Sarajevo

Sarajevo

Sarajevo Romanija or Sokolac

Today was the worst day in Sarajevo.

In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are visiting Sarajevo, which is now in annexed Bosnia.

Well, we just finished up in Sarajevo, and your Admiral wanted us to pump you guys up.

And suddenly she sees a tank ambling down the main road of Sarajevo knocking everything out of its path.

I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that, so many that I lost count, but there was nothing like Sarajevo.

It was a very somber gathering of the reporters that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers, and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves.

(Video) The immediate cause was of course the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip.

So I went out reporting and within a day I met Narcisa Kavazovic who at that point was opening a new factory on the war's former front lines in Sarajevo.

But not only have I seen with my own eyes during my deployments in Lebanon, Sarajevo and as the Netherlands' Chief of Defence, this is also supported by cold, hard statistics.

One of the conspirators, Gavrilo Princip, once the whole thing was botched he gives up on the whole assassination attempt and he is literally having a sandwich at a cafe in sarajevo thinking about how botched their whole attempt was, and while that was happening, a mistake on the part of those planning archduke Franz Ferdinand's route as he was traveling within Sarajevo has them driving right near Gavrilo Princip.

We are missing the story of Fareeda, a music teacher, a piano teacher, in Sarajevo, who made sure that she kept the music school open every single day in the four years of besiege in Sarajevo and walked to that school, despite the snipers shooting at that school and at her, and kept the piano, the violin, the cello playing the whole duration of the war, with students wearing their gloves and hats and coats.

What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege, the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, and I don't like the word anniversary, because it sounds like a party, and this was not a party.

But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast, if you can remember the story of Sarajevo, or the story of Rwanda, then I've done my job.

And the thing that struck me the most, that broke my heart, was walking down the main street of Sarajevo, where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago, and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs, empty, and every single one of them symbolized a person who had died during the siege, just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia, and it stretched from one end of the city to a large part of it, and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs for the children.

But I think the worst kind of fear is the fear as Samia, a Bosnian woman, once told me, who survived the four years besiege of Sarajevo she said, The fear of losing the 'I' in me, the fear of losing the 'I' in me.

A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people pushing with her infant son in her arms to give him to a stranger on a bus, which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo to take children out so they could be safe.