There are two main routes from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo. The first leaves the Croatian port city and heads north crossing into Bosnia Herzegovina and heads up through the Sutjeska National Park. It approaches the capital city from the southeast. The second route heads west along the coast before turning north and heading up though Mostar to approach Sarajevo from the west. There is quite a contrast.
Not long after you cross the mountains behind Dubrovnik on the eastern route you pass a large weather-beaten billboard welcoming you to Republika Srpska, one of the two autonomous entities composing Bosnia and Herzegovina; the roads are poor, traffic infrequent and the streets of the towns you pass through are lined with decaying Eastern Bloc-style low-rise apartment blocks. The sense of decline is palpable. There is little visible economic activity apart from a 60-year-old hydroelectric scheme and a decaying lignite-burning power station.
The background to the four-hour trip may be beautiful – at times staggeringly so; not least in the Sutjeska National Park. But the foreground is dominated by half-built houses, derelict factories and rusted cars.
The journey is bookended by another billboard, this time welcoming you to the city of East Sarajevo, which is described as “the city of the 157,000 Serbs who had to leave Sarajevo”.
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The billboard is one take on the events of 1992 to 1995 which saw 100,000 people killed, 2.2 million displaced and thousands of women systematically raped. The Bosnian war was part of the wider conflict sparked by the collapse of Yugoslavia. It ended with Nato intervention and Dayton accords which saw the creation of Bosnia Herzegovina and its two constituent entities, the Republika Srpska dominated by Orthodox Christian Serbs and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina which is populated mostly by Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats.
Sarajevo, which was under siege for the duration of the war, still bears the scars of the conflict with buildings pockmarked by bullets and shells. It would be a stretch to describe it as prosperous. It is not. But it is busy and full of young people.
As you start the journey south via the second route, through the Federation of Bosnia Herzegovina, you pass the former Holiday Inn. The base for many foreign journalists during the siege, it was the backdrop to numerous news reports. It has been renovated and rebranded as the Hotel Holiday. Farther down the road you pass an exceptionally large Porsche dealership that is hard to reconcile with the air of economic stagnation that prevailed during the first part of the journey.
The economic consequences for the people of Republika Srpska of what is likely a doomed push for seccession seem like a high price to pay
And soon you are on an EU-funded motorway that takes you a good portion of the way to Mostar – another city made famous for all the wrong reasons by the war. The secondary roads are far better. They take you through valleys – the sides and floors of which are home to red-roofed villages that would not look out of place in the foothills of the Alps, were it not for the minarets of the mosques.
The signs of economic activity are plentiful. A nascent tourist product is evident in the gorges leading into Mostar and once you pass the city there is a long stretch of strip mall development of western and domestic retail outlets and crowned with one of the icons of western capitalism – a large new Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.
A road trip is an arbitrary way to assess the relative strengths of two economies – and it’s clear there are two economies in Bosnia Herzegovina. In truth, there is little difference between the two entities in terms of GDP and unemployment but the impression that the federation is making progress and the republic is at best stagnant is an inescapable one.
There are many reasons for this. One is obvious: inward investment. Republika Srpska missed out in the recent investment round announced by the €2.1 billion Western Balkans Investment Framework. It is backed by the EU, financial institutions and other donors. The €303 million allocated to Bosnia Herzegovina is targeted at projects in the federation.
Separately, the German government recently put €105 million worth of infrastructure products on hold including renovating the hydroelectric plant on the eastern route from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo.
These de facto sanctions follow increasingly bellicose separatist rhetoric from Milorad Dodik, the leader of Republika Srpska, which has passed legislation seeking to annul decisions by the country’s constitutional court comprising three Bosniak, three Serb and three Croat judges.
It has also challenged the authority of the international envoy to Bosnia Herzegovina. Created by the Dayton accords, the high representative has the power to veto or enforce laws. The moves, according to Dodik, will be the foundation of Republika Srpska’s independence.
The economic consequences for the people of Republika Srpska of what is likely a doomed push for seccession seem like a high price to pay – particularly when the appalling human cost of trying to forcefully unpick a multi-ethnic and fragmented country is in living memory. You would think there would be little appetite for such self-defeating politics. But the opposite seems to be the case.
Comparison with events unfolding in Gaza is at best simplistic. But one thing can be said without too much fear of correction: that however things develop over the next few weeks, the continuation of the conflict for another generation seems all but guaranteed. We only have to look at our own country’s past and present to understand the enduring nature of hatred.