Originally Posted by Bassim  Please would you proofread this text:
An eerie silence fell over the town. Shops and restaurants were open as usual but people did not linger in the streets. If one met an acquaintance, they spoke for a short moment and hurried to their homes. Every day there were more check points, all entrances to the town were guarded by the heavily armed men who looked at the passers by suspiciously. Visually, there was no difference between Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims. They could not discern their "friends" from "enemies".
Bosnien is the place where soldiers from hundreds of different armies marched through and fought bloody battles, and they left many women pregnant who later gave birth to children whose hair was blond, black, brown or some other colour depending on the soldiers' origins.
Warriors from Ancient Rome, Turks, Napoleon's solders, Germans, Italians and many others had left their imprints in this small, mountainous country where people were very friendly in peacetime and in wars turned into vicious animals.
Although the killing still did not start, the Serbian National Party took control over the media. One day they took over a TV transmitter on the top of the mountain about twenty km from the town. Instead of TV Sarajevo we could only watch Serbian TV from Belgrade, which at that time was spreading hatred for everything that was not Serbian, picturing its own nation as a victim and demonizing the others.
So the central government in Sarajevo, although officially recognised by the whole world, was completely powerless. The weapons of the former Yugoslav People's Army were in the hands of the Serbs, the government lost control over the media and Bosnia as a state started to look like an irrational creation where every little village could decide where it belonged and put barriers and check points on the roads, while the powerless central government could only watch and pray to God that one day they would not find such barriers in front of their own homes.
To understand the mind of Serbian people, one should bear in mind that the Serbs do not see history in the same way as people in the West where events are are seen in a linear perspective. For the Serbs, history is rather circular. An event from the fourteenth century is still present as if it happened yesterday. Myths and stories never get old. The suffering of the past is never forgotten. Therefore when General Ratko Mladic ordered the killing of 8000 men in Srebrenica, he not only killed Muslims in the year 1995 but also avenged the Turks' killing of the Serbs in the fourteenth century. It can happen that if one talks with a Serb about the war crimes, he or she would, instead of acknowledging they were committed by their own people, start to talk about the Second World War, the Turkish occupation or some other historic event where the Serbs were the victims.
Those beautiful, warm May days, nobody could have predicted what was going to happen. The war in Croatia was still going on. One could hear cannons thundering in the distance over the border and read about horrific crimes, but nobody in my neighbourhood wanted to believe the same fate awaited us as well. Maybe our minds always want to find a trace of sanity in all the madness around us and we try to believe that this little piece of sanity will shine over the others and bring them back to the path of normality.
However, we have forgotten that when nationalism, hatred and madness start to dance together, they are as if in a trance, swivelling and spinning like a hurricane and sweeping up everything that comes in their way.
To be continued... |