Our Balkans writer remembers; Bosnians try to forget
THE flyblown plaza in front of Sarajevo’s railway station is called “Srebrenica Genocide Victims Square”. The echoey, empty station is like a cathedral. When Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, was at the heart of the former Yugoslavia it bustled. Now only 11 trains a day depart, and 11 arrive.
Most Bosnians have lost the habit of train travel. “You are mad” said friends when I said I was taking the train: it will be disgusting and the toilets will be clogged. They don’t know that it is as modern a train as you will find anywhere in Europe. The rolling stock was delivered from Spain in 2010 and then parked in a siding until 2016, when tracks and infrastructure was finally upgraded to take them.
Opposite me is Morsal, 26 years old. She is travelling with her two-year-old daughter, who was born in a refugee camp in Serbia. Morsal explains that she used to be a policewoman in Afghanistan. She shows me a picture of a woman surrounded by white cloth and has something white on her mouth. It takes me a few seconds to realise that the subject is lying in a coffin.
I have little doubt that Asal and Morsal will flourish in, and contribute to, any country that takes them in. I cannot say the same about a group of Algerian men in our carriage. One, who sports a top-knot, says his father is in France but he cannot get a visa to go there because, he chortles, he has been in jail four times “for fighting and that sort of thing”.
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