Since April , it is famous for only one thing: war. Sarajevo will captivate you, make you sad, drag you down and make you laugh. Some meetings with similar organisations had been pre-arranged in Slovenia, but the most powerful encounters were those that happened accidentally and spontaneously. During the Bosnian war Tanja, designer of unique collectible planners, which look even more special this year as they include the first sentences from great books, managed at her home in Ljubljana a small refuge for famous and slightly less famous people from Sarajevo.
During our trip, she arranged to meet some former refugees who are now her quite powerful friends from Sarajevo. Tanja, otherwise a native of the town of Jesenice, sympathised with the city back then and felt a special connection with the country long after the guns on Igman were silenced. She is a voracious reader and I hope that some day she will publish what people need to read in order to understand what really happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the wider region, which was ravaged by wars and marked by blood and crazed killing.
Somebody once told me, and I do not know if it is true, that the Balkans is the worst place in the world for cruelty. All four of us were left speechless after this less than year-old man, father of three children, bared his soul to us in that taxi.
How he shook after the first time he killed a man. How in action you first feel fear, then after a couple of minutes you go numb, you shoot, and it is not until you reach the safe haven of the barracks that you finally start shaking.
How war veterans like him do not have secure jobs in the numerous public administration offices for they are reserved for people with connections and for those who went into hiding during the war. How there was a misunderstanding between the Croatian and the Bosnian people during the war that led to some shooting. He became a member of a Bosnian special forces unit at the young age of seventeen.
