BOSNIA & HEREZGOVINA: Sarajevo's Modern History

There are two things in Sarajevo’s modern history that I remember.

One is in 1984 when Sarajevo hosted the world at the Winter Olympics.

It was the first Winter Olympic Games held in a Slavic language-speaking country, as well as the first Winter Olympics held in a communist country.

The 1984 Winter Games mascot was a wolf, an animal typically found in the forests of the Dinaric Alps region of Yugoslavia.

The 1984 Winter Olympics was considered a success. It made it possible to further modernize Sarajevo and develop winter sports in Yugoslavia.

 

 

The other thing I knew about Sarajevo was the Balkan War which broke out in Yugoslavia in 1992, less than 10 years after the Winter Olympics. The war heavily damaged the city and the Olympic facilities. Some sites have been renovated after the war but others remain abandoned, like the former bobsleigh/luge track.

What I never understood or knew before were the details and the horrors of the war. 

 

After the breakup of Yugoslavia following the Cold War, religious and ethnic strife escalated.

Three ethnic groups—Serbian, Croatian, and Muslim—fought to expand territorial control over the region. It was a brutal and horrific war with ethnic genocide as the goal. 

Specifically in Sarajevo, between 1992-1995 Serbian forces surrounded and besieged Yugoslavia's former capital with shelling and sniper fire. They used the very mountains that had hosted the Winter Olympics to trap the citizens of Sarajevo and subjected them to daily shelling and sniper attacks. 

Because of the mountains the citizens were isolated and cut off from the rest of the world. There was no escape. This went on for nearly four years. Damage from that time can still be seen on some buildings.

A "Sarajevo Rose" is a concrete scar caused by a mortar shell's explosion. The holes were filled with red resin as a reminder of the blood shed by people who were trying to survive and live their life in a city they could not escape. There are around 200 "roses" that mark the locations where at least three people were killed during the siege of Sarajevo.

This market where we bought our produce has a red rose.

The war was brought to an end by the "General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina", negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio on November 21st, 1995 and signed by the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia in Paris December 14th, 1995.

The Siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days and resulted in over 11,000 people killed, of which 1,600 were children.