In commemoration of 25 years of the longest and bloodiest siege of any one city in modern history, the Independent published a text about today’s situation in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
“Despite the fact that the military of the Bosnian Serbs that held the city under siege left a long time ago, Sarajevo’s multiethnicity is still under siege,” writes journalist Max Clements.
“During the peace negotiations in Dayton in 1995, the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, while studying a map of BiH, looked at the others and said: “There’s nothing here but mountains”. “That’s Bosnia,” Slobodan Milosevic and Momir Bulatovic answered,” reminisced Clements while traveling from Mostar to Sarajevo.
Large objects all over the country remind us of Bosnia’s religious diversity.
The Independent’s journalist arrived in Sarajevo at night, so he got to see Sarajevo’s war wounds only tomorrow.
“Despite the major reconstruction of the city in the previous two decades, bullet hole are still visible on buildings, stores and walls along the sniper’s field through which civilians passed at their own risk while being shot at by Serb snipers. Those views define this conflict, as well as the embarrassment of the international community due to a lack of a reacton,” writes Clements.
He described BiH as a “microcosm of Yugoslavia” due to the ethnic differeces and is adamant that the majority population Bosniaks paid the biggest price for the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
“I didn’t expect war. I was eating pizza with my friends at university when the city was first shelled,” Armina Pijalovic (49) recalled for the Independent.
“The three constitutive peoples in BiH share the same country. They are all Bosnians. That’s the Bosnian national feeling, unrelated to the ethnic identity of religion, which is present in Sarajevo today. Peace and a better future for Bosnia must be built. But, in an ethnically cleansed country, in which ethnic homogeneity was imposed during the war, Sarajevo is once again under siege,” the Independent’s journalist concluded.
(Source: Radiosarajevo.ba)
