I arrived in Sarajevo late at night, and the son of the woman I sat next to on the plane, who happened to be the UK's representative to the principality of Brcko, drove me to my hotel. Sarajevo is one very long street that runs along the river. We drove past the site where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated as well as the once famous city library, which is now very much a testament to the siege of the city in 1995. From my hotel window I looked down upon the city of Sarajevo, prayer calls were competing for my attention.

I spent the first day of my trip with Zayid Jusufovic. He had worked for the Red Cross during the Siege of Sarajevo. He explained I joined the Red Cross instead of the military; my friends consider me a traitor. We started our day together traveling into the hills that overlook the city. You can still see where snipers had dug out positions to shell the city. The key targets of the Serb military were the post office, the newspaper, the library, and the parliament. Today the parliament is undergoing extensive reconstruction. Concealed behind scaffolding, the 20 story building is a powerful memorial to the war. Also in the hills we visited what remains of the Osmane Hotel - the site of a Bosnian attack on a Serb brigade in the summer of 1992. Zayid talked about the hotel as part of his adolescence, especially the search for love and attention. The Serbs dug trenches and mined the area - and the hotel was destroyed.

Why, after all these years, do humanitarian organizations still give us food? We do not need any more food - we need a place to talk - a place to apologize.

Zayid was quite critical of humanitarian organizations. This would turn out to be a theme of the trip. Many of the people we spoke to felt that international organizations had only short-term solutions to problems. They also felt that they were an impediment to the growth of local and regional NGO's who understand both the issues and what is needed for long-term development.

We went for lunch at a park which boasts the source of the Bosna river - named after an indigenous lily, the river symbolizes the national aspirations of the Bosnian people. While we were there, a group of Italians were de-mining the hills along the river. Zayid noted that 472 people have died in the past ten years in Bosnia from land mines.  

After lunch we headed out toward the airport. En route we saw the road that used to be controlled by the UN - and which divided Serb and Bosnian control of the city. There is a brand new - and very large - mosque which has been built by the Saudis. The Muslim countries have provided a significant amount of money for post-war development; however, the majority of it has been for Islamic institutions. Zayid said that during the UN arms embargo, Iran and Saudi Arabia - inter alia - provided weapons to the Bosnian army. He also talked about how the Mujahadeen came to Bosnia in 1994 from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.  An estimated 400 are still here; many married Bosnians.  Six are in Guantanamo.  There were small protests at the time.

If there is one thing that I clearly remember from the war in Bosnia, it is the television coverage of the airport. It was here that Bosnians escaped the besieged part of the city by crossing under the airport runways, which were controlled by the Serbs. The tunnel ended in Dobrinja/Grabavica, where people could get much needed supplies or do some trading on the black market.

Today the museum is in the Kolar family home,  In addition to a part of the tunnel which is open to the public, there is a small museum which retells some of the more dramatic stories of the passage through the tunnel over the two years that it was in operation. The tunnel is 800 meters in total, and would have taken twenty-five minutes to walk. The Kolar’s house had been commandeered by the Army at 34 Kotarac Street - the senior and junior Kolar were Bosnian army officers.  The tunnel has been credited with saving 300,000 citizens.

After the museum, we then visited some of the other important landmarks of the city: an old-age home which inexplicably was shot up by the Serbs after it was deserted; the Holiday Inn, which housed the press during the conflict; the former parliament; the bridge where the first two victims of the war were killed; and the marketplace - where the Serb attack was graphically brought into living rooms worldwide, and started to spark an international demand for something to be done in Bosnia.