Why sarajevo war

With the international presence in the region waning, unresolved rivalries and opposing interests among the three ethnic groups have resurfaced. The most serious development has been moves toward secession by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, emboldened by a lack of pressure from the European Union and United States, as well as support from Russia and traditional ally Serbia.

The Croats fear they might become irrelevant in a Federation where Bosniaks are in the majority. They have proposed a new electoral law that would allow them alone to choose their political representatives, which is now not the case. Unlike the United States, many Europeans had placed their troops at risks by participating in the U. When limited air strikes in late May resulted in nearly peacekeepers being taken hostage, a consensus quickly emerged within the U.

This sent the not-so-subtle message to the Bosnian Serbs that they were now free to pursue their preferred strategy. Ivo H. The Bosnian Serbs implemented their strategy with horrifying results. In July, Serb forces turned their focus to Srebrenica, a small village near the eastern border with Serbia swollen with some 60, Muslim refugees. It was there that the then-U. I will never abandon you. Within 10 days, tens of thousands of Muslim refugees streamed into the Muslim-controlled city of Tuzla.

Missing from the stream of refugees were more than 7, men of all ages, who had been executed in cold blood — mass murder on a scale not witnessed in Europe since the end of World War II. Breaking Out of the Box By the end of July the United States and its allies confronted a situation that required concerted action. The strategy of muddling through that had characterized U. The president made clear to his senior advisers that he wanted to get out of the box in which U. This box had been created by an unworkable diplomatic strategy of offering ever greater concessions to Serb President Slobodan Milosevic just to get the Bosnian Serbs to the table; by the long-standing refusal to put U.

Congress bent on taking the moral high ground by unilaterally lifting the arms embargo on the Bosnian government without, however, taking responsibility for the consequences of doing so. Yet, the Clinton administration had been here before. In early it rejected the Vance-Owen Peace Plan; in May it tried to sell a policy to lift the arms embargo and conduct air strikes while the Muslims were being armed; and in it had sought repeatedly to convince the allies to support strategic air strikes.

Each time, the new policy was rejected or shelved, and an incremental, crisis management approach was once again substituted for a viable approach to end the war. Why was the summer of any different? Why the emergence of a firm consensus on a concerted strategy now when it had eluded the Clinton administration for over two years?

The answer, in part, lies in the horrors witnessed by Srebrenica—a sense that this time the Bosnian Serbs had gone too far. That certainly proved to be the case in the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary William Perry and JCS Chairman John Shalikashvili took the lead in pushing for the kind of vigorous air campaign that was finally agreed to in London.

With presidential elections a little over a year away, the White House in particular felt the need to find a way out. It was a way out that the president demanded from his foreign policy team in June The Sarajevo incident refers to the events surrounding the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Archduchess Sophie during a state visit to Sarajevo on 28 June It is traditionally regarded as the immediate catalyst for the First World War.

Moreover, by the turn of the 20 th century, the province increasingly existed at the heart of a convoluted web of rising geopolitical tensions. The Young Turk Revolution in July subsequently served as the catalyst for direct action by the Monarchy. In March , however, a new target had been chosen: Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este , who would be visiting Bosnia-Herzegovina in June to observe local military manoeuvres. Vitus Vidovdan on 28 June. The trio subsequently returned to their homeland in May.

Franz Ferdinand arrived in Sarajevo on 25 June Reuniting with his wife, Sophie, Archduchess of Austria , the Archduke spent the following two days attending to his official duties as well as sightseeing. On the morning of 28 June , six assassins took up positions on Appel Quey, a narrow boulevard running along the northern bank of the Miljacka River.

Ironically, the conspirators had found an unsuspecting ally in the local authorities. Consequently, beyond a light police presence, security arrangements for the procession were notably lax. They dream that men with beards are coming into the city to get them. One of my friends has a big beard. The children knew him before, but now they are frightened of him. It found that four out of five believed they had been in a situation where they would be killed.

Half of the children had witnessed someone being killed, 57 per cent believed massacres had occurred in their home towns or villages, three out of four had been forced to abandon their homes and half thought someone else was now sleeping in their bed.

Pre-verbal infants try to articulate their traumas as soon as they start to speak. She started talking and said Vukovar. The two-year-old spreadeagled and panicked.

Other children he has treated from Vukovar, the Croatian Danube town which the Serbs besieged and levelled over three months, dive for cover at the sound of a tram coming as the noise reminds them of an approaching shell. The picture, sounds, and smells can be re-experienced constantly. They are stored at the front of the brain and not processed. It can be like a constantly recurring horror movie.

The difficulties of treatment are exacerbated by the fact that war trauma psychology is a young discipline, only receiving attention in the United States in the s and s. In addition, successful treatment of scarred children is complicated by adult reluctance to confront the challenges.

All the experts agree that most children are happy to relate the horrors they have experienced and that, if reluctant, they should be coaxed. What the children need, experts and parents agree, is a daily structure and a routine that the war has torn apart. After almost a year of missed schooling, handfuls of children are attending impromptu classes set up by teachers in their flats. Several mornings a week, small groups of children, from infants to teenagers, sit huddled in their gloves, hats, and anoraks in unheated shelters or apartments all over Sarajevo.

They include Nusrat, a skinny, grinning little nine-year-old black with grime, who has spent several months in the Ljubica Ivezic orphanage in Sarajevo since his father was killed while fighting the Serbs. His mother was killed the same day by a mortar bomb. Nusrat has not been told and thinks his mother is in hospital in France — another case of trauma when the child is finally told.

Kids can be good at coping with that. But once the war is over, the worst phase is when they are trying to recover. Ian Traynor , Europe editor of the Guardian, died in In she was was named Journalist of the Year for her reporting from Bosnia.

There are five in the car riding high in the white hills above Sarajevo. The man in the middle of the back seat dangles a black German-made machinegun between his legs. It is the day the BBC World Service announces that Cyrus Vance is giving up peace talking to spend more time with his family the day the hard-line Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, took his self-proclaimed parliament to a town in the south of Bosnia and rubber-stamped the failure of the Owen-Vance peace plan the day the continuing of the war in Bosnia was as clear as a view of Sarajevo from the sights of the tanks on our hill.

It is a year since Bosnians voted by referendum to separate from the old Yugoslavia a year since the leadership of the Bosnian Serbs took fright and proclaimed their opposition to secession.

The white eagle in the back of our car, with his black machinegun, had come to Sarajevo then to fight as the first of the heavy mortars landed on the streets, courtesy of the Yugoslav federal army and their patron, the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Good-looking Pedja is about as moderate as they come in this war.