Three carriages from the past

The train once again connected Belgrade and Sarajevo

The peoples of the former Yugoslavia, almost 15 years after the bloody collapse of the country, are looking for ways of rapprochement. Yesterday morning, a train departed from the Belgrade station, giving many nostalgia for the past and hopes for a better future. The final stop is Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Travel time is eight hours. The cost of a ticket is approximately $45. There were only 17 passengers in three carriages in the yellow and blue colors of the Bosnian flag. Only nine of them reached the Bosnian capital, the rest got off along the road.

However, at the final points of the route they hope to increase passenger traffic during the Christmas holidays. In the past, Sarajevo was considered one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the former unified socialist Yugoslavia. In 1984, the XIV Winter Olympic Games were successfully held there. Later, thousands of Belgrade residents regularly went to Bosnian ski resorts for winter holidays and weekends.

The route resumed operation after 18 years. In the first half of the 1990s, Sarajevo became one of the bloody symbols of the war in the vastness of the former Yugoslavia. Fierce clashes broke out around this city between the armies of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs. Both sides of the conflict intended to make Sarajevo their single and indivisible capital. More than 12 thousand city residents died and about 50 thousand were injured.

“The history of the Bosnian ethno-civil war, including the circumstances of the siege of Sarajevo by the Serbs, still keeps many secrets,” Konstantin Nikiforov, director of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the leading Russian experts on Bosnia and Herzegovina, told Vremya Novostey. He recalled that “the Muslim authorities in Sarajevo continue to accuse the Bosnian Serbs of committing war crimes against the residents of the city, although the facts they cite, such as the shelling of the Sarajevo market, bear clear traces of falsification. The Muslim side claims that Slobodan Milosevic stood behind the Bosnian Serbs, although relations between them were very contradictory at that time.”

The painful legacy of the Bosnian War continued to poison relations between Belgrade and Sarajevo in the post-war years. The showdown reached the International Court of Justice in The Hague. This highest judicial body in February 2007 stated that there were “acts of genocide” in the Bosnian war, but refused to recognize the “direct participation” of the Belgrade authorities in this.

“The current improvement in relations between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina is largely due to the European Union’s attempts to overcome the legacy of the war and establish regional cooperation,” says the VN expert. He recalled that Belgrade and Sarajevo “are interested in obtaining the official status of candidates for accession to the EU. And this requires them to at least minimally interact with each other.”

Petr ISKENDEROV