The first time I saw Sarajevo was from the window of a train, having spent a sweat-soaked three days travelling across Europe in the late-June heat. Our compartment was air-conditioned by way of a spare bootlace tying the window open. We had left Zagreb at 9 that morning and it was now approaching 6pm as the hills fell away to reveal the outskirts of the city. We disembarked the packed train and the crowds dissipated into the city, leaving us standing bewildered in virtually disserted plaza outside the station.
I was finally there, in the city I had spent four years studying and many more obsessing over.
It was all a little surreal. Here were the landmarks I’d seen on archive TV news footage burning and shattering into dust, whilst shells and sniper fire echoed around. In the peaceful evening sunshine, it was hard conflate the two images. The tram we took to our hostel passed under the Holiday Inn, still towering in garish ochre over the expanse of Sniper Alley. That day, cars, trams and pedestrians made their way untroubled along the wide road out to Ilidža. I looked up at the surrounding hills, clambering down into the town at this point, orientating myself in this strange new reality.
My friends and I stayed six days before heading south to Mostar. I could have stayed for six weeks. You can devour everything there is to read about somewhere, but until you visit, you cannot appreciate the taste, the touch and the sound of a place. The random juxtaposition of Euro-pop and the call to prayer; the bitterness of your first Bosnian coffee, drunk in a tiny front room up a spiral staircase; walking barefoot home from a mountain-top restaurant in a summer storm.
I was just eight years old when the war ended in 1995, so my vague memories are limited to the coverage on Newsround. My curiosity about Bosnia was piqued at a much later age and my visit served only to cement the country's place in my heart. I am not arrogant enough to presume that because I have visited Sarajevo I can even begin to imagine how they suffered during the siege. I do not pretend to know the city like a local. Far from it. There is so much more to learn, to experience and discover in this fascinating European capital. I highly recommend a visit.
Sadly, all too often, Sarajevo is associated with war. The Latin Bridge spanning the River Miljacka, on which Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is a stark reminder that this is the city in which the war to end all wars began. And if they are unaware of that connection, many people automatically connect Sarajevo with the horrific images of the 1990s.
But despite spending three-and-a-half years under almost constant fire from encircling forces in the mountains around the city, Sarajevo survived. In the summer months, the BSA turned off the water; in the winter, they cut off fuel supplies. They arbitrarily sniped at pedestrians as they sprinted across road junctions and landed shells at random. Against this backdrop, Sarajevans held a film festival and classical music concerts. They dug a tunnel under the airport to bring supplies in from beyond the frontline. And when the war was over, they quietly picked up the pieces of their lives and rebuilt their multicultural city, where East meets West.
Being the only student of the war in the group, I didn’t inflict too much history on my fellow travellers. We visited what remains of the airport tunnel and the siege exhibition in the historical museum. But, to the informed eye, the signs of the conflict which was raging just twenty years ago are everywhere. Pavements and buildings are pock-marked with bullet holes and shell craters. I watched in a dumbstruck trance as my friends shopped in the Markale marketplace. The only sign of the shell that fell there in February 1994 is a memorial along the back wall bearing the names of the 68 who died there; you’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it. A market trader accidentally knocked his sack trolley into it the glass casing around the shell crater. And there were the railings over which I had seen the image of a mutilated body slumped.
Yet it felt necessary not to be seen noticing these things. Whether it was due to my own awkwardness, being intimately acquainted with the pusillanimous efforts of the British government to end the war, or a sense of intrusion, it seemed somehow inappropriate, or at the very least impolite, to mention the war.
Aside from one moment of tension on arrival, when, confused and tired from travelling across seven countries and dealing with four different currencies in one weekend, we attempted to pay for our room with Croatian Kuna and were curtly informed that Bosnia was a different country, it was not apparent from the Bosnians we spoke to that a war had taken place. We were accepted on face value as tourists and the people we met were eager to show us the delights of their beautiful country.
There was a sense almost as if the people were holding their breath. The government buildings were set apart from the rest of the vibrant city, shrouded in a fearsome quiet. Sarajevans were reclaiming their lives through hospitality, culture and congeniality, not through politics, which, since Dayton, have become toxic in the capital which suffered so much during the siege. Declarations of political intent could tear apart a city which has restored itself to peace so successfully.
Over the last month, however, Sarajevo has awoken. Sparked by the political stalemate over legislation governing the allocation of ID numbers, which has left babies born since February without numbers and therefore without access to insurance and passports, protesters have come out in force onto the streets of Sarajevo. The demonstrations have been further fuelled by the story of baby Berina, whose life-saving medical treatment in Serbia was delayed because she could not be issued a passport. An emergency 180 day law was passed on 5 June allowing ID numbers to be allotted, but it was too late for Berina, who passed away on 13 June.
The sticking point is that politicians from the Republika Srpksa, the Bosnian Serb entity within Bosnia-Herzegovina, want the ID numbers to contain a signifier identifying the bearer’s region. Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Muslim politicians want the numbers to be allocated randomly. As a result, Parliament is at an impasse. The protesters set a deadline of 30 June for the government to break the deadlock, but that date has passed and the vote on the new draft law has been postponed until next week.
The public’s prior reluctance to protest is perhaps understandable. The last mass protest in Sarajevo was a peace rally in April 1992. Snipers shot into the crowd and killed two civilians. Three-and-a-half years of war followed. The Dayton Accords, signed in November 1995, left Bosnia-Herzegovina in a state of limbo, governed in an uneasy peace by the Federal government in Sarajevo and the Republika Srpska, with its de facto capital in Banja Luka. The Bosnian Serbs want independence, whilst the Federal government wants unification and so the political system remains balanced on a knife edge.
Bosnians are now beginning to come out of political hibernation and exercise their democratic rights. There has been plenty to inflame tensions in the last few weeks – the returning of 405 recently-identified bodies to Srebrenica on the 18th anniversary of the massacre, the reversal of Radovan Karadžic’s acquittal on charges of genocide in The Hague and the posturing of Bosnian Serb politicians boycotting Parliament and claiming that Sarajevo is not a safe place for Serbs. But in Sarajevo the people have not reacted with violence but with a resounding demonstration that they will not allow the political elite to drag them back into conflict with one another. Ethnicity has not played a part in the protesters’ message.
The recent of accession of Croatia to the EU has further highlighted the petty infighting amongst Bosnia’s politicians. They had five years to prepare for it, but the Bosnian government still managed to miss the 1 July deadline for reforming legislation in order to allow its farmers to continue exporting food to neighbouring Croatia once it joined the EU. Bosnia has now lost its largest export market worth 22 million euros annually. Even if the legislation can be passed, it will take EU inspectors up to six months to give the exports the seal of approval, whilst Bosnian farmers search desperately for markets elsewhere. Dissatisfaction with bickering politicians who appear more concerned with furthering their own personal interests than those of the Bosnian people is mounting.
It is true that the root of Bosnia’s current problems lie in the poor construction of the Dayton Accords, which left the country over-reliant on the international community and nationalist political parties. But part of the blame lies with the people who have buried their heads in the sand and elected these politicians back into power time and time again. With Croatia joining the European Union, perhaps the Bosnians now have a realistic goal to strive towards. Croatia was also devastated by war twenty years ago, though admittedly not to the same extent as Bosnia, and has now recovered to a point where it can be accepted into political union with the rest of Europe. Bosnia has a long way to go – it is predicted that they won’t be joining the EU until 2015 at the very earliest – and a lot of changes to make, but a resurgent political consciousness amongst Sarajevans may just be a start.
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