Today is the City of Sarajevo day. 19 years ago today, the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia and fighting began in Sarajevo: two women were killed by shots fired on a crowd of peace protesters marching towards the parliament building. Shelling of the city began not long afterwards. The siege was fully established by 2 May 1992.
A memorial service was about to begin when I passed by the Eternal Flame on my way to work this morning: men in suits were collecting wheel-shaped, beribboned wreaths from a florist across the street while policemen in dress uniforms stood by the flame, looking rather proudly self-conscious wearing their best brass.
Just as you've become comfortable in Bosnia and forget the things that happened here - as you go about your everyday business, busy and distracted by important matters like getting to work on time - Sarajevo has a tendency to bite back with incidents like these.
Back in February, I was on my way to my local fruit and vegetable market one Saturday lunchtime to do my usual weekly veggie stock-up. Except that my local fruit and veg market is the Markale, and there was no market that day. As I approached I noticed that the road alongside was cordoned off to traffic and inside, the rectangular concrete space was filled with men and women in suits, heels and fur coats, solemnly standing with shoulders joined as the national anthem was played over loudspeakers. As it ended, a middle-aged man in an army uniform began to slowly read out words which I didn't initially understand. As the minutes went by and the words continued, I realised that it was a list of names: victims of the Markale massacres, whose anniversary was being commemorated that day. So no fruit or veg or haggling over prices with farmers, just an endless list of the names of the dead on an ordinary Saturday afternoon. I stood at the back and listened for a few moments, watching persons in the crowd who were clearly still bowed with grief 16 years later. I didn't stay long before I crept away, feeling like a voyeur who had no place intruding on their memories.
Incidentally, the main war crimes for which Radovan Karadžić - you'll remember him as the one who was found moonlighting as an alternative healer in Belgrade in 2008 - is currently on trial in the Hague include atrocities committed during the Siege of Sarajevo, particularly the Markale incidents. He has defended himself by claiming in court that Bosnian Muslims shelled their own civilians as they queued for food and water, in order to win the public support internationally which eventually led to NATO intervention in the conflict. I thought of that as I watched the crowd of mourners remembering death on an ordinary afternoon.
Today on the City of Sarajevo Day, I heard some stories from colleagues about their experiences of the start of the war. Although I'd talked to one particular colleague in the office every day for the last six months, for instance, it was only today that she told me that on 6 April 1992 she happened to be at a friend's house when the fighting started. She couldn't get back home to her family in the part of the city where they lived because they had been separated by the front lines. She managed instead to get out of Sarajevo some days or weeks later, and eventually borrowed some Deutschmarks and managed to get to Croatia, because she happened to have a friend there who offered her a place to stay. She didn't see her family again until 1996, after the war ended. All because she happened to be in a friend's house when the war began.
It tells you everything about postwar Bosnia that only the start of wars are commemorated here, but not their conclusion. Unlike celebrations which still mark Armistice Day in 1918 or VE Day in 1945, for instance, Bosnians only remember the days that it all started. The 15th anniversary of the Dayton Accords - the peace agreements which marked the official end of the war - would have passed entirely unnoticed last December if Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat mainly responsible for the conclusion of the agreement, hadn't died by coincidence on the same day.
No victory in this war, just victimhood.
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