Sarajevo, Mostar, Srebrenice. Experience, Remember, Learn.

This is not anything to do with e-learning but it is about education, about remembering and about learning.

Travel broadens the mind. Or in this case opens your mind to things you knew were there but didn't fully understand. I remember the war in the Balkans, I knew it was happening, I knew bad things were happening but I didn't really grasp the magnitude of it until I went to Bosnia, saw the bullet holes, the rows of freshly dug graves and the bags of bodies that are still unidentified almost 20 years later. Having been to this beautiful country and met people who will go out of their way to pick up 4 strange foreigners because it is raining I want to try and explain it, to myself and to anyone that is interested but hasn't had the opportunity to experience the beautiful scenery, the wonderful people and the heartbreaking history that is still visible and will be for many years. 

Like any city Sarajevo his its monuments to past residents. I personally have always found a sense of beauty in graveyards, especially in places where they still exude a sense of family and togetherness. This set of old stones (Muslim graves have a stone for head and feet) to me shows a life well lived and an afterlife to be cherished. In Sarajevo however, my overwhelming feeling about its cemeteries was somewhat skewed because of the sheer number of them.

Every neighbourhood has one, and they are large. That is not to say that they aren't wonderful memorials to people that have been lost in the city but for me it was very hard to see so many and covering such a short space of time. The majority of the dates are between 1992 and 1995 when the city was under siege. 

The dates are even harder to look at on the children’s memorial where the names of young people who died during the conflict are remembered. Zuko (Suad) Adi 1994 -1995.

The city bears its scars as well as the people, much of the city centre has been rebuilt and restored to its former beauty but some buildings, or rather shells of buildings, still remain to show the damage the was done to the city, very recently, in my life time. It is also apparent in the hills surrounding the city which, from a distance, look like a hikers paradise. Tree covered mountains, spectacular views but inaccessible to anyone. The countryside was mined during the war and still is, a problem which is still claiming the lives of innocent people.

Leaving Sarajevo you can take one of the most spectacular bus/train routes imaginable to Mostar, a strikingly beautiful city with a crystal clear river running through the centre spanned by very a famous bridge. Constructed in the 16^th century and destroyed in 1993 after standing over the river for 427 years. A piece of world heritage that was destroyed forever in one mortar hit. The bridge has been rebuilt and is now a UNESCO world heritage site but it is clear that it is not the original structure.

The rest of the city also has its scars, more so than in Sarajevo presumably because of financial limitations. The scars are still displayed with a certain kind of pride to the thousands of tourists that travel through the city every year and there are still many many buildings that have been almost totally destroyed although many of them have been reclaimed, to an extent, by street art. Using the bullet holes in the walls as part of the picture I hope this is a sign that the city and the people are healing because it, like Sarajevo is a beautiful city with kind, welcoming and generally amazing people who have experienced and witnessed things that most of us can only imagine and could in no way begin to understand.

The sieges in Mostar and Sarajevo however are only part of the history. The name Srebrenice is probably familiar to many from the news broadcasts of the 90's. I know that I remember hearing it as a child but the full weight of what happened there cannot be comprehended, even a little, until you have stood at the memorial in Potocari. The memorial to the thousands of people killed there, in what was at the time a UN safe zone, and the 10's of thousands who were forced to leave during the process that became known as ethnic cleansing.

The memorial is the burial site of people who were killed there on July 11^th 1995, most of the of them Bosnian Muslim men, and were then buried in mass graves around the country, some of which are still to be found. The memorial shows the names of all the people buried there, currently that number is over 6500 and holds entire families. 

I have visited war memorials and holocaust memorials but only here have I witnessed the freshly dug graves and been around the relatives of the people buried there. Every year on July 11^th more people are laid to rest, this year over 400 victims. Almost 20 years on and people are still being identified and many more are still missing and will in all likelihood never be found. Meaning some families will never get the closure they need.

I was also given a somewhat unique opportunity for someone in my position to visit the facility where victims are given back their identities. On top of the many thousands of victims already identified and returned to their families the ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons) facility still has over a thousand remains to be identified. Many of these bodies are not complete and may never be complete leaving families with a decision to bury whatever percentage of their loved one has been found or whether to wait and hope more will be found. This is a decision no one should have to make and for many of the families in the area they are making this decision multiple times for husbands, brothers, sons, fathers.

I am still not sure I have processed in my own mind the magnitude of seeing so many fresh graves, so many grieving families, so much work still to be done but I hope by sharing my experiences that more people will take 5 minutes to think about what happened in Bosnia and maybe take a step closer to not letting this kind of thing happen again, to anyone, anywhere.