Here, the destruction was not the random bomb splash marks of besieged Sarajevo. These villages were wiped out systematically, with each building burned to a shell and all the inhabitants gone. The serene countryside should have been beautiful to me. Instead, it was eerie because it was utterly abandoned. I kept thinking, this is the end result of prejudice.
People tend to treat the war, so broad and cataclysmic, like a natural disaster.
Even in Bosnia, they call the war period belaj, which roughly translates as misfortune or troubles. But this war was not equivalent to a drought or a flood or a monsoon. Before the war, millions of Bosnians lived together in mixed communities and relative harmony. Muslims, Croats and Serbs have told me that before the war, they lived together with much less discord than black and white people live together in the United States. I believe them.