It Happened in Bosnia

I was only in Bosnia for a short time last spring, but it was long enough to know that I wanted to go back.  I told my students I was flying to Sarajevo on Thursday, and one of them said, "You go to all the weird places."  Maybe so. I can't explain it, but I am fascinated by the Balkan region.  

This blog is more-or-less a travel blog, not a political one. When you travel to the Balkans, though, it's hard to leave politics out of it. Before planning my last trip to the Balkans, I had a vague sense of what had happened in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Fighting broke out among the Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. They all hated each other, and had been killing each other for generations…and that was a good enough reason for the rest of us to stay out of it.  All sides had all committed atrocities; therefore, they were all equally guilty, right?

I don’t think so anymore.

At the beginning of the war, the rest of the world tried to help stop the war by refusing to sell or give any of the fighting parties weapons. Sounds good, right? No weapons, no fighting. The problem is that this left Croatia and Bosnia at a gross disadvantage; neither had a real army. The Serbs, on the other hand, had all of the Yugoslav arsenal at their disposal.  

When I heard of the war in the Balkans back then,  I was under the impression that fighting was all over. Not true. None of the actual clashes were in Serbia; some of the fighting was done in Croatia, and a lot of it happened in Bosnia.  Even twenty years later, many shelled buildings serve as a reminder.

      



Of the more than 100,000 killed or missing at the end of the war, over 68,000 of them were Bosnian Muslims*.  I believe it, too. I have never seen so many cemeteries –with such new-looking headstones—as I did all over Bosnia. 

part of a cemetery in Mostar; most of the people buried here died in 1993

During World War II, Croats murdered many Serbs; the Serbs used this as a reason to attack the Croats in the 1990s. The Serbs better hope that the Bosnian Muslims don't use the same reasoning in thirty years.

 

 Bosnia, twenty years after the war

 

 

 

 

*From The War Is Dead, Long Live the War, by Ed Vuillamy. The numbers come from a thorough analysis by two Polish investigators, Zwierchowski and Tabeau. They have been criticized by both Bosnians (who think the numbers are too low) and the Serbs (who think the numbers are too high).   

 

 

More of Croatia!

Wow, it's been a long time!  I have a lot to catch up on.  My last post was about Split and Dubrovnik, but that was not the only time I had been in Croatia. In October of last year I spent nearly a week on an island near Zadar.

I used most of the time in Preko to relax, but there was time for a little exercise. My friends were going cycling, and that's not really my thing, so when the girl at the tourist office suggested I walk up to the ruins on the hill, I thought, why not?  She said it was only a 30 minute walk.  My general rule is when someone from Europe tells me how long it will take to walk somewhere, I double it. So, one hour to the ruins wasn't bad.  It was more like an hour and a half on a windy road.  

Above: I probably should have known it would take more than an hour to get to the ruins; I couldn't even see them. Below: At that point, I thought I had to be halfway there--I wasn't...not on that windy road!)

Just when I thought I had made it...there was one last leg up to the ruins.

 

It was a little scary because there was NO ONE anywhere.  Occasionally I would hear a car or a plane, but that was it.  Once I got to the top, I turned my iPad to roaming, and posted a picture on facebook. I figured, that way, if anything happened to me, people would at least know where to start looking! It was worth it, though, because from the top I could see the other side of the island. 

 

 

While we were in Preko we took a day trip to Plitvice National Park. I remember thinking it was pretty when we were walking through it, but when I look back at the pictures I see just how amazing it is. Here are just a few: