The ‘Bloody Spring’, the beginning of the last genocide against the Bosniaks, began on this day in 1992. The bloody spring became a bloody summer and finally four bloody, painful years that can hardly be described in words. The genocide began on 1 April 1992 with the massacres in Bijeljina, a town 200 km north-east of Sarajevo, followed by the burning alive of over a hundred people, mostly women and children, at various locations in Višegrad, the rape camps in Foča, the death camps in Prijedor, and the extermination of entire villages. And over 30 years ago today, on 5 April 1992, the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, began.
Sarajevo is tightly packed into a breathtaking valley surrounded by mountains. A European metropolis, which hosted the Olympics in the 1980s and formed the heart of the regional rock scene, is squeezed into this narrow space. A few years later, in the early 1990s, it became a symbol of destruction, terror, and the political indifference of the international community.
The aggressive Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milošević (President of the Republic of Serbia within Yugoslavia from 1989 to 1997) accelerated the aspirations of the people of all the countries of the former Yugoslavia for independence. Bosnia was already independent and internationally recognised as a state when the Yugoslav People’s Army (consisting only of Serbia and Montenegro) marched into the capital Sarajevo, captured the president, and began murdering the city’s residents.
Barricades were set up, the airport shelled, and the city surrounded. Nobody could leave Sarajevo. Food, water, medicine, electricity, heat; all these things were either in short supply or no longer available at all. The mountains were transformed from Olympic venues and destinations for outings into places of terror that the Serbian troops used to attack the city and murder its citizens for years. Over four years: the longest siege of a capital city in modern history.
In total, the city was fired upon with more than 500,000 bombs and projectiles. The people of Sarajevo were at the mercy of the murderers, as if served up to them on a macabre silver platter. They tried to protect their lives behind large tarpaulins and destroyed buses, hid in cellars, counted the seconds between sniper shots, and then ran for their lives. More than 11,500 times it was in vain. More than 11,500 people were murdered on playgrounds, in hospitals, in their beds, on the street, at work. While sleeping, while trying to get to safety from bombs, or while waiting desperately and starving in long queues for bread or water. They were murdered trying to save the lives of others. Trying to collect the bloody, still warm body parts of their loved ones. Trying to bury them in increasingly cramped, improvised cemeteries.
In the neighbourhoods of Grbavica, Vraca, and Kovačići, horror took place within horror: they were not besieged, but occupied, and Serbian troops stayed in these neighbourhoods for years. The residents were forbidden to close the doors of their homes so that the Serbian troops could rape, torture, and murder at will at any time. I will not stop repeating it: for over four years. And by ‘Serbian troops’, I don’t just mean soldiers, but also Serbian civilians involved in the killings, paramilitaries, volunteers from Russia and many other Eastern Orthodox countries. And particularly ghoulish: Chetniks, i.e., supporters of Serbian Nazi collaborators from the Second World War, whose leaders had already committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims during that conflict.
This mishmash of murderers dreaming of Greater Serbia terrorised the city’s inhabitants. When they went to synagogue, to church, and especially to mosque, they were filled with fear. Because Muslims, i.e., Bosniaks, were to be annihilated in this genocide. Christians who stayed in Sarajevo despite warnings and tips were traitors. The murderers didn’t care about Jewish lives, anyway. And this in a city in which some of those same Jews had already fought for their lives less than 50 years earlier.
The centuries-old Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo was misused as a base by Serbian troops and was desecrated. 95% of the gravestones were destroyed or damaged by gunfire, as were several Holocaust memorials. When withdrawing from the city, the Serbian troops left behind landmines and unexploded ordnance in civilian spaces: in the Jewish cemetery, in the occupied neighbourhood of Grbavica, and on the playground of my primary school in order to specifically murder children.
However, we children had landmine safety as a school subject back then. We survived and are now here to tell the stories of our city, our wounded, our traumatised and murdered neighbours. The stories of the lives of over 1600 children who were murdered by Serbian troops in Sarajevo alone. So that all this is never forgotten and cannot be trivialised. And so that the danger that still emanates from Serbian nationalism and anti-Muslim racism is finally recognised, taken seriously, and combated.
