Bosnia is caught in a complex, volatile dispute that embraces ethnic divisions, religious rivalry, genocide denial, harrowing memories and the nagging suspicion that Moscow is stirring things up.
To understand just how visceral those divisions are, we leave Sarajevo and drive for a few hours. Just before you get to the border with Serbia, you find the town of Srebrenica. It was here that more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, by Bosnian Serbs, in July 1995. An act of almost unspeakable callousness, led by Ratko Mladic. He assured the locals they would be safe, and then ordered a staggering wave of violence, which began, scandalously, under the eyes of United Nations troops.
"When I was thinking about my son, he said he never stopped thinking about us. We were lucky. He said he would have killed himself if we had died. My brother was never found and I have never found his remains. I hope to find one bone to bury him - that would bring me comfort. So I can pray." "This is my cousin Augustus here," says politician Vojin Pavlovic, as we walk round together."His head was cut off and kicked around like a football. It was terrible."
To many people, this sounds a lot like the sort of rhetoric that led to war 30 years ago, but Pavlovic is clear in his mind:"There will be no peace in this area as long as the international community represents and defends and protects only one side. That one side is the side of Muslims."
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