I am writing this from Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia Herzegovina where for the past week I have been attending a conference on International Peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies. It is a journey that will also take me through Zagreb in Croatia to Slovenia. Having visited several cities that have experienced war and conflict in Africa and Central America, scenes of urban centers devastated by wars and armed conflict are not unfamiliar.
Yet, visiting Sarajevo was an eye opener. This is a distinctly modern European city and for someone who has come to associate Europe with order and cosmopolitan sophistication, the sight of one bearing the same fresh scars of war that I have come to associate with the troubled regions of the developing world was unsettling.
The rows of high rise concrete apartments, dating from the communist era in Tito’s Yugoslavia, reminded me of similar buildings I had seen in Jena and other parts of what used to be East Germany. Walking through the street, it was easy to see how this historic town could once have been central to the history of Europe. After all, it was in Sarajevo that Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian student Gavrilo Princip, sparking the First World War in 1914.
The historic character of the city as the “Jerusalem of Europe” is also evident in the landscape -- the cascading hills surrounding the city, the stone facade of the buildings in the old Jewish quarters and the mosque minarets standing beside church towers. This is a city where the three monotheistic religions have long coexisted. I could hear the ringing of the church bells down the road one moment and in the next, the unmistakable sound of the “adhan” (Muslim call to prayer). One does indeed feel a sense of being at the crossroads of history.
Yet, in all these, it is difficult to escape the real legacies of war in this city. Almost every building still has bullet or shrapnel holes on the walls. Some were gaping holes. Although there were signs of reconstruction and repair, many buildings are still in ruins.
I asked my colleague and guide Goran, who works with a local Peacebuilding NGO, how so many buildings could have been destroyed in the war. He explained that during the siege on the city, Serb/Yugoslav army occupied the hills surrounding the city, making it an easy target for bullets, mortar rounds and RPGs. Most of the devastation I saw came from exploding mortar rounds that killed thousands.
We came across a street in which over 50 people were killed on a single day in mortar explosion. The buildings on the street bore little bronze plaques with the names of those killed -- many of them were women and children. War is devastating everywhere and those who bear the brunt are often the innocent and most vulnerable.
As I walked through the city centre with Goran, I asked how such intense ethnic hostility and animosity could have existed among a people that looked to me so homogenous. How was it possible to tell a Serb from a Croat and a Croat from a Bosnian during the war? They all look the same to my untrained eyes. Goran replied that most people in the former Yugoslavia speak the same Serb-Croat language and “pretty much look alike racially.” “During the war," he continued, it was your neighbor, friend and colleague who pointed you out as being ethnically different – an enemy or traitor.” It reminded me of Rwanda.
It was Jonas Savimbi, the Angola warlord, who defined peace as the “space between two wars.” The most we can do, he argued, is to make that space as wide as we can but at some point men must war. I disagree. There is nothing inevitable about war and the pain and devastation that it brings to humanity. We can choose a different destiny -- PEACE. Visiting Sarajevo convinces me even more of this.
