Sunday, April 8, 2018

Cable Car Diplomacy



The Sarajevo Cable Car in Bosnia has just reopened 23 years after being destroyed in 1992 at the start of the longest siege in modern history. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days with 13, 812 people killed (5,434 civilians and the rest were Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian soldiers) In comparison the Siege of Leningrad during World War 2 lasted 872 days with 642,000 civilians killed during the siege and 400,000 civilians killed during evacuations from the siege.

I have always wanted to go to Sarajevo. The closest I got was to Mostar, Bosnia which is 47 miles away. Mostar also had several sieges by different armies (the Bosnians and Croatians against the Serbs and then the Bosnians against the Croatians) during the war that lasted 421 days and where 2,000 civilians were killed.

I also stayed in Dubrovnik, Croatia (80 miles from Mostar) The Siege of Dubrovnik in Croatia lasted 8 months with 88 civilians killed. Dubrovnik also has a cable car that was destroyed at the beginning of the siege in 1991 (the Serbs and Montenegrins stayed at the top of the mountain and shot and bombed the Old Town below even though the city is part of UNESCO and had been de-militarized since the 1970s.) The cable car was reopened in 2010 and the picture is one I took from the cable car a few months after it re-opened when I went to Dubrovnik.

It may not seem like a big deal: to re-open a cable car in Sarajevo or Dubrovnik, but even though 22 years have passed since the wars in the former Yugoslavia ended the area is still a highly segregated place. Croatia only uses Croatian as its language and the majority of its people are Catholics. Bosnia is a Federal State with one part given to the Bosnian Serbs who use Serbian as their language and the majority of people are Serbian Orthodox and the other part given to the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croatians who use the Bosnian language and the Croatian language. Even within the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croatian part there is strict segregation (like in Mostar) with Bosnian Muslims attending school in the morning and Bosnian Croatians attending school, in the same building, in the afternoon so each side will be separate from each other and they can be taught their own identity.

In case you didn’t know the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages are exactly the same and come from Serbo-Croatian. Serbo-Croatian was the official language of Yugoslavia from 1918 until 1991 and every ethnic group learned the language using both the Latin and the Cyrillic Alphabets. Since 1991, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian became “separate” languages with Croatian and Bosnian only using the Latin Alphabet and Serbian using both the Latin and Cyrillic Alphabets (but mostly Cyrillic.) The only way a person in the former Yugoslavia can tell who is a Croat, a Bosniak (Muslim) or a Serb -without knowing their name - is by their accent/dialect yet they continue to separate along linguistic lines. It would be as though the US segregated between those using Standard American English (Atlantic English) and those using Southern American English or the Brits segregating between those using the Queen/King’s English and any other British English dialect.

With that said some of the most helpful people I have ever met were in Croatia and in Bosnia. I received help with the wheelchair on uneven cobblestones from random strangers who literally picked it up and carried it long distances without me even having to ask for help - they simply walked over and gestured to pick up the chair and they pointed to which direction we wanted to go (I couldn't tell if they were Croat, Serbian or Bosniak.) With many such experiences like that it is hard for me to image people like this killing their neighbors and in some cases parts of their families - since there were a lot of mixed marriages - 22 years ago. The rebuilding of the cable car in both Sarajevo and Dubrovnik is a sign that things can get better since the mountains that the cable cars go up to were once used by soldiers to kill innocent people in the cities below and now they are tourist spots with great views once again.

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