Yet, people have spent hours staring at their TVs since the invasion by Ukraine launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 24, 2018.
Amra Muftic, who was able to survive the 1992-95 siege and viewed news reports that showed civilians fleeing Russian rocket attacks, shelling, and gunfire at underground stations and subway stations, said, “Not so far ago, they were us.”
She said that “if our experience — and I have the gut feeling that it is — things will get worse” for them.
During the bloody fall of Yugoslavia, Bosnian Serb forces occupied Sarajevo. For 46 months, 350,000 people were held hostage in the multiethnic city. They were subject to daily shelling, sniper attacks, and were cut off from regular electricity, water, and medicine access.
The siege resulted in the deaths of more than 11,000 people, including nearly 1,000 children. Numerous others were also wounded.
“We understand how they feel. Elma Vukotic (an anesthesiologist) said that they survived the longest siege of modern history. She and her fellow medical workers were standing earlier this week at their Sarajevo hospital in blue and yellow, wearing their medical robes, and holding balloons with the blue and yellow colors the Ukrainian flag and, coincidentally, the Bosnian. Vukotic stated that their spontaneous act of solidarity was the best they could do to their Ukrainian colleagues.
Vukotic stated that all wars are difficult, and all attacks on civilians are abhorrent. However, what is happening to the Ukrainians right now is particularly traumatic for us because they are so close to us and are in a similar situation to ours three decades ago.
“Television images showing pregnant women waiting in Kyiv to give birth gave me a strong feeling of deja vu; they are exactly like me, and how scared they must feel,” she said. “Also I believe we can all empathize with the unwillingness of ordinary Ukrainians to accept the fact that war was coming, until Russian bombs and rockets began raining down on their houses, schools, and hospitals.
Bosnian Serbs tried to establish ethnically-pure territories with the Yugoslav army with the intention of joining Serbia, which led to the outbreak of the Bosnian War. More than 100,000 people were killed, and more than 2 million people — nearly half of the country’s total population — were made homeless by the conflict.
Throughout the conflict, the Serb leadership maintained that multiethnic Bosnia was not a country and that it, along with its Catholic Croats (and its Bosniaks), which are mainly Muslim and make up about half the population, should be divided between Serbia and Croatia. They claimed that Bosniaks were only treacherous Serb converts who had abandoned their Orthodox Christian faith centuries ago.
Many Sarajevo residents heard the old insults in Putin’s recent statements that were meant to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The U.N. arms embargo in Bosnia during the 1990s conflict gave Bosnian Serb militias, armed with the Yugoslav Army and supported by it, an advantage in the fight. In less than two months they had conquered 60% of Bosnia’s territory and committed atrocities against their Croat and Bosniak compatriots.
The 1995 U.S.-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement, which was brokered by the U.S., ended the violence in Bosnia. It divided the country into two semi-autonomous sections — one administered by the Serbs, and one that is shared by Croats and Bosniaks. Both are connected by weak multiethnic institutions.
It has been difficult to live together after a violent, fratricidal conflict.
Postwar power-sharing perpetuates the polarized, venomous political climate of Bosnia while its rooted nationalist leaders continue to stoke ethnic animosities in pursuit of political gain.
The pro-Russian Bosnian Serbs have been pushing for independence for their region for many years with Moscow’s support. Nevertheless, the system is still plagued by sectarian networks of patronage, corruption and widespread corruption that have made Bosnia one of Europe’s poorest countries. This has led to the country losing its brightest and most talented citizens to other countries.
“Right now, Ukrainians have been tortured, they are asking for help and hoping for what,” Zoka Catic, a journalist and filmmaker from Sarajevo, said. She has documented for years the devastating effects of war on mental health among Bosnians of all ethnicities.
He argued that no matter how the conflict in Ukraine ends he believed there was no happy ending to a military conflict.
“It’s only a matter time… before (Ukrainians), turn into us: sad and unhappy people who experienced one of the worst feelings in the world — helplessness.”