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Wednesday 15 October 2008

A hint of heroism

Thomas Leveritt enjoys Sarajevo

The confusion is a hangover from the last Tory government, whose foreign policy on Bosnia, for well-meaning but ultimately misguided reasons, was not to interfere with the Greater Serbian project. And in order to sell this policy at home they embarked on a quite conscious project of disinformation (what’s now call spinning), Douglases Hurd and Hogg briefing journalists that the warring sides were all as bad as each other, that it was terribly complicated and all to do with ancient ethnic hatreds and so on and we’d best just steer clear of it. Anything to muddy the waters enough to justify their inaction. In fact, so central was Britain’s role in enabling the Bosnian agony, that Bosnia was only with difficulty persuaded not to bring formal charges against the UK as an accomplice to genocide at the International Court of Justice. It’s a shaming episode, and on the whole one that Britons, I find, don’t know about.

The Bosnians know, but they’re too nice to mention it. No one wants to talk about that stuff anyway, they just want to dance and get rich and fall in love. Which gives an extra poignancy to being British there, to me anyway: I’m craven with apologies. I’ll do anything to this town to make it up. The best I can do is spend money, which, given the exchange rate, is quite hard to do in serious quantities. But the West has spent 12 years buying its conscience back with guilt money, and the city is looking great again. You have to work hard to find bulletholes. The city squares are packed, in the summer anyway, with a very hip, very sexy café society — locals with green eyes and asymmetric hairdos chain-smoking and talking about the metaphysics of film. Every evening at dusk the whole city comes out to do a sort of paseo, walking arm-in-arm up and down the main shopping streets of Ferhadija and Saraci, just seeing and being seen, courteously greeting friends, chatting, flirting, being calm.

As the sun goes down behind the great slab of Mount Igman, a galaxy of streetlights comes on all over the city slopes, minarets wail into life, church bells call, and rooks gather to roost in their cemetery trees. The beauty is almost painful. It’s a good place to be young and in love.

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