Three Sides, One Answer — What Bosnia Actually Told Me

Every checkpoint had three names for itself, in three scripts. Nobody at any of them agreed on much — except this. All images generated by author unless stated

Introduction

I served with the RAF Police in the 1990s. In the mid 1990s I was based out of Split, on the Croatian coast, but most of my actual working time was spent inland, in Banja Luka, in what was then, and is now, Republika Srpska. I was there for roughly six months, toward the tail end of the war, working alongside Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, not as a visiting journalist gathering colour for a story but as someone embedded in the daily, unglamorous machinery of a ceasefire, checkpoints, liaison meetings, the long stretches of ordinary downtime where people actually tell you things.

At different times, separately, with none of them able to coordinate an answer with the others, I asked people from each of those three communities the same question. Not the version in the history books, Ottoman collapse, centuries of Balkan fault lines, the explanation every Western correspondent reached for on the evening news. I asked who they believed had actually started this specific war, in their own lived understanding of the previous few years. Every one of them gave me close to the same answer, in almost the same words: “the fucking Americans.” They had a name for it, too, Balkanisation.

I want to be precise about what I’m claiming here and what I’m not. I’m not going to pretend three sets…