Bosnia war set tone for future

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/04/2012 (5261 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By the time war broke out in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia Herzegovina, in the first week of April 1992, it had actually been underway in the former Yugoslav republic’s rural regions for weeks. Swaths of northeastern Bosnia went silent as Serb forces spilled across the border from Serbia and drove Bosnian Muslim families from border communities in Bosnia’s first spate of ethnic cleansing. Thousands were already dead, tens of thousands displaced, when war came to Sarajevo.

I’m ashamed to admit it now, but myself and others of the international press corps were sitting in Sarajevo, waiting. There was no doubt in any of our minds it would one day explode. The multiculturalism that resulted from mixed marriages between Muslims, Croats and Serbs was no more than a thin veneer against the rising nationalism that took hold of the former Yugoslavia. We journalists enjoyed the spring air and café society of the capital, hunters waiting for our next helping of human misery.

The wait ended April 5, 1992, the day Sarajevo and Bosnia Herzegovina’s ethnic diversity died. It wasn’t long before tank shells screamed from the hillsides into the centre of the city, and snipers were suddenly on the rooftop of every highrise.

The collapse of civilities was swift. The city’s main traffic artery just stopped one day, littered with burning trams and cars hit by shells. Water services were cut off, resulting in lineups of battered citizens, who risked death by sniper or shell. Food ran out, the city was sealed by Bosnian Serb forces, and the siege of Sarajevo began.

It went on for three years.

As a relatively young journalist, I covered stories that to this day trigger a kind of shell shock. The Sarajevo Market Massacre, where we walked and filmed amongst the dead, our boots splashing in about an inch of blood. Me, breaking journalism’s cardinal rule of objectivity by having a cow slaughtered on the Bosnian Serb side to then take the food to doctors and nurses on the Bosnian Muslim side, because they were starving. Losing colleagues and friends to war, until I realized that by the age of 30, I knew exactly 30 journalists who’d died doing the same job as I.

During the war, on visits home to Winnipeg, I would often be asked to speak to journalism students at Red River College. Their hero worship was flattering, until one student asked me just how many dead I had actually seen in Bosnia. I couldn’t answer how many, but instead defaulted to the most I’d seen in one place: about 2,000, in a mass grave being investigated by the International War Crimes Tribunal. Silent shock filled the classroom. I in turn was shocked by their shock, seeing it as part of the job.

It was years before the full impact of the war on myself and many of my other colleagues became clear. I eventually left journalism. Others became addicted to the draw and adrenaline of life in a war zone, one so much so that he turned to heroin for a high once out of a war. Still others are gone, having given their lives to journalism in more recent battlefields of Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twenty years on, the true cost of the war — and the senselessness of it — is clear. Today’s Bosnia is a peaceful country, but one that is completely divided along ethnic and religious lines. Memories of multiculturalism are reflected only in cemeteries, where grave markers pronounce the appropriate ethnic or religious affiliation of the dead. Mixed marriages and the charm of steeples and turrets framing city skylines are history, consigned to archive news footage.

Perhaps just as troubling is that Bosnia was something of a watershed in the recent history of war itself. The immolation of the Balkans seems to have triggered a new era of increased warfare involving the most civilized of societies. I can remember working with NATO soldiers in 1995, many of whom had never even been in a war. They came from Canada, the United States and Great Britain and were thrilled at being in a real war, like it was a new toy.

Now those same countries are battle-hardened and weary. The Canadian military gave up the role of peacekeeper for enforcer in Afghanistan. The United States has just emerged from Iraq and a war conducted on utter falsehoods. They’re still in Afghanistan, and words of war hang heavy with Iran.

Two decades after the start of the war in Bosnia Herzegovina, and it seems as if war itself was the bigger victor. Peace is still in the midst of taking a terrible beating.

 

Jackie Shymanski is a former CNN correspondent who covered the war in Bosnia Herzegovina and the breakup of Yugoslavia.