Street Spirit by Steve Crawshaw

Street Spirit by Steve Crawshaw

Author:Steve Crawshaw [Crawshaw, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books


Cropdusting a plantation in Nicaragua – as seen in the documentary Bananas!*, about pesticides and health.

SITTING IT OUT

‘Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’

ELIE WIESEL

The war in Bosnia lasted for three years from 1992 to 1995. The Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was besieged for most of that time. Across the country, tens of thousands of civilians were killed. The country suffered ethnic cleansing, rape and genocide.

Interviewing Serb leaders at that time could be a strange experience. When I asked Slobodan Milošević, Serb leader and chief instigator of the conflict, if he might one day find himself before a war crimes tribunal, he sounded surprised and explained that he was ‘for peace’. Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, assured me there were no snipers surrounding the capital – cheerfully denying the lethal reality that Sarajevo experienced every day.

Too often, basic facts get lost. Humanity can get lost, too. But Sarajevo was determined to ensure that humanity and truth were not forgotten. In 2012, on the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, 11,541 empty red chairs were laid out in eight hundred rows for half a mile along the main street of the city, representing all Sarajevans who had died in the war. They included 643 smaller chairs. Those represented the children who died.

During and after the conflict, it seemed that Milošević and Karadžić were right to be complacent. There appeared to be little prospect that they would ever be held to account. But justice can be patient. In 2001, six years after the conflict ended, Milošević was sent to The Hague, and died behind bars. Karadžić, who lived for years under cover as an alternative healer and expert on ‘human quantum energy’, was arrested in 2008. In 2016, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, and jailed for forty years.



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