Sarajevo is a city haunted by death. The killing of an Austrian archduke that triggered a world war defined the beginning of the twentieth century and a murderous, protracted siege its end. I was stunned by the sheer, spectacular beauty of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia Herzegovina.

Sarajevo is a lovely town with its Ottoman mosque minarets and Orthodox church steeples, with its tram clogged streets, Austro-Hungarian fortresses and Turkish bazaars. The Bosnian capital was once known as the Balkan Jerusalem, the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics Sarajevo it was bisected by a flowing river, nestled amid the emerald green pine forests in the steep foothills of the Dinaric Alps.

The amphitheatre of emerald green hills that encircle the airport rained random death on the Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995—the longest siege in Europe since the horrors 
of Leningrad and Stalingrad. Inflamed by nationalist demagogues and UN indicted war criminal President Milosevic of Serbia, Serb militia snipers and gunmen killed thousands of innocent civilians in a hailstorm of death from 
the very hills that once made Sarajevo the glitziest resort spa of the Balkans.

Sarajevo’s roots at the crossroads of empires, trade and ideas go back two thousand years. Modern Sarajevo is an Ottoman creation, with even the name of the city derived from the Turkish word for palace (“saray”), the heart of the Balkan empire of the new Islamic superpower.

Then came the assassination that changed the course of history. On July 28 1914, the heir to the Austrian archduke and his wife were murdered on the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist, the opening act of World War One. Sarajevo was the provincial capital of a Yugoslav kingdom, occupied by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and liberated by the British, then capital of Bosnia under Marshal Tito’s communist Yugoslavia whose death rattle after the collapse of the USSR ignited the Balkan ethnic wars of the 1990’s.

It is impossible to escape the fragments of Sarajevo’s past in its architecture. This is a city whose heritage was once shared by Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs. Sephardic Jews, Romans, Hungarians. But no more. The ethnic 
wars of the 1990’s ended its milieu of gentle, cosmopolitan tolerance. Nationalism poisoned relations among people who had coexisted peacefully for centuries.

The Bosnian wars proved that genocide in Europe did not end with the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps in the 1940’s. The Serb militias made no secret of their determination to not just defeat their Bosniak rivals but expel and “ethnically cleanse” the Muslims from the land of their ancestors. Snipers with high powered rifle scopes and RPG launchers would kill cowering civilians to incubate terror during a siege that slaughtered 25,000 citizens of Sarajevo, including several thousand children. When General Ratko Mladić’s Chetniks overran the UN safe haven city of Srebrenica, Serbian executioners murdered 8000 Muslim men and boys in cold blood. The US under Bill Clinton, preoccupied by 
its health care reform agenda and fearful of another Vietnam, was loathe to intervene in Bosnia. The shame of the Bosnian Muslim genocide still hangs like a foul stench in the chancelleries of the West and Muslim world.

The lessons of the Bosnian war haunt both international relations and the conscience of the world. The fate of the Bosnian Muslims embittered the Turks and accelerated the rise of 
Erdogan’s ruling AK Party in Ankara. The massacres and killings in Bosnia and Kosovo finally forced NATO to bomb Belgrade, overthrow and arrest President Milosevic for war crimes. Several hundred NGO’s, the EU, NATO and $15 billion in aid was needed to reconstruct the gutted Bosnian state. Memories of pain and loss are palpable in the cemeteries of Sarajevo, Mostar, Tuzla, Banja Luka. Women in black shawls weep, wash white stone graves, sometimes every talk to the sons, brothers and husbands they lost in the Bosnian slaughter.

Sarajevo National Library, targeted for destruction by Serb gunners eager to erase the memory of the Bosnian past, is still a gutted shell. Serbia, eager for EU aid, has finally apologised for the Srebrenica killings, though Belgrade still denies genocide. Yet there are still landmine clearing teams and mass graves in the forests of eastern Bosnia, evidence of a genocide in Europe under UN watch. Bosnia, like Ground zero in Manhattan, Dachau, Sabra-Shatila, Rwanda, Halabja and Kfar Qana are all places suffused with pain and mass death, symbols of horror, theme parks of human suffering and human evil. Their memory shame the human race.

MATEIN KHALID
STRATEGIST, CAPITAL MARKETS & RESEARCH