Sarajevo Siege Museum

From Yahoo News:
"Sarajevo to store memories of Mladic siege in museum"

Twenty years on from the siege of Sarajevo, artists in the Bosnian capital are planning a museum to commemorate the 44-month atrocity for which Ratko Mladic faces a war crimes court this week. Artists groups are putting together an ambitious project to build and open a museum to mark the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege in May next year, and city authorities have donated a vacant lot for that purpose. Since the end of Bosnia's 1992-1995 war the priority has been given over to rebuilding a ruined city, where 10,000 people were killed. Now Bosnian artists say it is time to remember the horrors, but also celebrate Sarajevo's unique spirit. "It will not show the city as a victim, but rather as a place where a spirit defeated terror," said Suada Kapic, one of the artists who launched the project. Dino Mustafic, a theatre director and head of the museum project, said "the Sarajevo siege museum will be a house of survival. "It will be a testimony on the spirit of a town that experienced difficult moments in history, but that managed to miraculously renew itself," he told AFP. Audiovisual exhibits and objects from the dark days of the siege will serve as a reminder. The collection will also include some 1,400 wartime interviews with Sarajevans. Sarajevo's 350,000 inhabitants lived for 44 months under constant shelling and sniper fire from Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic, without water, electricity or heating. An underground tunnel, dug in 1933, enabled some food and arms to be brought into the capital. Some 10,000 civilians, including 1,500 children, died during the siege. When space in the city cemetery ran out people were buried in a neighbouring football field. "For everything I do, I'm inspired by the siege experience since it marked me completely," said artist Sejla Kameric, just 14-year-old when the siege began in April 1992. Now, she is one of the artists involved with setting up the siege museum she refers to as a testament to human resilience. "The siege marked me since I was there for that four years, it is a part of me and most of my works are linked with the war, the wartime experience and experience of a life in a besieged town," Sejla Kameric told AFP. Her latest work in a feature length film about her experiences during the siege called "1395 Days without Red". The arrest and Mladic future trial make the establishment of a siege museum all the more pressing, said Mustafic. "Mladic's arrest is extremely important for the future of this region since it is important that everyone faces the facts from the 1990s," he said. "We live in a difficult time where people try to relativise historical facts." Among the exhibits will be the 1993 Sarajevo Survival Guide, a tongue-in-cheek manual with tips for surviving the dark days of the siege.

"Sleeping is entirely conditioned by the arrival of water and electricity. If they appear at the same time, the shock is complete. The race against time starts -- in order to use both in the best possible way," the guide reads. "We were following the break up of a civilisation and the establishment of a new one," said Kapic, who edited the guide. The siege -- the longest such blockade in post-World War II Europe -- lasted until November 1995. Mladic, now 69, was arrested in Serbia last week and extradited into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague to await trial on charges of genocide and war crimes after almost 16 years on the run. As well as the siege of Sarajevo, he is chiefly accused of masterminding the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys, Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.

^ It is a great idea to open a museum on one of the longest sieges in modern history so that people do not forget what happened and to teach those that don't know much about the Bosnian War. I hope that the museum will have things from all sides (the Bosniaks and the Serbs) to give the whole picture. Ever since I went to Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia (Mostar) last December I have been reading as much as I can about the wars in the former Yugoslavia. I had a basic understanding of what happened, but now have an even better picture from all sides involved. If I ever go to Sarajevo I would like to visit this museum. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110601/lf_afp/bosniawarcrimesmladicsiege