Sarajevo is a city of about 440,000 (600,000 before the war) and is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a nation of the former Yugoslavia. The architecture in Sarajevo bears the evidence of centuries of Ottoman rule (the old center is full of little Turkish-style shops and streets surrounding the Sebilj fountain), then Austro-Hungarian rule (moving out from the old town the buildings in the center are handsome and more Western European), and eventually several decades of communisim under Tito (the city expanded greatly during this period and I find very little of the architecture appealing). The Miljacka river runs through the city and there are many bridges that span it, including one now known as Princip’s, where a hotheaded Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia, thereby starting World War I (the Great Powers all had manipulative alliances with various Balkan states, so the fact that the war started was not really the fault of anyone in the Balkans, it was just what finally sparked outright aggression among the Powers). Tito emerged as the leader of Yugoslavia as WW II ended, initially ruling the country as a strict Stalinist, brutal and repressive, but after being expelled by Stalin from the union of Communist governments, he became more of a “social visionary” and Yugoslavia enjoyed several decades of greater economic prosperity and excellent social systems. During this period more than a million people in BiH listed themselves in the census as “Yugoslav” without defining a separate national or religious identity.
Tito died in 1980, and while Yugoslavia held together for another decade, crises in Kosovo (then a semi-autonomous region in Serbia because of its primarily Albanian population) began to fuel Serbian nationalism. By the end of the ‘80s Milosevic had risen to power in Serbia and was manipulating Serbian nationalism, calling for the creation of a greater Serbia and - as Slovenia and Croatia, to the north of BiH, grew increasingly nationalistic and eventually announced their independence - threatening that any country that suceeded would face disputes over their borders so that all ethnic Serbs could live in Serbia.
BiH, sandwiched between Croatia and Serbia and with a 44% Muslim population (who were quite secular after decades of communism), remained fairly calm until 1992. One person that I’ve talked to here said that war seemed inevitable because the population of BiH was a microcosm of Yugoslavia. After a referendum in March 1992 in which 65% of Bosnians voted for independence and the EU and UN recognized the nation, Serbian paramilitary forces (who had been quietly occupying villages and massing heavy artillery and tanks on the hills surrounding Sarajevo) attacked the city. Thousands and thousands of Sarajevans of all backgrounds took to the streets to protest the barricades and a sniper fired into the peaceful crowd, starting a war that would last until 1996 and a genocide of proportions not seen in Europe since the Holocaust.
Atrocities were committed on all sides during the war (Croats and Muslims in Bosnia maintained an alliance against the Serbs for a time, but when that fell apart Croats and Muslims fought each other as well). Nobody escaped suffering. There was massive internal displacement of populations, refugees were scattered across the world, and people were robbed, killed, raped, and brutally torn from their families and their homes. The West had said “never again” after the Holocaust, but again concentration camps and genocide appeared on European soil. Twelve years ago next month nearly 8,000 men and boys were killed at Srebrenica, an area under UN protection.
Sarajevo itself survived the longest siege in modern military history: over 1200 days with little food and water, under constant sniper and artillery fire, over 11,000 of its inhabitants died while the rest were supported by what little they could carry into the city through a 1 meter square tunnel that ran under the airport’s runway. Some neighborhoods, like Grbavica, where I now work, were under Serb control, completely cut off from the rest of the city. The park near the Olympic Stadium (the largest Olympics held up to that point were here in 1984) was turned into a massive graveyard because it was one of few open spaces were people could bury their dead without being under fire from snipers.
Some people here credit Clinton with finally ending the war with the signing of the Dayton Accords ( negotiated in Ohio and signed in Paris in 1996), some question why he waited so long. One of his campaign platforms had been, after all, to bring an end to what was then just the beginning of war. Srebrenica is said to have caught the attention of many Americans who in turn pressured the government, as were the deaths of 60 people in an open market in the middle of Sarajevo when a grenade was launched into the crowd.
Much has been restored in Sarajevo in the last 11 years. Many buildings that were in ruins or mined have been torn down and replaced. The national post office (where women, in an act of resistance to the war and the snipers’ fire, would go to work every day, dressed and made-up, until the building was too shattered to be safe) has been restored, as has the national museum. There are still, however, many buildings in ruins, skeletal apartment houses, roofless structure - even in the heart of the city - where trees now push their way up out of the rubble. Bullet, shrapnel, and mortar holes are everywhere.
