Serbia’s Humanitarian Law Centre and the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina opened an exhibition in Belgrade on Tuesday evening that depicts everyday living conditions in Sarajevo during the longest siege of a European city in contemporary history.
The director of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Elma Hasimbegovic, said that the exhibit features items that people in Sarajevo used during the siege and original photographs.
“We are not giving any interpretations, only trying to show through authentic objects what life looked like under the siege for 44 months,” Hasimbegovic said at the opening of the exhibition.
Entitled ‘Sarajevo Surrounded’, it shows how people in the city lived without electricity, heating and water during the 1,335-day siege by the Bosnian Serb forces, and had to improvise in order to survive.
It also shows how the city’s markets and streets looked during wartime, how people communicated, how schools and hospitals operated and how the city’s cultural life remained surprisingly lively despite the siege.
The executive director of the Humanitarian Law Centre, Budimir Ivanisevic, said that a an opining survey conducted on behalf of the rights group last year suggested that only 23 per cent of Serbian citizens could answer a question about which city was under siege for four years.
“This is the reality that we in Serbia live in, and one of the main motives why we decided to organise this exhibit with the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Ivanisevic said.
A representative of the Mothers of Srebrenica organisation, Kada Hotic, who attended the opening, said that she felt that people in Serbia should be better informed about what happened in neighbouring countries during the war.
“Informed people make better judgements,” Hotic told BIRN.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
