(HOST) Commentator Bill Mares, a former high school history teacher, recently visited the Balkans and reflects on the history of the region – as he once taught it.
(MARES) For 15 years I used events in Sarajevo to illustrate two blood-drenched bookends of the 20th century.
The assassination there of the Austrian Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 was arguably the most important event in the 20th C. Thus, to visit that very site was like going to Gettysburg or Cedar Creek for the Civil War buff.
I shivered as I stood on the Latin Bridge over the Mijacka River and read again how five young co-conspirators, one by one failed to reach their target. Then, incredibly, the driver of the Arch-Duke?s open car took a wrong turn and stopped right in front of 19-year old Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnia Serb. Princip stepped to the running board and put bullets into the Arch Duke and his wife Sophia.
In only five weeks, the alliance dominoes of the time were toppled, and and Europe exploded into a general war that eventually took 14 million lives and re-arranged the maps of the Europe and the Middle East.
Then, from this same spot on a river no wider than the Winooski in Montpelier, my eyes rose first to a few pock-marked buildings and then to two mountain ranges of 3,000 feet which seemed to arch over the city. In the early 1990?s Serb gunners commanded those heights during a three-year long siege, that killed more than 10,000 people, including 1,000 children. They shelled the city with indiscriminate artillery, rocket and mortar fire. More murderously, like the camp commander in Schindler?s list, they used humans for target practice. "Shoot slowly, continuously, drive them mad!" were orders from the Serb commander Ratko Mladic, who is still allegedly hiding in Serbia.
In this city that had been the most cosmopolitan in the Balkans, which had hosted the winter Olympics in 1984, every act of peaceful human exchange, was snuffed out. Opening a window, crossing a street, stopping in the open, put people?s lives in jeopardy. Mothers had to decide if they would risk death to get water for their families.
The siege was only broken by NATO air strikes and a UN resolution to force the Serbs to pull back.
But my grim day of history ended on a lighter note. On my way to catch a bus back to Croatia, I had 15 minutes to take pictures along the a tram line, dubbed Sniper?s Alley, because it was a favorite hunting ground for Serb gunners to fire at civilians dodging between wrecked street cars to cross the open land.
Suddenly a cop appeared at my side and motioned that I follow him to a temporary police station in front of a large building under construction. This did not look good. Several other cops surrounded me. "
Your passport please," said one with good English. "You shouldn?t be taking picture here."
"Why,?" I asked.
"It?s an embassy."
"Whose?"
"Yours!"
Thank goodness for a digital camera. When I showed them that all the pictures were indeed of the tram line, they waved me on good-naturedly. I made the bus with five minutes to spare.
Note: You can find more commentaries by Bill Mares on line at VPR-dot-net.