Matein Khalid

SARAJEVO is a city haunted by death. The killing of an Austrian archduke that triggered a world war defined the beginning of the twentieth century and a murderous, protracted siege its end. I was stunned by the sheer, spectacular beauty of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia Herzegovina.

Sarajevo is a lovely town with its Ottoman mosque minarets and Orthodox church steeples, with its tram clogged streets, Austro-Hungarian fortresses and Turkish bazaars. The Bosnian capital was once known as the Balkan Jerusalem, the site of the 1984 Winter Olympics Sarajevo it was bisected by a flowing river, nestled amid the emerald green pine forests in the steep foothills of the Dinaric Alps.

The amphitheatre of emerald green hills that encircle the airport rained random death on the Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995—the longest siege in Europe since the horrors ?of Leningrad and Stalingrad. Inflamed by nationalist demagogues and UN indicted war criminal President Milosevic of Serbia, Serb militia snipers and gunmen killed thousands of innocent civilians in a hailstorm of death from ?the very hills that once made Sarajevo the glitziest resort spa of the Balkans.

Sarajevo’s roots at the crossroads of empires, trade and ideas go back two thousand years. Modern Sarajevo is an Ottoman creation, with even the name of the city derived from the Turkish word for palace (“saray”), the heart of the Balkan empire of the new Islamic superpower.

Then came the assassination that changed the course of history. On July 28 1914, the heir to the Austrian archduke and his wife were murdered on the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo by a Serb nationalist, the opening act of World War One. Sarajevo was the provincial capital of a Yugoslav kingdom, occupied by Hitler’s Wehrmacht and liberated by the British, then capital of Bosnia under Marshal Tito’s communist Yugoslavia whose death rattle after the collapse of the USSR ignited the Balkan ethnic wars of the 1990’s.

It is impossible to escape the fragments of Sarajevo’s past in its architecture. This is a city whose heritage was once shared by Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs. Sephardic Jews, Romans, Hungarians. But no more. The ethnic wars of the 1990’s ended its milieu of gentle, cosmopolitan tolerance. Nationalism poisoned relations among people who had coexisted peacefully for centuries.

The Bosnian wars proved that genocide in Europe did not end with the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps in the 1940’s. The Serb militias made no secret of their determination to not just defeat their Bosniak rivals but expel and “ethnically cleanse” the Muslims from the land of their ancestors. Snipers with high powered rifle scopes and RPG launchers would kill cowering civilians to incubate terror during a siege that slaughtered 25,000 citizens of Sarajevo, including several thousand children. When General Ratko Mladiæ’s Chetniks overran the UN safe haven city of Srebrenica, Serbian executioners murdered 8000 Muslim men and boys in cold blood. The US under Bill Clinton, preoccupied by its health care reform agenda and fearful of another Vietnam, was loathe to intervene in Bosnia. The shame of the Bosnian Muslim genocide still hangs like a foul stench in the chancelleries of the West and Muslim world.

The lessons of the Bosnian war haunt both international relations and the conscience of the world. The fate of the Bosnian Muslims embittered the Turks and accelerated the rise of Erdogan’s ruling AK Party in Ankara. The massacres and killings in Bosnia and Kosovo finally forced NATO to bomb Belgrade, overthrow and arrest President Milosevic for war crimes. Several hundred NGO’s, the EU, NATO and $15 billion in aid was needed to reconstruct the gutted Bosnian state. Memories of pain and loss are palpable in the cemeteries of Sarajevo, Mostar, Tuzla, Banja Luka. Women in black shawls weep, wash white stone graves, sometimes every talk to the sons, brothers and husbands they lost in the Bosnian slaughter. Sarajevo National Library, targeted for destruction by Serb gunners eager to erase the memory of the Bosnian past, is still a gutted shell. Serbia, eager for EU aid, has finally apologised for the Srebrenica killings, though Belgrade still denies genocide. Yet there are still landmine clearing teams and mass graves in the forests of eastern Bosnia, evidence of a genocide in Europe under UN watch. Bosnia, like Ground zero in Manhattan, Dachau, Sabra-Shatila, Rwanda, Halabja and Kfar Qana are all places suffused with pain and mass death, symbols of horror, theme parks of human suffering and human evil. Their memory shame the human race.—KT

Guy Sorman

IN the Western part of Europe — the part that former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld maliciously labelled “Old Europe” — almost every government is in deep political trouble.

The United Kingdom’s new coalition government may be the exception — for now. In the European Union’s big member states, the popularity ratings of leaders — Nicolas Sarkozy in France, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Angela Merkel in Germany and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero in Spain — hover around 25 percent or worse.

Whether it is conservatives like Sarkozy, Christian Democrats like Merkel, rightwing populists like Berlusconi or socialists like Zapatero, political affiliation appears to make no difference. If you hold office in Europe nowadays, you are in trouble.

What has gone so wrong?

Two years ago, when shock waves from the collapse of the U.S. housing bubble crashed onto European shores, these political leaders reacted with apparent vigour, making themselves rather popular for a while. Paradoxically, the early stages of the financial crisis appeared to favour conservative and pro-market leaders — who seemed to be in a better position to save the economy — more than socialists.

Today, this is no longer the case. Socialism is on the rise again across Europe, at least in opinion polls. And rightwing populism has become an electoral force to be reckoned with in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Economic stagnation has come to appear endless. Jobs are scarce and the future looks bleak everywhere. The Greek crisis has cast a pall over the entire eurozone. The common currency is now looked at with suspicion. On the fringes of public opinion, some people are even muttering suggestions that their countries should revert to their ancient national currencies — which would only bring disaster as EU countries are indebted in euros. To quit the eurozone would only increase indebtedness.

What makes this desolate economic landscape even gloomier is the striking inability of European leaders to explain what has happened and is happening to their citizens. Europe’s leaders have no vision on which to draw.

Consider the euro: No head of state or government has so far been able to present a coherent defence of the eurozone to counter the pervasive unease that now exists toward the common currency.

Or public spending: All European leaders adamantly want to reduce government spending. But these same leaders, including that supposedly stern mistress of the budget, Angela Merkel, were arguing less than two years ago that public spending would provide a “Keynesian” way out of the crisis.

Why such a turnaround?

The European public has discovered that the 2008-2009 fiscal stimulus programs, which were aimed at forestalling an even greater crisis, generated more debts than jobs. Politicians, however, hate to confess past errors and can’t seem to explain their new rationale for the spending cuts.

Europe’s leaders make things worse when they prove unable to connect isolated “reforms” — say, a lower public deficit — with any comprehensive vision of the economy. A good example is Sarkozy’s effort to raise France’s retirement age from 60 to 62. Trade unions are up in arms. Most people just do not understand how an older retirement age is linked to the crisis.

The truth that politicians are reluctant to admit is that Western Europe’s current morass is distinct from the global U.S.-made downturn. Old Europe has entered into a severe and intractable crisis of the welfare state as ordinary Europeans have come to know it.

The generous retirement pensions, unemployment compensation, health coverage and all kinds of social programs that make Western Europe a comfortable place to live were established when Europe’s economy and population were growing fast. Now, after one generation of economic and demographic stagnation, the welfare state can be financed only by issuing more public debt. Financial markets, awakened by the global crisis, will no longer support the situation in which welfare benefits have become a facade propped up by deficits.