SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Back in the mid-1990s, I didn’t have a TV or internet access, and newspapers were largely preoccupied with the political and economic chaos in Ukraine. Therefore, I grew up oblivious of the war in the Balkans.
Then, I went to study in Vienna, where my classmates were largely from Bosnia and Croatia. I was impressed with how they burst in rage when CNN showed public statements by Serbian officials, and the fact that they actually took time to ink out the part “Serbo” on the cover of their Oxford Serbo-Croatian -English dictionaries.
It’s with those memories that I visited Sarajevo in January 2015, nearly 20 years after it suffered a four-year siege by Bosnian Serbs that killed nearly 14,000 people. Most Bosnians don’t like to talk about war. It’s only when one mentions being from a country currently at war is that they nod in understanding.
So the only way to find out how it really was in Sarajevo is to walk around the city, famous for the 1914 shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, an assassination that started World War I. The truth is that it is one of the coziest European capitals, with an awe-inspiring mix of old Turkish and Austrian architecture.
Entering the city from the airport, one sees a rather grim-looking multistory residential building not unlike anything you see in any city of former Soviet Union – this is the legacy of Bosnia being a part of Yugoslavia. Sarajevans like to tell about how the local U. S. Embassy is located exactly between the nice Austrian part of the city and the not-so-nice Soviet one.
Another thing one might hear is that tiny Bosnia with the population of 4 million actually has one of the most complicated government systems in the world. It was designed as part of 1995 peace settlement, in order to not give any ethnic group a dominating role. That resulted in having three rotating presidents, representing Bosnians, Croats and Serbs, and multiple layers of government, which has led to such anomaly as having 13 education ministries at once. Such compromise helped stop the war, but created an inefficient state system that is largely dependent on foreign financial support.
The key place to visit to learn about the war is the Srebrenica Genocide Museum located on Ferhadija Street, the main pedestrian street of Sarajevo. It tells a horrifying story of a killing of nearly 8,000 Muslims by the Bosnian Serbs in just three days – July 11-13, 1995.
Besides having a devastating impact on the Muslim ethnic group, the tragedy is also a testament to the inability and unwillingness of international organizations to prevent such massacres to happen. It took place in the vicinity of military base stationing a group of 400 United Nations peacekeepers from Holland. To make things worse, their commander was filmed drinking with the Serb General Ratko Mladic prior to the killing and accepting souvenirs from him in the aftermath, as the Dutch peacekeepers were leaving the base.
A prominent place in the museum is given to the photos of graffiti left by the Dutch soldiers on the walls of their compound. One of the graffiti, “United Nothing,” well-resonates with the events in Ukraine.
Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov can be reached at [email protected].
