The Balkans

---

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from 1992 to late 1995 and was a disaster on an epic scale. Until 1992, Yugoslavia was an industrialized but not quite modernized multi-ethnic country situated between the Adriatic Sea and the landlocked countries of the more traditional Eastern Bloc, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary. In 1989 the geopolitical earthquake that was the breakup of the Soviet Union began. It took a couple of years but the ethnic and nationalist tensions that had been simmering gradually began to rise to the surface. 

Yugoslavia disintegrated as one group after another declared independence beginning with Slovenia in June 1991. Serbians, who dominated the ranks of the national army and bureaucratic corps, were unwilling to let each piece of the puzzle simply break away, however. When Croatia and Bosnia declared independence, Serbia moved to assert power over both militarily.

Utilizing the canard of protecting Serbian “minority interests,” military and paramilitary forces began forcing Bosnian and Croatian families from their homes. In villages, they often simply killed the men, raped the women, and took the homes and/or any valuables inside. In short order, scores of villages across the countryside become wholly Serbian in makeup as the other groups were killed, fled for their lives, or were forcibly relocated to concentration camps. In larger cities, such as Banja Luka, an entire administrative system was set up by Serbian authorities that allowed Bosnians to sign away all of their property for the opportunity to board a bus that would take them out of their homes, their lives, and towards refugee status. They were the lucky ones. Others would hear a knock on the door at 2 AM, then black-booted men would burst in and drag off everyone, never to be seen again. 

Outside the newly declared independent Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, Serbian forces were stymied by hastily organized local militia. Sarajevo was at the time a cosmopolitan city of roughly 500,000, full of vibrant cafés, international hotels, and a keen sense of pride about having hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. 

Serbian efforts at a swift conquest thwarted, the powers that be, primarily Milošević, National Army head Ratko Mladić, and the leader of Bosnian-Serb forces Radovan Karadžić, decided on a strategy of siege warfare, on Sarajevo’s civilian population of half a million. The Serbian army entrenched themselves in the hills surrounding the city, then began attacking people with shells and sniper fire. Families walking in the streets of Sarajevo would watch a brother, sister, father, mother suddenly explode in a cloud of blood and flesh, leaving them covered in gore that used to be a loved one. 

Children, teenagers, people from all walks of life could hear a sharp crack, then hold the hand of someone they cared about as they died before their eyes from a sniper bullet. Someone in a protected hilltop bunker had just peered down a rifle scope, aimed at someone unarmed, and pulled the trigger, simply because that person was presumed to be on the wrong team. Former neighbors killed each other and massacred entire families because a society, with shocking speed, had split into “us” versus “them.” 

Hotels rooms exploded as artillery rained down. Office buildings burned. Markets became especially favored targets of ghoulish artillery officers, transforming market squares into mass-casualty events. That it was allowed to continue for years, in Europe, in the late 20th century, reflected a colossal diplomatic and humanitarian failure for Europe, the UN, and the United States.