-month siege. It's the one that newspaper columnist Zlatko Dizdarevic answers in this powerfully evocative, disturbingly beautiful collection of essays taken from Sarajevo's daily paper, Oslobodenje (Liberty).The answer, like these essays, is profoundly simple: because they led a civilized life before the war, and decent people do not let themselves be bullied out of doing the right thing.