Bosnia has sat on the confluence of east and west for centuries, steeped profoundly in history. It was only during its bloody war for independence in the early 1990s, though, that it reemerged into the western consciousness, and emerged for the first time into my own. Television images of the conflict dominate my childhood memories of the world. I remember, in the winter of 1993, packing a shoebox with home comforts to be sent to Sarajevo, then at the one of the worst points of its four year siege; I recall too those grainy ITN news images of the Omarska concentration camp, its withered and emaciated inmates forced to run across the camp ground for the cameras, their every sinew straining, terror in their eyes. It was the first puncturing of my childhood innocence, I suppose; the first time that I realised all was not necessarily well in the world.
These memories, limited though my capacity to understand them was, cemented Bosnia deep in the foundations of my imagination; it has remained there ever since, enthralling and mysterious, in need of explanation and exploration. As a country, it is in so many ways exotic and alien—Slavic, plurality Muslim, formerly Ottoman—and yet so close and familiar; it is at once in “the backyard of Europe”, as the infamous expression goes, and a million miles away from it. The Roman, Holy Roman, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires have ebbed and flowed across it, with varying degrees of permanence, an historical foundation from which was borne Bosnia’s multifarious population—Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish and Roma—and the famous cosmopolitanism of its capital city, Sarajevo.
That this multiethnic ideal came so close to wholesale destruction in the 1990s is Bosnia’s—and perhaps postwar Europe’s—greatest tragedy: for the sheer bloodiness and pointlessness of the conflict itself on the one hand, but also for the effect it had on perceptions of Bosnia in the rest of Europe and in the US. For almost twenty years now, the west has seen Bosnia and the western Balkans in general through a distorted lens, as a barbaric region of ancient and simmering hatreds destined periodically to boil over into bloody conflict. Bosnia as a concept, this simple analysis seemed to conclude, was flawed from the outset: how could these peoples—these savages—possibly coexist peacefully? War was inevitable; the region was inherently and inescapably violent; nothing more needed to be explained or investigated.
I suppose it was this very conclusion, and its obvious flaws, that so encapsulated Bosnia’s appeal to me. Bosnia was a standing refutation, and had been for centuries, of nationalism, of chauvinism, of extremism, of intolerance. In the face of impossible circumstance, of invasion and of occupation, it had retained its character and its subtlety; reduced to an absurd caricature by lazy journalists in search of a simple narrative, I felt compelled to side with it. Even today, when I tell people of my destination, I am forced defend it when its name conjures up not the stari most at Mostar, the stećci, the baščaršija, but instead the siege of Sarajevo, the Srebrenica massacre, ethnic cleansing. People’s thoughts leap to Radovan Karadžić, not Ivo Andrić; to Ratko Mladić, not Meša Selimović. It seems such a shame.
I am torn, then, between these two preconceptions, these two conflicting images of Bosnia. Is the commonplace narrative of Bosnia really unfair and lazy? Or is my imagined Bosnia just as simplistic a reduction? The truth I’m sure is somewhere, elusively, between the two, a complex puzzle that I can’t wait to unravel.
As well as general travelling, for much of my time in Bosnia I will be working for the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), the region’s foremost English-language news source, which specialises in coverage of the country’s ongoing war crimes trials. I am grateful to the English-Speaking Union for their generosity in partially funding my trip.
