We see it on television every evening, the war, this is the real news. It is close because it is a few miles from the sea, it is far away because it buzzes on the TV screen – Came into the world – Margaret Mazzantini
I was a teenager when the war resurfaced in Europe. Early 90s, a very young girl Giovanna Botteri and never forgotten Ilaria Alpi words that I had never heard before echoed from the front lines of a disastrous conflict: militiamen, refugees, Chetniks. It was the war in Yugoslavia, in the heart of Europe, whose dissolution began in June 1991 and which brought with it a 10-year trail of blood and more than 2 million displaced people.
It may be said that the most serious crisis to have hit Europe since the end of the Second World War. We talked about it at school and we were shocked. There was war stories and there was diplomatic management and images of massacres and torn bodies were shown on TV. Or at least we could well imagine there were.
In the spring of 1992 the conflict spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina, between clashes between Serbian, Croatian and Muslim militiamen that bloodied large cities and small, remote countryside villages. What was then striking was the entire narrative of the conflict and the passage of terrifying moments, one of which was the first of the two massacres that occurred at the market in Markalein the historic center of Sarajevo, on February 5, 1994. 30 years ago.
The war
The dissolution of the former Yugoslavia began on 25 June 1991, after Slovenia – the northernmost of the Yugoslav federal republics – declared its independence. It’s immediately war, which moves to Croatia and Bosnia, the bloodiest chapter, and then again to Kosovo and Macedonia.
Yugoslavia had united Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims for decades in 6 federal republics under the banner of coexistence. But after Tito’s death in 1980, tensions between different ethnic groups also grew due to the nationalist rhetoric signed by the president of the Serbian republic Milosevic and claims that were rooted in hundreds of years of cultural, religious and social divisions: Yugoslavia, “land of the southern Slavs”, born after the First World War, was divided into fragments and the military intervention of the unitary Yugoslav army and of the various militias of the ethnic groups that made up Yugoslavia itself immediately turned into a bloody civil war between Croats, Bosnians and Serbs.
The central episode of the war was the siege of the city of Sarajevo, a city in communist Yugoslavia, which lasted for four years from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, more than three months after the signing of the Dayton Accords which officially ended the war. But the massacres of Markale.
The Sarajevo market massacre
There were in fact two bombings by the Bosnian Serb army during the siege of Sarajevo in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, targeting civilians who frequented the city market of Markale (market in Bosnian), in the historic center of Sarajevo, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The first massacre took place 30 years ago, on February 5, 1994 and caused 68 deaths and 144 injuries. The second took place on August 28, 1995, when 5 mortar shells caused 43 deaths and 75 injuries. The latter of the two attacks led to a NATO airstrike against Bosnian Serb forces.
The market was located in the oldest part of the city and there, thanks to tunnels dug underground to escape the bombings, even during the war you could find fresh vegetables and clothes. On February 5, a Saturday, around 12.10 pm, a 120 mm caliber mortar shell, fired from the hills surrounding the city and where the Serbian artillery commanded by General Ratko Mladic was operating, hit the market squarely.
More than 60 people died and over 140 were injured.
Bosnia’s government, made up mostly of Muslims, blamed the bombing on the Serbs (who in turn claimed that it was the Muslims themselves who had fired on the market).
We are condemned to death, we are denied the right to defend ourselves. Those who deprive us of the right to self-defense will be complicit in this crime, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic immediately said, referring to the embargo on the delivery of weapons to all parties to the conflict decided by the UN.
A common feeling, second New York Times who reported what some citizens of Sarajevo at the Markale market had shouted to foreign journalists:
It was the world – The whole world killed these people – Thank you Clinton, thank you Boutros Ghali.
Three independent investigations were carried out into the massacre, but it was never definitively established where the mortar shell had come from. Many would even have thought that the Bosnian Muslim government had struck its own people to increase pressure on the international community, many others have called it a conspiracy.
The final UN report of February 14 concluded that the reconstruction of the trajectory established the area of origin of the projectile in an area of two and a half square kilometers, in which there were both Serb and Bosnian Muslim positions.
The fact is that the event at the market increased tensions and on 28 August 1995, following a second massacre in that same market, NATO intensified the bombings against the Bosnian Serbs with the Operation Deliberate Force. The Serbs found themselves more or less forced to surrender.
