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I can't believe after six months of fundraising, I am actually going to Bosnia tomorrow.
I'm flying with Collette, a massage therapist. Originally from Provence in Southern France, she now lives in Bradford-on-Avon just eight miles from me and we're great friends. We'll be completing a team of five healers and therapists in Sarajevo. The charity asks its volunteers to raise £800 each. Mine was raised by giving Reiki sessions locally and one fabulous quiz evening organised by the landlady at our local pub.
After a four flight to Belgrade, a six hour wait at the empty, depressing Soviet-style airport and a connecting flight to Sarajevo, we are met by Salih, the driver who ferries the HHN therapists to and from the airport.
We drive up a tiny street on a hill above the city and reach the Healing Hands house. Salih unlocks some large double doors before ushering us into an enclosed courtyard. It's 11 pm, very quiet and dark - I've been travelling for fourteen hours but as we climb up the steps to the locked front door I note how tired and shabby the place looks. It's a large building, the paintwork is dull grey colour and we can't miss the big holes in its façade which Salih tells us are from mortars.
Three Healing Hands therapists are here to welcome us - Bjorg, a stunning, tall Norwegian woman who lives in London, Jayne, a northerner who is about 30, and Liz, a researcher at the University of London as well as a practising reflexologist. They have been in Bosnia for a week, they greet us warmly, bringing us some bread and cheese and reticently ask if we would like some wine. Our enthusiastic chorus of "yes please" is met with visible relief - apparently the outgoing practitioners disapproved of alcohol.
They look very tired and tell us the work is hard but enormously rewarding. They ask us if we would like to tour Sarajevo with them tomorrow as volunteers don't work at the weekend.
Sarajevo and its living past
Our guide is a chain-smoking communist Muslim with long dark hair that looks distinctly unwashed. But such a description deflects from the man himself - Zijad is not only informative, he has a wonderful dry sense of humour and at the end of our tour generously buys us a beer.
Through Zijad and my own natural curiosity whilst working here, I learn a great deal about this beautiful scarred city - a city with a fine, rich history still trying to recover from one of the most brutal chapters in the savagely messy Bosnian civil war. To truly get to grips with the complexities of the many vying ethnic groups and militias operating during the war and the four year siege of Sarajevo would require years of study.
The plain fact of unpardonable human suffering endured by thousands of innocent civilians is inescapable. Indeed as Dr Mirko Pejanovic, Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Sarajevo conceded, "… during the four year siege carried out by Karadzic's military forces and the SDS, there were deaths of Sarajevans of all ethnicities … we cannot talk of an extermination or genocide of Serbs, but of a responsibility of the SDS and Karadzic's military forces for the overall extermination of Sarajevo and Sarajevans".
Over 12,000 people were killed and 50,000 wounded during the daily shelling and sniper attacks during Sarajevo's siege which began in April 1992 and ended with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. As capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sarajevo was central to the Bosnian conflict.
In March 1992 Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence from the Yugoslav Federation. And though the region was ethnically diverse - populated by Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Slavs - it wasn't until Serbian leaders, like Slobodan Milosevic, stirred up ethnic tension under the guise of protecting the Serbian minority in Bosnia (Serbs made up approximately 30% of Bosnia-Herzegovina) that the ugliest episode in the breakup of Yugoslavia began.
Bosnian Serb forces carried out barbaric campaigns of "ethnic cleansing," massacring and expelling civilians from their homes to create exclusively Serb areas, populated by those who demonstrated clear patriotism to their cause.
Clinton's favourite book on the Balkans, written by a religion professor of Serbian descent called Michael Sells, tells how non-nationalist Serbs who refused the persecution of Muslims were also killed. He wrote of the beating and on the spot shooting of an old Serb named Ljubo who had objected to being separated out from his Muslim friends when Serb militants were carrying out a 'selection' in Sarajevo - examples of such depravity throughout the city and beyond were sadly commonplace.
The medieval city of Sarajevo which had been an intellectual centre noted for its multicultural tolerance became a killing field. It lost approximately 60% of its population and all Sarajevans became victims and witnesses to every conceivable human rights atrocity, including mass executions, rape and starvation.
With all roads blockaded and the airport shut down the residents had to cling to survival in a city without a water supply, electricity, medicine or food. Some estimate that food scarcity caused the average Sarajevan to lose over two stone during the siege. One of the most common signs in the city were those which read Pazite Snaijper! (Beware Sniper) and sniper alleys - streets where one's life could not be guaranteed, were everywhere in the once proud metropolis.
Some have calculated that the city was bombarded with an average of 330 shell impacts a day during the siege. Mass killings occurred several times in the central marketplace, as well as at a football game and even whilst people waited in line for water.
CONTINUED….
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