20 years since beginning of Sarajevo siege

Source: B92

BELGRADE -- Bosnia-Herzegovina today marks the 20th anniversary since the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo.

During the course of almost four years, more than 100,000 people were killed and more than two million were forced to leave their homes.

Boths Bosniaks and Serbs today believe that there was no winner in the war.

The 20th anniversary since the beginning of the war will be marked with a series of manifestations in Sarajevo. The central ceremony will be a performance dubbed “Sarajevo red line”. The performance will be held in downtown Sarajevo and the performers will place 11,541 red chairs on the street – one for each killed Sarajevo citizen.

War correspondents from all over the world have also announced that they will gather in Sarajevo on Friday.

“Anniversary must serve as reminder”

Former High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina Paddy Ashdown and EU Special Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina Peter Sorensen have stated that the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the Sarajevo siege is reminder of the war horrors but also an encouragement to help build Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ashdown stressed that few events had so much influence on the modern world as the siege of Sarajevo did. Sorensen stressed that the consequences of the war could not be forgotten.

“A total of 100,000 people died in Bosnia-Herzegovina and two million became refugees. The trust and relations between people were simply destroyed,” Sorensen noted and added that Bosnia-Herzegovina had a bright future in the EU.

The siege of Sarajevo, which lasted 1,425 days, started when Serbian troops took over the international airport in the neighborhood of Ilidža on April 5, 1992. The siege officially ended on February 29, 1996, three months after the Dayton Accords was signed.

“For those of us who work in the field, for all my colleagues in the EU and other organizations here, the question is how to maximize this bright future and obvious potentials. That’s the whole reason the EU is here and the way it is making decisions and allocating resources,” the EU special representative explained.

Ashdown stated that the 20th anniversary since the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo should remind Europeans that they should still be on alert, adding that the reconstruction of Bosnia was not over bearing in mind that the country was “not united and dysfunctional”.

“There are some people in Bosnia-Herzegovina, even on the highest level, who will keep going and continue to want to see the state break apart, which was Radovan Karadžić’s original goal. (British Foreign Minister) William Hague and the British government see this danger very clearly and they are ready to warn the others. On this anniversary it is more important than ever to make the effort work. We are aware of the 1992 dangers,” Ashdown concluded.