I follow the Sarajevo Times on Twitter, it’s the only English newspaper
in town. In the past few months they have had two articles on two towns in
Bosnia, Visegrad and Prijedor. One was a piece on visiting Visegrad, which no
doubt is a beautiful city, but with a very grisly background. During the 1990’s
Bosnian war, Visegrad was one of the first sites of the war atrocities, Muslim
Bosnian families burned alive, rapes, people being shot and thrown over the
famous bridge in Visegrad. They say the river ran stuffed with the bodies of
the victims (victims who in many cases are still not found or identified). It
was a blood bath. And the saddest part and the major reason I don’t want to go,
is that the perpetrators still live there. The town sits silently, never
offering an apology and major politicians in the town refuse to acknowledge
what happened there. I can’t ever imagine wanting to go to that town for
tourism. Everywhere I turned, I would be wondering, “were you one of the people
who did these things?”, “Is this where the atrocities occurred?” I try to compare this to other towns where
horrors happened, like in Germany or Poland from WWII and I think the
difference, at least in my mind, is that not only has time passed and vital
players in the evil are gone but there has been some acknowledgement to the
crimes. I mean, how can I go traipsing around, spending money, and taking
smiling photos as if nothing happened? When the town won't even recognize
correctly what ensued. For me, it is too creepy and wrong to the victims and
survivors.
If Visegrad is bad, Prijedor is even worse! After Srebrenica, people
say Prijedor was the second biggest genocide in Bosnia, during the war.
Bosniaks in that region were the first victims, completely unaware of what was
to transpire. There are mass graves all over that part of the country, they
just discovered a new one last summer. I remember reading the news story about
the discovery and how the International Missing Person’s Commission (IMPC) said
that the grave could have been unearthed earlier but that people living nearby
didn’t say anything despite knowing of its existence. What the heck?! Why would
I want to visit a place where people might not have pulled the trigger but are
comfortable with living for over 16 years with unidentified dead bodies close?
It just reeks of a Stephen King novel to me, something like Children of the
Corn, everyone conspiring to keep this dirty secret hidden. The politicians of
Prijedor continue to push ethnic politics and deny any wrongdoing against
Bosniaks. They put up memorials to the guys who committed the ethnic cleansing
and fuss over creating memorials to the victims. This is also the region where two of the
worse concentration camps existed. There continues to be ethnic tensions and
violence against returnee’s who survived the war and want to come back to their
ancestral homes in that region. All of
this adds up to a very unfriendly picture, not something I would be jumping at
to go visit. It makes me think of how I would have been treated (as a child of
Indian immigrants) traveling to Mississippi in the 1960’s.
While they can try to whitewash their history, I am not fooled and I
hope that until there is admittance to the horrific truths, these towns remain
in seclusion.
(map of a number of big massacre sites, except Sarajevo, please note this map isn't exhaustive, many big killing locations are missing from here).
