Buying a Better World by Anna Porter

Author:Anna Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2015-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

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Meddling in the Balkans

Nestled inside a great valley along the Miljacka River, surrounded by the Dinaric Alps, Sarajevo has always been a place where different cultures — Serb, Turkish, Islamic, Catholic, Orthodox, and Jewish — have lived reasonably well together, despite the occasional clash. In her long, extraordinary travel book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West wrote of its charm, of feeling “like being gently embraced by a city,” its exquisite Islamic architecture “in its restraint and amiability,” its stolid, over-decorated Habsburg administrative buildings, the Serbian Orthodox cathedral, and the grand Catholic cathedral. But even in 1941 when West’s book was published, the river ran red. West remarked on the phenomenon when she stood on the bridge over which the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie would have driven the morning of June 28, 1914, had they not been assassinated by a Bosnian named Gavrilo Princip. The assassination triggered the First World War.

Had West postponed her visit by a few months, she would have seen the city bombed, then occupied by the Germans and just a couple of years later by the Allies. Still, it survived all that, as well as its absorption into the newly created country of Yugoslavia, but it barely survived what became known as the Siege of Sarajevo. Shortly after Bosnia-Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, Bosnian Serb forces besieged the city. The siege lasted until 1995 and more than 10,000 people were killed, many while crossing streets, shopping at markets, or lining up for water or bread.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, George Soros set up foundations in each of the new states. The money earmarked for Bosnia may have saved more lives than the combined efforts of the world leaders and United Nations foundations that were engaged in the conflict, which turned into a mass murder or genocide. The United Nations exacerbated the suffering by declaring certain areas “safe” when they were not and UN forces had no authorization to fight. Yugoslavia was a humiliating lesson for the UN and a nightmare for its peacekeepers who had to stand by while men, women, and children were massacred. Both Srebrenica and Sarajevo were declared “safe,” but neither city was.

Aryeh Neier, no stranger to atrocities during his work in South America, found the situation in Sarajevo “almost impossible to comprehend,” and the reasons for the attack on the defenseless civilian population — a large number of whom were Serbs — were equally bizarre. They referred back to “supposed historical injustices during the centuries of Ottoman rule.”[1]

Sarajevo, as it turned out, brought together some of those who remained with Soros’s foundations for most of their working lives. It has become a memory of how a small number of people can make a real difference in a short time.

In 1993, when the city was isolated and surrounded, a Soros group went to Sarajevo to see how $50 million could be used most effectively to alleviate the suffering of the population under bombardment.

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