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).