Anna Callaghan
OCCRP
Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Be careful. The two words that people keep leaving me with.
Of course this is sound advice to a girl living alone in a foreign country for a summer. I’m not saying it’s silly to offer that advice, but rather pointing out that it’s coming from two different places of concern. One come from the same place that would deliver the same sentiment had I been off to London or Rome. The second has to do with the country itself. The country is scarred by war and still plagued by the paralysis that was codified into the peace treaties that ended it. War still lingers, it’s true. But the war ended almost two decades ago.
War is what people remember about Bosnia. If they were conscious during the Clinton Administration they likely remember the intense, dramatic media reports coming from inside its borders. The Balkans has a history of wars after all. The Austro-Hungarians. The Ottomans. Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo – the event that sparked WWI. The countries of Tito’s Yugoslavia. There’s a verb for that: Balkanize. It means to break up into small, often hostile units.
Bosnia is no longer dangerous like it used to be when the place was often compared to hell on earth – one of the 14 worst places in the world at one time. The arms have been lowered. Churches and mosques have been reconstructed to an extent. Some bullet holes have been patched up with red – Sarajevo’s roses. The war is over.
Though I suppose people aren’t wrong in associating the place with war. The scars it still bears hinder progress and impede the population from reaching the high standard of living that many enjoyed before the war. The ethnic tensions between Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats have created a bureaucratic gridlock that makes the US government look like a utopia. So don’t think danger and war when you think Bosnia. Look forward rather than back. In order to move forward many things need to be forgotten, memory must be tempered against forgetting.
Bosnia is far from perfect. It’s riddled with problems. But it’s also beautiful and full of hospitable people. The perpetual narrative of war corrupts the latent potential that does exist. Not to paint too rosy a portrait, but searching for hope is always better than looking for the opposite.