HOW CAN I EXPLAIN BOSNIA TO HIM?

by Manuel Carballo

(The Herald Tribune, 12/07/1995)

GENEVA - A recent trip home from Sarajevo coincided with my son Eli's history exam and Geneva's celebration of the 50 years of the United Nations. One question my son was asked in his exam was why the League of Nations failed and how it compared with today's UN. My own response was that despite its shortcomings the United Nations has achieved a lot, in Bosnia and elsewhere. I firmly believe that.

My son, who is 15, was unimpressed by my arguments. He parried, asking me about Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Gorazde, Bihac, towns in Bosnia he has heard me talking about - towns that have been surrounded and cut off from the rest of the world for years. Why, he asked, is the world allowing citizens of these cities to be systematically starved. Why are children shot by snipers as they walk to school? Why are old men and women being shelled as they wait in line to collect what little water there is left in the city?

At school he has discussed whether what is happening in Sarajevo in 1995 differs from what happened to the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943. The war against civilians in the besieged towns of Bosnia is repeating history, my son says. He sees little difference between the closing off of the Warsaw Ghetto and the murder of Jews there, and the closing off of Sarajevo and the shelling of its population.

He asked me how the war in Bosnia differs from the 1936-39 war in Spain, which paved the way for World War II. While the war in Spain was laying the ground rules for a broader European conflict, it was producing a noninterventionist pact by countries that probably could have prevented far bigger disasters had they acted in time.

What is different, my son says, is that in the past there were few opportunities for people to know what was happening. There was no television and little radio reporting from the field. News travelled slowly. Today, he says, there is no longer an excuse. The bleeding bodies of children being rushed into the Sarajevo hospital are with us every evening. Soon, he says,there will be pictures of emaciated people, dead and dying from dysentery - people dying of thirst because water to Sarajevo has been cut off for months; or of dysentery because it has been impossible to get chlorine tablets to purify what water there is.

What is also the same, my son says cynically, is the passivity of the world's response. Days of violent siege have become weeks, months, years. One of history's most tolerant communities of Muslims, Christians and Jews is slowly being torched - by forces seemingly committed to its slow, painful, humiliating destruction - as we watch at home.

My son says that most of his schoolmates no longer believe much in the concept of international solidarity. The world,he says, seems to have lost its sense of direction. I try to tell him there is always hope, hope that someone will stand up and say enough is enough. I say to him that the United Nations has done a lot of good, that without it we would be even worse off. I tell him all this with a growing sense of sadness and fear.

I sit with him as he reads his books, thinking how little we have learned. A short flight from Europe's capitals the people of Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Gorazde and Bihac will starve, be shot by snipers, sleep in their cellars, holding their children tight.

I came back from Sarajevo to a Geneva bedecked in placards commemorating the many UN ,resolutions on human rights. The placards waved in the breeze, their words blending with the lush summer foliage: the right to shelter, the right to water, the right to health, the right to free movement, the right to food, the right to life itself. Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Gorazde, Bihac. Reminders of how the lush foliage of words can gradually obscure the meaning behind them. What will historians say about the free world at the end of the 20th century, asks my son. I can only agree with him; it may not be very nice.