Atrocity on this day 22 years ago at Markale, a turning point for Bosnia
SARAJEVO, August 28, 1995, around 11:00am: Another day dodging shells and snipers’ bullets in the war-fatigued Bosnian capital besieged since April 1992. On this warm summer morning some Sarajevans braved their way to the Markale, the central open-air marketplace.
The crowded market is abuzz with chatter – jovial and nervous, people relishing the momentary peace. Then, a huge explosion shatters the tense stillness. A pall of smoke rises into the city’s skyline signalling death and destruction. Mayhem on Mula Mustafe Bašeskije Street. Blood splattering. Disembodied human flesh scattering. Agonising cries of humanity’s pathos.
On this day, a 120mm mortar shell mercilessly snuffed out 43 lives, wounding 75 others.
Only 18 months before this tragedy, 68 people lost their lives and 144 were wounded at this market.
Both sides in the conflict blamed each other for the market bombings. Two days after the August 1995 market slaughter, Nato launches air strikes against the Bosnian Serb forces.
Last month, walking on Mula Mustafe Bašeskije Street, I am attracted by the colours of summer fruit and vegetables at the open Markale. I buy large, dark crimson cherries from an elderly man using a scale with weights. He kindly gives me two juicy green figs. Later, I wonder where the subdued fruit seller was on the fateful day of the market bombings, whether his fellow sellers were among the victims, whether he is a survivor of that treachery.
Across the market, the azure sky is adorned with minarets of the Ottoman architectural splendour, the Gazi Husrev-Beg Mosque, built in the 1500s.
Nearby are other mosques, Catholic cathedrals, Orthodox churches and synagogues. The ornately decorated Moorish-designed Ashkenazi Synagogue is alluring.
Bosnia was one of the few territories in Europe since the late 1400s to welcome Jews fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal during the Catholic Inquisition, a papal decree ordering Jews and Muslims to convert to Catholicism; and again during World War II.
Sarajevo’s religious and ethnic tolerance, and the sanctity and beauty of its places of worship, are the antithesis of the depraved inhumanity of the Balkans war in the 1990s, that inflicted unimaginable human suffering largely along ethno-religious lines. This crime against humanity chillingly became known as “ethnic cleansing”.
The sight of the minarets transports me to the foothills of Table Mountain in Cape Town where once people of various spiritual beliefs and races – Muslims, Christians, Jews – lived together. Their places of worship in close proximity. This was District Six, a melting pot of cultures; destroyed by apartheid’s racist Afrikaner nationalist leaders.
The images of the Bosnian war haunt me. I fear the virulent racist and ethnic invective of demagogues across the political spectrum in South Africa.
These narcissistic leaders instil fear, division and hatred instead of love, tolerance and unity.
A few months after the 1995 market tragedy, the Dayton Peace Agreement partitioned Bosnia into two entities, one Serb controlled and the other a federation of Muslims and Catholic Croats.
Dino, a silver jeweller in the Old Town, forlornly tells me: “In the middle of Europe, we have apartheid here in Bosnia. We now have three presidents. Our children no longer go to the same school.
“They have different history books. Most parts of our lives are becoming segregated. Once we were a united people, not anymore.”
Sarajevans are recovering and rebuilding their lives in a post-war period of many economic, social and political challenges.
However, the human spirit of Sarajevans, lovingly wired over half a millennium, enmeshed in rich diverse cultural strands, remains indomitable.