This morning I ate my first Bosniak burek. Wow! What a surprise! I had a burek with meat and the taste is completely different from the meat bureks I had in Serbia and Croatia. They use different spices and it was saltier, it tasted quite good!
The son of the owner of my hostel happens to be a tour guide, so yesterday I booked a tour with him that was to start at 11 AM and last 4 hours. I was a little hesitant to take the tour because it was screwing up my eating schedule haha but in the end I decided to go because it was about the war in Sarajevo and I'm really interested in that (you probably noticed that already, I talked about it a lot these past few days). I learned A LOT of things today. And it is honestly too bad that I can't tell you everything in this blog because I won't remember absolutely everything, the guide spoke pretty much for the whole 4 hours. I'm not sure whether everybody is interested in that topic so let me first show you a few of the pictures of Sarajevo I took in the evening, and I'll come back to the guided tour at the end so that people who don't want to read about it can simply skip the rest of the post.
Sarajevo is absolutely beautiful. There is a section downtown with many different souvenir shops, but they sell things I haven't seen very often such as beautiful carpets, decorated tea cups, it actually reminds me a lot of the things we see in the Turkish festival in Ottawa. Since most part of the Balkans was conquered and controlled by Turkish (Ottoman empire) for 400 years (15th to 19th century), it is not surprising to see their influence but it is much more present here in Bosnia then in the other cities I have visited in Serbia and Croatia.
Another section of downtown are streets filled with nice buildings and lots of shops. Tonight there was a lot of people out, having a drink, walking around, chatting with their friends..
The city is very much alive and since today is Tuesday, I assume there are people out pretty much every day.
Here is the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina which I don't think you had seen in my previous pictures yet:
And a few more pictures I took today:
Those of you who don't want to hear about the war can now stop reading for today.
As I said earlier, I booked a tour with the son of the hostel owner. I'm not sure how much you know of the history of Sarajevo (I realized I didn't know much myself!) so I will give you as much information as I can remember. If you read this and you see that I am giving wrong information, please point it out and I will rectify.
Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for independance on March 1, 1992. Croatia and Slovenia had already become independant in 1991. Serbs were aware that the same desire for independance was growing in Bosnia as well, so before the independance, they had started to send members of the army to Sarajevo. People of Sarajevo were aware of the presence of the army but did not get alarmed. If you think of it, that makes perfect sense. When I see an army convoy in Canada, I do not get alarmed, I just assume they go somewhere to practice, or something like that.
At that time, a certain percentage of Serbs lived in Sarajevo. The Serbian army provided the civilian Serbs of Sarajevo with weapons. When the siege started on April 5 1992, both the army and the Serbs of Sarajevo attacked Sarajevo and were able to control the following territory (in red):
Bosnians who used to live in those areas either got kicked out, or killed. Our guide pointed out that those people got pretty much kicked out or killed by their own neighbours. It is however good to mention that some Serbs in Sarajevo teamed up with the Bosnians against the invaders throughout the whole duration of the siege.
The army completely blocked Sarajevo from the rest of the world. No food, no electricity could get in and communications were cut. Sarajevo did not have a huge army and did not have much weapons, so normal people, just like you and me, had to protect their city with the weapons they could find in their homes.
From the map, you can see that Serbian forces were mostly located on the mountains. From there, they placed snipers whose jobs were to kill anybody they could see walking in the city. One of the main streets in Sarajevo was nicknamed "Sniper Alley", the guide showed it to us today. The mountains are quite far away but there is nothing to block the view so with proper equipment, anything is possible.
The Serbian Army bombed Sararjevo pretty much on a daily basis. For the duration of the siege, there was on average 329 shell impacts per day. On average throughout the siege, 8 persons died and 44 were wounded per day. And those are civilians, including children.
On the map above, there is an area in the north where Serbian armies almost connect. In this area, Bosnians dug a tunnel, to connect their city with the outside world. From there, they were able to sneak in weapons to protect themselves better. The guide said that without the tunnel, the city may not have been able to survive as they did. And he may not have been alive to talk about it today.
I saw a small part of the tunnel, here is a picture:
There were two famous attacks from the Serbian armies on one of the market places in Sarajevo (Markale massacres). Serbian armies attacked the people who were waiting in line to get bread. The first massacre happened on February 5, 1994; 68 people were killed and 144 more were wounded. The second occurred on August 28, 1995 when five mortar shells killed 37 people and wounded another 90.
After the second incident at the Marketplace, NATO got involved and attacked the Serbian forces around Sarajevo, eventually leading to Serbian armies retreating and on December 14, 1995 the Dayton Agreement was signed, bringing back peace to the country.
There are many unanswered questions... why did it take so long for NATO to get involved? How did the Serbian army got convinced to shoot at innocent civilians?
Of course, this is just my summarized version of these terrible events and it definitely does not truly convey what people in Sarajevo had to endure. I strongly recommend you to read the Wikipedia articles about the siege of Sarajevo, the Markale Massacres, etc. Even though these events are over now and belong to the past, it is still important to talk about them because even if there are many proofs of what happened, there are still many people who deny that these events took place.
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