Paula Green re-visited Bosnia for a week in July, the first time back since our projects ended there a decade ago. Here are her reflections:
Paula Green with Vahidin Omanovic in front of the Center for Peacebuilding in Sanski Most, Bosnia
A decade later, Bosnia is both the same and different. Most of the homes destroyed in the 1992-95 Bosnian War have been rebuilt, either by their former owners or by displaced people seeking shelter because their own homes had been demolished and they no longer felt safe returning. Some housing, however, remains in its bombed-out state, serving as a stark reminder that war was recent and human beings can be destructive in the extreme.
The fields are blooming again, the pastures have been restocked with animals, the infrastructure repaired, and the shops busy. What locals report is that the primary difference between pre-war and post-war Bosnia is a sharp ethnic separation, with Bosniaks (formerly called Bosnian Muslims), Serbs, and Croats living in different regions and no longer in neighborly relation to each other. Not only is the dream of an ethnically mixed Yugoslavia long gone, but the dream of Bosnia as the most diverse state in the region was also shattered by war and further harmed by the postwar legal arrangements. Continue reading
