Here's a brief history of the war as I understand it and which may or may not be totally correct and is surely missing many important details and is vastly oversimplified. There are three main ethnic groups that live in the area: the Serbs (Eastern Orthodox), the Croats (Catholic), and the Bosniaks (Muslim). You cannot look at someone and tell which group they belong to; only their name identifies them. They have hated each other for centuries; 800 years ago the Ottomans (Muslim) enslaved the other groups and were absolutely horrible. WWI started here when a group of Slavs were trying to unite their people and resented the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand when he was visiting Sarajevo. When WWII came around, the Nazi controlled government largely consisted of Croats, who used the opportunity to terrorize the Serbs and sent them (along with the Jews et al.) to concentration camps so brutal and terrible that apparently even the Nazis were horrified by them. Tito was a WWII war hero, and also an unusual ethnic mix (between he and his wife they covered all the main groups). His resistance group pushed the Nazis out without help from the Soviets, and he established Yugoslavia, which he ruled until his death in 1980. It was a communist country, but not a Soviet country. He played the Soviets and the west off each other masterfully throughout his life, essentially making them each send his country lots of money. During the Cold War a Yugoslav passport was the most valuable in the world because you could travel on both sides of the Iron Curtain with it. People there seem to still love Tito. He was a dictator and ran a tight ship, but he was holding together a country full of people that hated each other. It was not a place you could go around criticizing Tito, but it was not the terror-filled police state of Soviet countries. People were taken care of. When he died in 1980, however, the union he had held together fell apart fairly quickly. In 1989 Slovenia seceded with minimal problems. In 1992 Bosnia and Herzegovina was still part of Yugoslavia, which had its capital in Belgrade, Serbia, and therefore the Serbs in the region had the most power. The people voted and narrowly chose to secede, which the Serbs did not like. The war in Bosnia in the 1990s was essentially the Serbs trying to take over the country to return to Serbia.
We spent our first day in Bosnia visiting Mostar, which was hit hard by the war and still has not recovered all that well. We first ate lunch in the courtyard of a little restaurant, next to a big bombed out building. There were lots of bombed out buildings here.
We then walked through the Turkish part of town, full of mosques and minarets. It was the first time in my life I had visited a predominantly Muslim area and it was so fascinating to hear the calls to prayer throughout the day from all the minarets. We were able to enter and tour a mosque, and climb to the top of the minaret. It was very narrow indeed going up the stairway.
Next to the mosque was a cemetery. There are cemeteries all over the city, and all the graves were from 1992-1993.
There was a classically Turkish house you could tour to get a feel for the architecture and daily life. It was fun to lounge about and interesting to see the inner courtyard (where women could be uncovered) and the outer courtyard (where they could not be uncovered) and the large covered porches.
There were also lots of shops to peruse, and we bought some souvenirs and gifts.
Mostar is most famous for this bridge that symbolically united the two parts of the city where different ethnic groups lived. It was destroyed in the war but has been rebuilt.
Mostar was really a lovely place. Our day there was interesting and fun.
The drive from Mostar to Sarajevo went past some stunning scenery and mountains, which I completely failed to capture.
And then we had three days to spend in Sarajevo. Of course one of the three things that everyone knows about Sarajevo is that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were shot here in 1914, marking the start of WWI and the beginning of all the horrible things that happened in Europe throughout the whole 20th century. It happened at this corner.The corner itself is unremarkable, but it felt pretty remarkable nonetheless.
Our apartment was just half a block from the main tourist section of Sarajevo, the Turkish quarter, full of shops and quaint cobblestone streets and mosques and this famous fountain and very old ruins of a caravansary.
The second day in town, the we hired the assistant of the person renting us our apartment to give us a tour of the city. His name was Alvin and he did an excellent job. He first brought us up to an overlook where we could really get a sense of the whole city and explained a bit about the siege of Sarajevo (the second thing everyone knows about the city). He was about 10-ish during the siege and lived just outside the city. He says he was a courier for the resistance, but I sometimes wondered if he was embellishing his experiences just a tiny bit to make his story more compelling.
The city is ringed by hills where the Serbian forces set up their artillery and forces from 1992-1996, for 1425 days. If you see the hill across the valley, you can see the enormous cemetery. There were cemeteries all over this city, too.
Here is a map of the city while it was under siege; they were almost completely surrounded except for that narrow neck at the north that was held by the UN and where the airport is located.
Here is our family with the lovely city behind us.
On the way to our next stop on the tour Alvin pointed out this sign. The country is divided into two main territories now, one of them being the Republic of Srpska. Alvin resented this enormously and felt like it indicated how divided the country is still. He is a Muslim Bosniak. One of the conditions of the peace settlement is that the presidency actually rotates between the three main ethnic groups. So for four years there is a Serb as president, then four more years with a Bosniak, and the next four years with a Croat. I can't really imagine that working very well. He was also disgusted by the amount of corruption in the government and was exquisitely aware of the fancy cars and houses owned by government officials when the vast majority of Bosnians, including him, are struggling so much. He says that the government is subtly resisting joining the EU because it would add a layer of oversight and expose their corruption. He also said that there is some concern about the amount of money that has poured into the country from various Middle Eastern countries since the war and the influence that they have; the several new fancy skyscrapers in the city seemed to be funded by Arab countries.
One of the main ways that the city was able to survive for so long under siege was the construction of a small tunnel under the airport to get food, weapons, and supplies into the city. One of the entrances was under this house that is now a small museum.
Part of the tunnel is open and it is pretty amazing to experience.
We then spent a bit of time in a park. Alvin really liked this place, and it was pretty enough but we were a bit underwhelmed. There is a large spring that comes out of some rocks here, and that was also very important to surviving the siege.
We ended the day by visiting the bobsled track from the 1984 Olympic games (the third thing people know about Sarajevo). It was incredibly surreal to be there; the track is intact but completely graffitied over and overgrown. We ran from the top of the track to the bottom. It was wild to be somewhere that had once been the focus of the world's attention and was now totally deserted.
Sarajevo the city is mostly rebuilt and recovered from the war. There are still some buildings with bullet holes, but for the most part it does not feel bombed out. But right after the siege ended an artist filled in the mortar scars with red plaster. They are called Sarajevo Roses, and there used to be hundreds and hundreds, all over the city. But as the years go by many have been covered up with construction and such, so the ones that are left are being preserved. There were an average of 329 shells fired into the city each day, for several years.
This is a moving monument to the children who were killed during the siege. There were an estimated 2474 civilians killed during the siege, an average of eight per day.Over 500 children were killed.
We stopped and had some drinks at a little place called Tito Cafe, with adoring photos of Tito throughout the cafe and a play area in the back consisting of old cold war artillery and such to climb on. It sounds like I'm making it up, I know. The boys had a really fun time playing here with a bunch of kids; they had some sort of tag game going on.
There was a park with a huge chess set. Early in the day we watched a bunch of old men play some games, and when we returned later one asked if Caleb wanted to play. He got beat, but the old man was really nice and gave Caleb some tips after the game.
On Sunday we went to church with the small branch in Sarajevo. It was just some missionaries and a few families that met in a rented room. The whole service was conducted in English and Bosnian; whichever language someone spoke in, someone else would translate what they said into the other language. The people were very nice. Most of the families had one American spouse and one spouse from another country who were in Sarajevo temporarily. There weren't many local people at the branch. It is hard to understand how missionary work could happen in a place where religion is so completely intertwined with ethnic identity, which is so loaded and significant.
That afternoon ellen and I visited Gallery 11/07/95, a photo gallery memorializing the slaughter at Srebrenica. This is one of the events that gave rise to the term "ethnic cleansing". It is terrifying and horrible. The Serbs were closing in on a small Bosniak town called Srebrenica, a UN "safe area," and the people fled a few kilometers to the UN base held by Dutch soldiers. The UN was apparently overwhelmed by the number of people and turned almost all of them away, letting in only mothers with very young children. Why they did this is, in retrospect, unclear because there was apparently plenty of room in the compound for everyone. Thousands of people were camped out around the compound when the Serbs arrived, and they offered the UN a deal. Let us take the people on buses to "a safe place," they said. OK, the UN people said for reasons that are hard to comprehend other than crazy people with guns are really really scary and make you want to believe that you have some option other than to have to fire your guns. So the Serbs separated out the women and children and put them on some buses, and put the men ages 12+ on other buses. Some men could see pretty clearly what was going to happen, refused to get on the bus, and started walking over the mountains on a three day journey to try to get to safety. The men who got on the buses were driven to various places, lined up, and gunned down. The men who walked across the mountains were slaughtered as well, although a few survived. Over 8000 Muslim men and boys were killed in less than three days. It is horrifying. The gallery and tour guide were harrowing.
I was in high school when the war in Bosnia was taking place. I knew vaguely that it was a very messy situation and the US didn't want it to be happening but didn't want to get involved. The UN was halfheartedly involved, but their lack of commitment really seemed to make things worse. People there hate the UN. There were weapons embargoes on the area, which really meant that only the Russian backed Serbs could get weapons, leaving everyone else far more vulnerable. There were UN peacekeepers in Sarajevo, but they were under no conditions to ever fire their weapons, which made them pretty useless. The UN "safe areas" of Srebrenica and Gorazde were not safe at all because the UN wasn't willing to actually defend them. You can't just go against an army willing to fire their guns and declare things if you're not willing to fire back. And kill people. And maybe get killed yourself. It's the sad truth. And pretending otherwise sometimes comes at the cost of many innocent lives. It was really when Bill Clinton finally started bombing Belgrade that the war ended. But bombing cities isn't clean business either, and I'm sure innocent people died there, too. It is all messy and bloody any way you do it. And so, so tragic.
That was the lesson of Bosnia for us all, I think. When people hate each other enough to kill each other, people really do die and suffer. It is hard to get out from under that hatred, and it is still there. Every year on July 11 in Srebrenica there is a ceremony formally laying to rest the remains of people they have found and identified from the slaughter there in the last year. (They find more mass graves around the countryside all the time.) We returned home a week before the ceremony, and 2015 marked 20 years. The Serbian president attended this time, a generous and brave, if small, gesture acknowledging the tragedy and his peoples' role in it. And the people there literally threw stones at him; he had to be rushed away because they literally were throwing to hurt him. This happened just a few months ago. Things are not OK. It made things in my own country feel more weighty and real. Racial and ethnic and religious hatred are not things to play around with. Once lines get drawn and people entrench, it can really happen that people start dying. And there is no easy way back.
Visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina was the most significant thing we did on this trip. It changed us all.
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