Travel report by international student Luke Litowitz, who is working with YIHR.
- International student Luke Litowitz
A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to travel to Sarajevo with my class cohort. This was my first time visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina, and I knew little about it. I was struck by the natural beauty of Sarajevo, nestled in the green hills with a river flowing through the town. It was hard to imagine the nightmarish scenes that I soon came to learn about. I was also struck by the duality within Sarajevo. The Ottoman bazaar is giving way to Austro-Hungarian boulevards; two distinct cultures are coming into contact, creating a cultural exchange I have never experienced. The experience of walking around the city gives insight into the vastly complex and layered history of the city, full of tension yet a remarkable beauty and coexistence as well.
The war's most horrific chapter unfolded in July 1995 at Srebrenica, a UN-designated safe area in eastern Bosnia. Despite the presence of Dutch peacekeeping forces, Bosnian Serb troops under General Ratko Mladic systematically murdered over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in what the International Court of Justice later recognized as genocide. It remains the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War. The Dayton Agreement, reached in November 1995, brought the fighting to an end but produced a fragile and deeply complicated peace. It effectively partitioned Bosnia into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, creating a political structure so divided that basic governance remains a source of ongoing dysfunction to this day. Dayton stopped the bleeding, but it also froze many of the ethnic divisions in place, leaving Bosnia in a state of unresolved tension that continues to shape daily life thirty years later.
To understand my experience in Sarajevo, I feel I need to provide some historical background that frames the region's complex history. The scars visible across Sarajevo and the broader region trace back to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995. When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, Bosnian Serb forces backed by the Army of the Republika Srpska, fought the combined forces of the Bosnian Muslims and Croats. However, from the autumn of 1992 until the spring of 1994, a conflict also took place between the forces of the Bosnian Muslims (led by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – ABiH) and the forces of the Bosnian Croats (led by the Croatian Defence Council – HVO), while at the same time both sides continued to fight against the Bosnian Serb forces. The siege of Sarajevo lasted nearly four years and stands as the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, subjecting its civilian population to relentless sniper fire, shelling, and severe shortages of food and basic necessities. Roughly 14,000 people were killed, more than 5,000 of them civilians. The city that had hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, a symbol of cosmopolitan openness to the world, was reduced to a battleground.
Our first activity was an interreligious tour led by Dr. Amra Pandžo, who focuses on interreligious peacebuilding. She was able to provide us with history, lived experience, and practiced reconciliation work that she participated in and bore witness to in the wake of the war in the 90s. We were led into a Jewish synagogue, a Franciscan church, a Muslim mosque, and an Orthodox church. In each of these places, we heard from religious leaders about the history of the different religious groups in Sarajevo, their practices and traditions, and what it is like to be a member of a specific religious identity in Sarajevo. This tour was super interesting for me, and I was shocked by the diversity and the hospitality that we heard about towards other traditions. In my experience, we often hear how different faiths struggle to live and engage with one another due to fundamental differences in traditions and beliefs. This tour left me with an optimistic impression for places that have cultural exchange or where religions collide.
I want to talk about two major takeaways that I had from this tour that have really stuck with me. The first was within the Jewish synagogue, where we heard from a Rabbi who painted this picture of justice through an analogy that left me thinking. The analogy was that there are three fish, one large, one medium, and one small. The large fish thinks that the world is completely just and fair, as they experience no injustice from their position of dominance and power. The medium fish thinks that the world is somewhat just as they stand to both gain and suffer from the natural cycle of predation. The smallest fish thinks the world lacks all justice, as they have nothing to gain in this scenario. This was posed as a metaphor for the religious power in Sarajevo historically, as those who are underrepresented or discriminated against often develop resentment or hatred of the system. Those who hold the power are unaware of the struggles without it, often overlooking or cementing those dynamics in space. I think that this is a lesson that can be applied to many situations where social hierarchies exist and can compel us to think differently about our own roles in society before judging others too quickly.
The second idea that really spoke to me was in the Franciscan monastery, where we got to know the identity of the priest. He is a Franciscan Bosnian Croat, a complex and rich multilayered identity. The thing that I thought was interesting was that each part of his identity is just as important as the next, and he cannot assume any one part of the identity. This is interesting because in many places people would assume a very specific one-dimensional identity. Here in Sarajevo, his identity is contingent on his relation to the other people. He wouldn’t be a Christian in Sarajevo without the presence of Muslims and Orthodox Serbs. I think that this is a demonstration of a type of lived religious tolerance that promotes peace. Each religious leader is deeply rooted in their faith, but due to the lived coexistence with others of different faiths and ethnicities, their identity is also rooted in the other. I think that this city demonstrates the epitome of religious hospitality, and each leader spoke about welcoming ideas, practices, rituals, and people of other faiths and beliefs. They are not threatened by this coexistence, but rather have their religious identity bolstered by the interreligious shared space that is Sarajevo.
Another significant part of my Sarajevo experience was the War Childhood Museum. The War Childhood Museum is a rotating collection of toys, clothes, trinkets, and other items of children who experienced wars. The wars were specifically conflicts in Yugoslavia, but they also had some items from Palestine and Ukraine. This was a very emotional experience for me, because it brings you to the realization of just how human these victims that you learn about are. You come to see similarities between yourself and the children who have sent their messages and items to the museum. We were all once children after all. I think that this experience really helped me find and focus on the human dignity of victims of terrible situations. This museum also had recorded retellings of survivors’ stories. This was hard to watch and listen to, especially when you consider how young they were at the time. I would recommend anyone to go to this museum to witness the way that violence and war disrupt childhoods and youth, yet humanity persists through hardship.
The Sarajevo War Gallery offered a different kind of encounter with atrocity than I had experienced at Jasenovac. The space was dark and intimate, built around black and white photography and a self-guided audio tour that placed you alone with the images and their stories. What struck me most was what the photographs chose not to show. Rather than confronting visitors with the violence itself, the gallery memorialized the humanity that the siege threatened to extinguish. A boy playing with a bow and arrow. Rows of portraits of those who died. Women waiting for husbands and sons who may never come home. These images did not document a war so much as they documented the lives that existed inside of it. This is not to say that there were no scenes of devastation and violence. There were photographs of hundreds of corpses that had been recovered from mass graves. There was poignant graffiti expressing the perceived betrayal by the UN. Combined with the film Miss Sarajevo, the overall effect was one of quiet devastation. I found myself thinking back to Jasenovac and the War Childhood Museum, and recognizing a thread connecting all three: the most powerful memorialization does not ask you to confront the horror of what humans can do to each other, but rather to mourn the fullness of what was lost.
Across every experience in Sarajevo, one thread ran through all of it: the irreducible value of human life. The War Childhood Museum asked me to see a child. The War Gallery asked me to see a father, a son, a woman waiting at a window. Even the religious tour, in its own way, was an argument for the dignity of the other. What struck me most across all of these experiences was how intentional that framing was. These were not spaces that asked you to hate the perpetrators. They asked you to love the victims. And I think that distinction matters enormously when it comes to reconciliation and healing. If the path forward runs through anything, it runs through that, through the slow and difficult work of humanizing those on all sides of a conflict, building shared spaces, and refusing to let political actors reduce human beings to ethnic categories or historical grievances. And yet, I left Sarajevo with a complicated feeling. On my last day, I shared a taxi ride with a local driver who told me that he believes another war is coming. It was a jarring thing to hear after days spent in museums and memorials that felt oriented toward remembrance and healing. It was a reminder that for the people who actually live here, the tensions that I was studying as history are still very much present. Peace was not fully delivered by the Dayton Agreement in 1995, and thirty years later, it is still not something that can be taken for granted. It shows that a top-down imposition of peace can only stop the fighting. Peace and healing are much more than that. That conversation stayed with me, and I think it is an important counterweight to any easy optimism. Reconciliation and healing are possible, and I believe the grassroots efforts I encountered point in the right direction. But they are not inevitable, and the work is far from finished.
-Luke Litowitz