On a sunlit winter afternoon, it is easy to imagine how life can be good in Bosnia. The pitched roofs of houses on the steep slopes of Sarajevo’s valley look like stacks of snow-covered cuckoo clocks. Children skate on an outdoor rink at one of the venues built for the Winter Olympics of 1984.
In the terrible war years between 1992 and 1995, when Sarajevo was besieged by the Bosnian Serb Army, I saw how bad, brutal, and short life could be here too. Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced bloodshed, cruelty and suffering that no-one had seen in Europe since World War Two.
The worst single atrocity happened in Srebrenica in the east, where Bosnian Serb soldiers killed more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys over a few days in July 1995. Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic are both serving life sentences for genocide and crimes against humanity…