20 years since the beginning of the end

March 3rd wasnt a forgettable date in Bosnia. It was the day that marked the beginning of one of the bloodiest wars Europe has seen. Bosnia and Hercegovina would soon become a complex battlefield for several armies, a battlefield of racism, of rage, and above all, a battlefield of death. 20 years have gone by since that 3rd of March, yet noone has been able to fully extinguish its flames, fueled by a war that lasted for more than 3 years. In its background we find many causes: the fall of the Yugoslav Federation, the Independence of Slovenia and Croatia and the arrival of Western influences following the fall of the Soviet Union. But its not posible to talk about the Bosnian war without taking into consideration the different ethnicities that lived thereBosnian muslims, Croat catholics and Serbian orthodoxes. This multicultural situation had worked for decades, but in the end it exploded, destroying every chance of peace. The war had started, and so had the crimes. The threesided brought the xenophobia and the ethnic cleansing to an unknown peak. The weapons embargo meant the superiority of the Serbian army, led by Radovan Karadzic, whose snipers hit hard against civilians. With people receiving bullets out of nowhere, Sarajevo stopped being a safe city. The brutality of the situation made the internationa community react, although politicians were just playing to the gallery. Even when the United Nations and the NATO arrived there, crimes against Humanity were commited. In Srbrenica, a place considered to be part of the safe zone, eight thousand muslims were butchered by the army of the Serbian leader Radko Mladic. Meanwhile, the Western world wasnt worried, at all. In 1992, while hundreds of civilians where being killed in Sarajevo, Barcelona, less tan 2000 km away from there, was hosting the Olympic Games. An utterly absurd situation when we compare the geographical distance between Eastern and Western countries, and the huge gap that divides them. Understated by almost everybody in the beginning, it wasnt until the media started to show the truth behind the war that people woke up and realized that overwhelming events had been taking place while we just looked after ourselves. The war ended in 1995, with a coalition of Bosnians and Croats defeating Serbians and forcing them to reach an agreement. Hostilites stopped, and despite the situation of the country, mostly destroyed, and with more than one million refugees willing to return to their former home, a new country, Bosnia and Hercegovina, arose from the sharpness. 4 years had been too much for a civil war, and the only thing everybody wanted was a long-lasting peace. The country succeeded in its efforts to go on and surpass the difficulties, an example for the rest of the world. Although its a dark chapter of History, the Bosnian War will always be there to demonstrate how humans are capable of doing both the best and the worst.