The Siege of Sarajevo

When I was a teenager, I used to love travelling in the old Yugoslavia. You had mountains, beaches, lakes, plains, and forests and great cities like Mostar.

The food, schnitzel and kebabs; sweet baklava and Turkish coffee; rakia and šljivovica.

The music of Ivo Pogorelić, Esma Redžepova, and Goran Bregović. The cinema of Dušan Makavejev, and Emir Kusturica. The literature of Ivo Andrić, and Danilo Kiš.

Most of all however, I loved its multi-ethnicity, multi-linguality, and multi-culturality. I loved the fact that an Albanian could marry a Motenegrin, live in Belgrade, go to see a play by a Croat playwright, support Partizan Belgrade, ski in Slovenia and summer in Dalmatia.

Unfortunately, the perverse and reactionary forces of nationalism bubbled over in the late 1980s and eventually led to the collapse of the old Yugoslavia.

The point is that when it did all begin to go wrong there were not enough of us standing up to say how dreadful it all was, and what a pack of lies was being told.

Instead we let commentators and politicians, talk nonsense about how there had been centuries-long enmities, how ethnic, linguistic, and religious hatreds was all that the peoples of the Balkans knew. We let people with their own personal and political agendas set the dismemberment policies, and what had been genuine economic and political grievances were expressed solely through the language of chauvinism, xenophobia, and revanchism.

The ultimate and inevitable conclusion of that logic of hatred was the four-year-long Siege of Sarajevo, which started 18 years ago today. It began with the murder of Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić on a bridge and ended with 10,000 killed or missing, including 1,500 children, and 56,000 wounded, including 15,000 children.

At the risk of offending you dear reader, we must be forever alert to the siren voices of division and dissemblance, fanaticism and falsehood, and remind ourselves and others, that there is much more that unites us than separates us, whether in Keighley, Yorkshire, Britain, Europe, or the World at large.