Tuesday, July 10, Sarajevo

After my one day here I've concluded that Sarajevo is a city best described as grimly waiting. Waiting for the next war with Serbia. The last one ended inconclusively with a UN-brokered compromise that left Bosnia truncated between three competing ethnicities:  Serbs, Croats, Bosnians (referred to derisively by the others as 'Turks').
The Serbs encircled and bombarded this place for over three years, killing, by Bosnian count, 11,000. This all started with glasnost  and perestroika. The Soviets let down their guard and the Iron Curtain disintegrated in 1989. Tito died. Yugoslavia began to fall apart. First the Slovenians escaped the 'South Slav' federation that Tito had created and maintained. There was a brief, ten-day, war but the Slovenes gained independence.
Then the Croats--Catholics and a remnant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire--declared their own independence.
My guess is that the Serbs began to realize that they were in trouble. They'd dominated Yugoslavia and created enemies amongst all the little republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo) that made it up. Soon they'd be surrounded by hostile peoples all eager to take a bite out of Serbia.
So the Serbs made war to try to preserve some sort of south slav empire with Serbia as putative leader. They began by attacking Bosnia. They didn't have the stomach to do the street-to-street fighting that it would take to annex Sarajevo so they relied on bombing, hoping the residents would flee. It didn't work out. By 1995 the world was sick of seeing dead Bosnians on the streets of Sarajevo so they sent in the fighter jets and persuaded the Serbs to back off. Then they met in Dayton and forced a peace on the warring parties.
Bosnia was given a hodge-podge government with three presidents and three prime ministers, one Croat, one Serb, one Bosnian. No one was happy.
My sense is that the people of this city expect to resume the war at some point. In 2015 it will be exactly one generation since the Serbs went back to their barracks. Just enough time to raise a new generation of fighters.
My guide today said things are sad in Sarajevo. People don't have enough money to travel or buy nice things so they sit endlessly in the sidewalk cafes drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Wages are low. There is some investment evident, a few skyscrapers going up, but mostly things seem stagnant. 

The heat has me off my feed. I have been spending half my time sleeping. It's too hot to do much walking, my normal approach to a new city. I visited some museums and ate some local fish, but I can't report that I've accomplished much.