Siege of Sarajevo

Please read this post, if you read nothing else on the whole site. Even if it is difficult to read.

The truth can be terrible, but it is worse not to know.

Sarajevo survived the longest siege of a city in modern history. They were completely surrounded and cut off from the rest of the world for almost 4 years. Hopefully you can see this photo of a map of Sarajevo that shows the Serb forces surrounding the city, with a narrow passage through the airport controlled by the UN. The Serb parts are the red-pink all around the outside and the city of Sarajevo in in the center which is more white.

From April of 1992 until December of 1995, Sarajevo was a city under siege.



What do I mean by this?

The Serb forces were formed from the army that was once the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and they had all the tanks, artillery, shells, etc. that once belonged to all Yugoslavs for their protection. they surrounded the city and camped in places like this (the old Jewish cemetary) overlooking the city from neighbornig mountains (Sarajevo it in a valley).

Anyone who was watching the news will regcognize the yellow building here in the center of Sarajevo. It is the Holiday Inn, where all foreign journalists stayed during the war.

The Inn itself has had a bit of a "facelift" in the intervening years since the war, but you can see the concrete roof part still shows the scars of sniper fire.

The Holiday Inn is located on a street ctalled "snipers alley" during the war because the Serb snipers would shoot civillians like clay pigeons as they hurried along. They would often shoot the first person, purposely only wounding them so they could kill more people when they came to help the wounded one. sick. anyway, during the war, the inn was called "sunny-side up egg" because in the winter snow of bosnia the yellow building looked just like that.

The Bosnian army was formed to react to this Serbian aggression on June 15, 1992, 2 months after the siege had begun and the city was already pretty well surrounded. They had only 1 tank I am told, and had a very difficult time obtaining arms with which to defend the city of Sarajevo (or the rest of Bosnia for that matter).

Let us back up a bit and talk about what Sarajevo once was.... it was the most multi-ethnic city in Eurpoe and possibly on the planet. It had the most inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriages when compared to other cities.

During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews fled Spain and where did they go? To Bosnia, to Sarajevo, a city famous for tolerance. Sarajevo was the only Eurpoean city without a Jewish ghetto, because they were not separated from the Muslims and Christians who were living in Sarajevo. During the Nazi times, the Jewish sacred book, the Haggadah, was hidden in the last place the Nazis would look (and they turned over every stone in Bosnia looking for it). The main mosque in Sarajevo hid the sacred Jewish text, and the Jews would have done the same for the Luslims had they bene threatened similarly. Now this Haggadah is on display in the National Museum.

In the main square of Sarajevo, there stand in a close circle a mosque, a synagogue, an orthodox church, and a catholic cathedral. apparantly there are plans for a buddhist temple here too. They call Sarajevo "the Jerusalem of Europe" because of this history of religious groups coexisting here and finding the sacred together and separately without hurting one another.

So what happened??

Many people pin the demise tolerance in Bosnia on the "Balkan Butcher," Slobodon Milosovic. This may be an oversimplification, but it seems to be the srtoy accepted by the people here. So Milosovic started 5 wars here and lost them all (but everyone loses in war... so this is not saying much). He started a war of aggression in Slovenia and lost, then Croatia and lost, then in Bosnia and lost, then in Kosovo and lost and then the "war" as it is referred to here with NATO which he seriuosly lost.

After Slovenia and Croatia seceeded from Yugoslavia, Bosnia knew it was only a matter of time before they were also attacked by Serb forces under the command of the Serbian nationalist Milosovic. So they had a referendum and 70% of Bosnia-Hercegovina voted to become an independent country, seperate from Yugoslavia. On the day that the UN recognized BiH as its own country, Milosovic began the shelling of Sarajevo, which was to continue for almost 4 years without cease.



The city of Sarajevo was completely surrounded by Serb forces, who cut off all food, water, electricity, phone, gas, and every other life-sustaining element to the city. There was a narrow passage by the airport to the "free bosnian territory" in the mountains, but this area was controlled by Serbs, who shot Sarajevans who tried to escape this way.

The United Nations did a very bad job of intervening and some people here say they hurt the Bosnian cause more than they helped. This might sound crazy, but just listen to what they did:

They took over the airport as a UN controlled area, which seems like a great idea, then they could let the people in and out for food, etc. but NO this is not what happened. The UN made an agreement with the Serbs that they would not let anyone in or out of the city, and they would give 50% of humanitarian aid to the Serb forces. very bad idea.

So the UN was providing 287 grams of humanitarian aid (including everythihng, not just food) per person per day, but since so much was going to the serbs, Bosnians in Sarajevo could only hope to receive 140 grams of aid per person per day. But they did not get even this small amount, because the Serbs could easily shut down the airport by shooting down a plane or two, which would close the airport for several days to a week at least. The UN also tried sending caravans of aid, but these were usually intercepted and relinquished to the Serbs.

The food that did get in was often so rotten it was inedible, or it was pork products (60% of Sarajevo is Muslim and they cannot eat pork) or disgusting meat in a can with no expiration date that made people sick. They also sent in 2 planes full of condoms so people could enjoy safe sex here in Sarajevo. It seems the people would have been happier with food, medication, and bullets.

At one point, the Serb forces captured about 300 UN peacekeepers and chained them to strategic targets like bridges and tanks, so that the UN would not be able to attack the Serb strongholds. Sad but true. The mission was poorly planned, poorly funded, and had no power behind it. It was never going to be able to succeed to help or save or even protect the people of Sarajevo.

But is actually gets worse...

The UN made an arms embargo (seems like a good idea, if both sides cannot have weapons, they cannot fight, right? WRONG!). Bosnia had no real army to speak of before this war, so they had no weapons and had to keep buying bullets, etc. as they were using them. The Serb forces had everything that once belonged to Yugoslavia and apparantly they had enough arms to fire on Sarajevo for 8 years without having to buy a single bullet. So the embargo only emboldened the Serbs and caused the Bosnians to be at a more severe disadvantage. A man told me today that in desperation the Bosnian army eventually made a deal to buy arms from Columbian drug dealers (so he said, if you have to buy drugs, buy from Columbians!).

But the very worst thing, the unforgivable thing, the thing that makes me want to crawl out of my skin is this: SREBRENICA.

Hopefully this is a familiar word to you. If not let me tell you a little background. Srebrenica was a predominantly Muslim town near Sarajevo, where it was very hard hit in the beginning of the war. The UN took the town over as a "safe zone" and the people rejoiced, thinking they would be saved. The Serbs surrounded the town and in the middle fo the UN safe zone, they massacres over 8,000 Muslim men.

The UN did not react, did not protect the people, did not do their job, did not respond as any feeling human being would to the bloody massacre that they were seeing in front of their faces.

The Srebrenica Massacre was well-documented and really no one contests that it happened just like this: 8,000 men were rounded up, forced to dig their own mass graves, then summarily shot for hours and days until they were all dead. The women were evacuated, raped, and otherwise dealt with. The few men who survived to testify at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague (ICTY) said that they only survived by staying under the bodies of their friends and neighbors, pretending to be dead also, then creeping out of the pits of bodies at night.

This massacre is the biggest massacre in Europe since WWII, and it has been classified as a genocide.

Let me remind you that Srebrenica was a UN SAFE ZONE. So what is a safe zone, anyway? It is a place where you and everyone you know can be rounded up and killed for no good reason.

So this is what the UN did in Bosnia. 10 years later, the UN appologised. This is insulting at best. Too late for appologies. You had your chance to do right by these people, but you got them killed instead.

These people cannot accept an appology:

11,000 people killed in Sarajevo from 1992-1995
50,000 civillians wounded in the war
10,000 Sarajevans permanently disabled (many missing limbs)
1,600 children under the age of 14 killed in Sarajevo
1,067 members of the Bosnian army (of all ethnic and religious groups) killed

This is only one of the graveyards in Sarajevo for those who fell in the war.


To top it off.... there is no reason that Sarajevo needed to be under siege for almost 4 years, because when NATO finally got off their asses and bombed the Serb forces surrounding Sarajevo, the war was effectively over in 5 days.

Let me repeat: once NATO intervened, the war was over in 5 DAYS.

Not 4 years, but 5 days.

This is our fault. Sarajevo is our responsibility. We knew what needed to be done: Sarajevo asked for NATO intervention in 1992 when the Serbs first surrounded the city. But we did not want to get involved. Clinton did not want to look like a hawk in the first part of his presidency, so he waited... perhaps he was waiting to make sure he would get that second term? I do not know. I am very glad that did eventually intervene, but how can he live with this?

how can I live with this?

the world waited and watched as thousands of innocent people, women and children old people and men were massacred. and we did nothing.

"never again" is an insulting and empty statement. meaningless at best, because a similar massacre is happening now in Darfur. it has been 3 years and no one is intervening, no one cares. no one hears those children crying. it is like the UN response to the Rwandan genocide, which they knew was happening: they said, "why should we intervene, there is nothing in Rwanda but people, nothing valuable."

In Bosnia they tell a joke:

Two Bosnian soldiers are digging a trench and one is digging too deep. The other one asks what he is doing, the the digging soldier replies, "maybe if I dig deep enough, I will strike oil and then someone will save us!"