FRIENDS AWAIT

COUNTRIES DISSIPATE

The Yugoslavia I knew is gone. Has been since April, 1992 when the siege of Sarajevo began. That lasted over 1,400 days, longer than the Nazi siege of Leningrad during WWII, and took the lives of over 5,000 civilians and displaced many others and many dear friends. One was in Moscow visiting family and was unable to return home for the duration of the conflict. Another fled to Croatia and then was part of a group that helped get a lot of children through to safety.

And you get mad when the guy in front of you doesn’t move fast enough when the red-light changes?

I have been in Yugoslavia twice. Once for the Sarajevo Olympics. I was there from December, 1983 until April, 1984 and then again for a much shorter visit in the summer of 1987. During those two visits there was no hint of the horrors to come. When Communism fell, the fragile cohesion that evidently was holding Yugoslavia together, broke the country apart when Slovenia and Croatia claimed independence. They were successful after relatively brief conflicts, but then Bosnia and Herzegovina tried to do the same. Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) Croats and Serbs all butted heads on this. Serbs fought to keep Bosnia in Yugoslavia, the Croats wanted more land and the Bosniaks bore the brunt of the conflict with horrific tales of vicious ethnic cleansing, genocide, snipers and incessant shelling. When the Markale marketplace was targeted and killed scores of civilians the world finally heeded the distress of Bosnia and the United States brokered the Dayton Peace Accords.

IT'S COMPLICATED 

SARAJEVO ROSE

To this day Bosnia is still split in two; the mostly Serbian populated Republika Sprska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with a population of Croats and Bozniaks. The peace agreement brought about the end of the Bosnian conflict but later conflicts flared up in Kosovo and Macedonia.

We are traveling to Croatia soon, flying into Dubrovnik and sailing through the beautiful Dalmatian Islands and you’re probably wondering why?  Dubrovnik, this proud and beautiful walled city on the Adriatic, was not spared during the Yugoslav Wars and shelled repeatedly. Reminders of the war can still be seen in walls pitted by shell fragments and bullet holes in buildings away from the coast and there are still dangerous areas where landmines have not been cleared. Although our trip will not take us to Sarajevo this time, the scars of the constant shelling during the siege are now called “Sarajevo Roses.” The gouges in the concrete have been immortalized and filled with a red resin to mark the spot. Sounds morbid, but this is the city where the conflagration of WWI began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and how the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, stood as he fired his gun is also immortalized in concrete.

Indeed, Yugoslavia began after the Allied victory in WWI as a big “F.U.” to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by taking away their land and then thrusting a lot of different people with different attitudes and grudges that were at times, centuries old, into one country.

Yeah, the area is complicated and when the long-time ruler of Yugoslavia Marshal Tito died cracks in the iron-fisted rule that kept Yugoslavia together began to show.

Now, I’ll bet you’re thinking a week at Seaside Heights, New Jersey is a lot easier to negotiate than traveling to this area, or better yet, turning on the air conditioning and drawing the curtains and not leaving the house is a safer way to go. If you do that though, you’ll be missing out on the most important aspect of this trip; a friendship that transcends decades. I have kept in touch with my friend, Zeljko, his wife, Hana, and now his son through social media. During the war he fled Sarajevo with his family to Zagreb and from there helped broker the safe passage of several busloads of children out of the horrors of Sarajevo.

Perhaps I feel guilty. When the war raged, I was immersed in my young family and turned a blind eye to my friends and their troubles and I can conjure up a myriad of excuses why this was necessary. Well, regardless of the past, now is time to redefine the locus of my travels.  We will be staying with them for the latter part of the trip at their seaside home in Trpanj on the Peljesac Peninsula to catch up. This is a trip of a lifetime...literally..