Spring in Sarajevo
We didn’t know quite what to expect when we arrived in Bosnia. We did not originally intend to go there. Our plan had been to relax in Dubrovnik and hit a couple of Croatian islands, but the combination of chilly weather and an over-abundance of tourists on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast made us reconsider.
And so, after a day in Dubrovnik, we headed over to Sixt, rented a car, and started our journey.
I never knew much about the breakup of Yugoslavia, from whose ashes modern Bosnia emerged. It happened when I was a kid, too early for me to remember vividly but too late for it to be taught in school. So as of a month ago, I couldn’t tell you much other than there was a war and I remember watching on TV as bombs fell and buildings burned. I couldn’t have told you who attacked who, for what reason, or even which countries made up the former Balkan nation.
I suspect many are in my position, so a very brief primer may help:
Until the mid-90s, Yugoslavia was a Communist country situated on the Balkan Peninsula, across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, to the South of Central Europe (Austria, Hungary, etc) and to the West of Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Romania, Soviet Union).
Yugoslavia – whose name literally translates to “South Slavs’ - was formed after WWI, when various ‘Southern Slavic’ peoples of different religions and ethnicities banded together over a shared desire not to be absorbed into a larger non-Slav power.
Yugoslavia was made up of six republics: Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia. Orthodox Christian Serbs were the ethnic majority within Yugoslavia, however the ethnic mix differed substantially between republics. Slovenians were largely Catholic; Croats were largely Catholic, but with a sizeable Serb (Christian Orthodox) minority; Serbs and Montenegrins were Christian Orthodox. Bosnia was the most ethnically diverse, with a mix of Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats.
In the 1990s, the six republic union began to break apart.
The first to break away was Slovenia, the Northern-most republic which had always enjoyed close ties with Central Europe and was a bit “not like the others” from the start. Slovenia’s secession in 1990 was relatively bloodless.
Croatia was next, but its breakaway would not be so easy. Motivated largely by the presence of a large Serb minority (600,000 people) within Croatia, the Yugoslav People’s Army (which by now was largely Serb, due to mass defections by Croats and Slovenians) attacked, bombing Dubrovnik and other Croatian cities. Nevertheless, after a few months Croatia persevered and successfully separated.
Then came Bosnia, and all hell really broke loose. Orthodox Serbs, who were a majority in Yugoslavia but a minority within Bosnia, claimed that an independent Bosnia could pose a threat for its Serb minority. How much truth there was to this claim will never be known; what we do know is that this distinction was enough for the Orthodox Serbs to launch an ethnic cleansing campaign against their neighbors.
The Serbs came from neighboring Serbia under the command of Slobodan Milosevic, and gathered some support from ethnic Serbs living in Bosnia as they crossed through the countryside. On April 5, 1992, they reached Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, and began the longest siege of modern history. From the hills surrounding Sarajevo, Serb snipers held hostage the city of 500,000 for 1,425 days, until February 29, 1995.
A total of 13,952 people were killed during the siege, including 5,434 civilians. Many were picked off, one by one, by Serb snipers stationed high above them, as they darted through the streets in search of water, food, and medical supplies. All of this happened in the middle of Europe, under continuous broadcast from the global media.
All of it seems abstract until you’re in the passenger seat of a van, climbing the hills above Sarajevo, listening to a first-hand account from a Bosnian police officer who spent 4 years fighting for his and his family’s life here during the siege.
At the outbreak of the war our guide, his wife, and their two small children lived in a high rise apartment building in central Sarajevo. He is Bosniak Muslim. But, as he describes it, such ethnic differences were not material inside the city:
“My wife and I are Muslim. Our neighbor was a Serb Christian married to a Catholic Croat. The neighbor on the other side was a Catholic Croat married to a Bosniak Muslim. Our families were intertwined. We were all Sarajevans first and foremost.”
And so, as the Serbs encircled Sarajevo and bombs began to fall, Sarajevans bonded together to try to save their besieged city. Our guide joined the resistance, helping smuggle food, water, medicine, and supplies through a tunnel that Sarajevans built under the airport. The 1 km tunnel, 1-meter-high and often filled knee-high with water, was the only route in and out of the city. Sometimes, he made 3 or 4 trips a night through that tunnel, loaded down with essentials that would help his city survive.
For almost 4 years, a city of 500,000, in the middle of Europe, lived in this way. Every day, people risked their lives to zigzag between burning building shells in search of food, water, and firewood. They lived without electricity, in cold and darkness. When the lights would come back on for a moment the whole city would fall into a frenzy, boiling as much water as possible, attempting to make frantic phone calls to relatives across the city, rendered inaccessible by the shelling.
All the while, cameras rolled.
It is said that Vietnam was the first televised war, and that the presence of the media is partially responsible for spurring the anti-war movement. For the first time, Americans could see the impact of their actions across the world. They saw My Lai, they saw Napalm girl, and they said enough.
Twenty years later, media coverage of Bosnia was even more ubiquitous. Outlets from around the world camped out in the Holiday Inn, one of the few buildings deemed ‘safe’ inside Sarajevo. Cameras rolled 24/7, capturing incredible amounts of photo and video footage inside the city.
Accounts differ on the role of the media in the Bosnian conflict. Some credit the fishbowl effect for literally stemming the bleeding; they believe more deaths would have occurred had the media cameras not been constantly rolling. Indeed, while the world’s attention was focused on Sarajevo, the Serb army massacred Muslims at will in the Serbian countryside. In Srebrenica, outside the reach of the cameras, Serbs slaughtered 8,000 men, women, and children in just two weeks.
Others believe that the media’s persistent attempts at neutrality resulted in an “all sides are to blame” narrative in a situation where there was a clear aggressor. The result, they say, is that it took almost 4 years for the United States to intervene to help end the war.
Finally, in December 1995, the Bosnian war ended. Some Serb leaders were eventually brought to justice – Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president widely portrayed as the war’s architect and arch villain – died of a heart attack in 2006 while on trial for war crimes at the Hague.
Yet, tensions continue to simmer in the region, and the 20+ years have not healed the wounds.
We asked our guide, what is the relationship now between Bosnians and Serbs? He started with a platitude – something about moving on – and then drifted off, unable to finish the lie.
“They have never apologized” he finally said.
Compare that to Rwanda, which suffered a horrific ethnic genocide at exactly the same time as Bosnia.
Post-war, the Rwandan government embarked on an aggressive “truth and reconciliation” process: for a decade, local village courts heard an estimated 2 million cases related to the murder of 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans:
“Trials were held in public, giving survivors the chance to confront alleged perpetrators in full view of their families and neighbours. Defendants faced penalties including life imprisonment and hard labour, but were given shorter sentences in exchange for confessing and were encouraged to seek forgiveness” – The Guardian
The scale of the atrocities was widely publicized, the Hutu publicly apologized to the Tutsis and helped them rebuild their homes and replant their farms. Then, the Government forbade the identification of Rwandans as Hutu and Tutsi.
As an outsider it is impossible to judge these complex ethnic conflicts, but on the surface it appears Rwanda’s approach has been more successful.
The other comparison that comes to mind is Lebanon. What struck me about Beirut was its tribalism. There, people did not identify as “Beirutis” – in fact, there were entire sections of Beirut in which someone unaffiliated with Hezbollah would never set foot. Unlike Sarajevans, Beirutis identified based on their religion, not based on their city affiliation. I could not imagine Beirutis coming together as the Sarajevans did during the siege. Then again, war makes for strange bedfellows.
So, where is Sarajevo now? And where is Bosnia?
You could say that twenty plus years later, the country continues to recover. But in a way, incredibly, life never stopped inside Sarajevo, even in the worst of times. Footage abounds of secret rock concerts (how Sarajevans managed to hook up amps in the middle of a blackout defies logic), defiant beauty pageants (women in bathing suits holding an infamous ‘Don’t Let Them Kill Us’ banner) and of course the improbable continuation of the Sarajevo Film Festival throughout the duration of the siege.
The culture never left, and it still pulses strong in this beautiful city. The arts, film, and music scenes are thriving. Sarajevo is cosmopolitan, modern, warm and cynical all at once. It’s a place I would love to return to.
On the whole, we found Bosnia incredibly friendly. None of the surly “Post-Soviet customer service” that plagues other Eastern European countries. None of the superficial fixed smiles that Croatians have adopted to deal with the hordes of tourists (who can blame them?). We found Bosnians to be genuine, and genuinely happy to see us (an unspoken “You are tourists? How did you choose to come here? Never mind, let us show you why you made a great decision”).
The Bosnian countryside was a stunning surprise. Clear, moody lakes, lush forests, old fortified towns, not unlike Italy’s hill towns, set beside rivers and waterfalls.
All of it, for a pittance. Take Croatia prices and slash them in 3, and you get Bosnia prices. Meals for $3, luxury hotels for $50 a night.
And so, at the end of this entirely too long blog post, what is my final take on Bosnia? At the risk of finishing on a cliché: Go. Before you go, read. Try to imagine the country as it was in 1994, and look at it now. Try to trace what has changed, and what has remained. Oh, and eat lots of Cevapi. You won’t regret it.
