BALKAN JOURNEY: I AM WRITING this article on the terrace of a cafe at the top of a mountain pass in central Bosnia. The scenery is simply stunning, writes Peter Murtagh.
From the city of Banja Luka, the capital of Republika Srpska, the self- governing Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a road winds its way south towards Sarajevo through an incredible gorge cut by the Vrbas river.
The river is good for white water rafting and kayaking, as evidenced by the canoe obstacle-course poles dangling above the water from cables straddling the gorge. The mountain on one side rises to 1,338m (4,393ft) and I reckon that the sides of the gorge immediately above the road are around 244-305m (800-1,000ft). Sometimes the cliff leans out and overhangs almost the whole road.
It is a place of such dramatic natural beauty that you simply have to stop, linger and look at it all and you feel better within yourself. If you came to this part of the world for a special holiday, a honeymoon perhaps, you would meet engaging, friendly people, eat terrific food and go home with money in your pocket.
But there are also other places and memories in these parts.
One such is Omarska, a village and mine complex west of Banja Luka where my friend and former colleague Ed Vulliamy of the Guardian newspaper in London, together with an Independent Television News reporter, Penny Marshall, found a Serb-run concentration camp during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Another camp was found in a place named Trnoplje.
According to Serbian documents known to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, 3,334 people were held in Omarska from May 27th, 1992, to August 16th, 1992. A breakdown reveals much about who was on the receiving end during the war: of the 3,334 people in the concentration camp, 3,197 were Bosnian Muslims and 125 were Croats.
Images from the camp were of emaciated, bare-chested men staring from behind barbed wire - eerily similar to images from camps in other parts of Europe a half-century before.
Before I came here on my "Balkan Journey", travelling on BMW motorbikes with my biking companion Tony Sullivan, I thought that I was probably going to see places that were physically beautiful but were lived in by wounded people. And I wasn't thinking of physical wounds.
That's more or less what we have found in the past fortnight. But there have also been moments when something else, something wonderful and quintessentially human has shone through - an optimism and vibrancy that defy logical analysis.
In Srebrenica, where at least 8,372 Muslim men and youths (the total number is not known) were murdered in July 1995, we spent three days and two nights in a small, family- run hotel and restaurant, the Misirlije, at one end of the town. The owner, a Muslim man named Abdulah Purkovic and his wife, whose name I regrettably did not get, were away. Their three children, son Avdo and daughters, Adina and Emina, were in charge. All three were in their 20s, I think.
Avdo studies economics in Sarajevo. Adina has turned away from medicine and is considering doing law. Emina is already a qualified lawyer. Tony and I sat up both nights until at least 2am drinking wine with Adina and Emina, listening to their stories, arguing points with them, telling jokes . . . and, just a little, falling in love with them the way fathers fall in love their daughters.
Before the war, they remember being children in a happy small town where differences between them and their Serbian playmates passed over their heads. "We all laughed and played in the streets like other children," recalled Adina.
Adina now has other memories as well. Srebrenica, as I wrote earlier in these pages, is riddled with empty, half-built homes - some derelict the way they were left after their occupants fled or were murdered; others half-way to being refurbished. Adina told me she sometimes dreams that the people who should be in those houses are actually still there at night, looking out. The souls of the dead watching the living and, maybe, questioning them.
Emina has occasional fears if she is alone at night in the restaurant and has to close the doors on her own. She feels insecure. Both women affect to make light of the petty slights against them because of their ethnicity that are a regular occurrence from some quarters.
And yet for all that, these three (but particularly Adina and Emina, and only because we chatted to them for so long into the night) are really bright, intelligent, balanced, warm, sharp-witted, playful, vivacious and funny individuals.
They are, in short, wonderful people, fully aware of what has happened to their town and to their neighbours (how could they not be?) and seem more than capable of rising above all the horrific experience of their community. It was no surprise to learn just before we left that Abdulah Purkovic spent part of the siege of Srebrenica working for the French charity Médicins Sans Frontières, helping to keep the town's hospital functioning.
I really wish I had met him because he and his wife are obviously remarkable people. Their children are Bosnia's future.
In all of the thousands of kilometres we covered on our bikes and the dozens of people we met, the absence of a yearning for revenge was humbling. All sides did dreadful things during the wars that engulfed disintegrating Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Serbs were the instigators but Croats, too, made attempts to grab parts of Bosnia and were also involved in ethnic cleansing, notably in Knin.
But overwhelmingly, the Bosnians - the Muslims and Bosnian Serbs and Croats, who stayed with them in Sarajevo or in the Bosnian army because they wanted to preserve a multi-ethnic state - were the main victims. Yet, even though it is 13 years after the war ended, we did not meet a single Bosnian Muslim who yearned for revenge for what happened to them - for what was allowed to happen - and that in itself is remarkable.
Figures are disputed but the most extensive research, carried out by the Research and Documentation Centre in Sarajevo and published in June 2007 as The Bosnian Book of the Dead, reveals the 97,207 names of Bosnia and Herzegovina's citizens killed and missing during the war. Of the documented casualties (soldiers and civilians), 65 per cent were Bosnian Muslims, Serbs accounted for 25 per cent and Croats 8 per cent.
But of the civilian victims, 83 per cent were Bosnian, 10 per cent were Serbs and more than 5 per cent were Croats, followed by a small number of others such as Albanians or Romani people.
I asked Emina why she thought the international community did so little to help Bosnia during the war. "Because we are Muslims," she said without any bitterness but as a simple statement of belief.
And I simply do not have the information to counter that argument and maybe it does not exist. The fact is that we, the United Nations, the European Union and a whole slew of individual governments, treated with racist madmen as though they were respected members of the same club as ourselves. We - the international community - refused to lift an arms embargo that massively disadvantaged the losing side.
The slaughter of shoppers in a market place at one stage prompted some ineffective action by Nato. There was further action by the alliance in the wake of Srebrenica. But, finally, it was only when Slobodan Milosevic and his Serbian forces were on the brink of turning Kosovo into a second Bosnia, that Nato acted with resolve and determination against forces in Kosovo and against strategic targets in Serbia to prevent it acting as a military aggressor in the region. Only then did it stop.
One cannot visit places that suffered such awful horrors, and listen to people who were so much closer than I will ever be to such things, and not be moved. Much of what I saw and heard upset me a lot. But if I'm angry at anything, I am angry at some of the views back home in Ireland.
In Kosovo, I saw young Irish soldiers, non-commissioned officers and senior officers helping to keep the peace, and if necessary enforce it, and also helping communities navigate a way forward that may create a better future for them. This is really important work for the people most immediately concerned and for the rest of us as well, if we don't want a repeat of the wars of the 1990s.
Everyone working for the international agencies in Bosnia and Kosovo - military, police or advisers to governments - believes that if the outside world was not involved, ethnic conflict would erupt again and that it would only be a matter of time. However, in Ireland, because some of these missions are carried out under a Nato flag and via a Partnership for Peace association Ireland has with Nato, it is often argued that our neutrality is being violated.
These neuralgic and myopic arguments over neutrality seem to me more than a little self-indulgent when one sees at ground level the valuable work being done by Irish participation in EUfor, the EU military mission in Bosnia, and Kfor, Nato's Kosovo mission.
It really is a gross and dishonest misrepresentation to suggest - as it was in the Lisbon referendum campaign - that by participating in the sort of EU or Nato military missions in the Balkans and in Chad, our country has somehow signed up to an "EU army" with imperialistic ambitions.
What sort of morality is it to sit on the sidelines when others are trying to prevent war, impose peace and help nations rebuild themselves?
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Series concluded.