On Wednesday 4 November, the Frontline Club marked the twentieth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement – the peace agreement that marked the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – by welcoming a panel of those who helped shape negotiations at the time, and who reported on the three year conflict.

The discussion was moderated by Allan Little who reported on the war for the BBC. Anthony Loyd, foreign correspondent for The Times who reported on the Bosnian war in 1993 and wrote about his experience in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, recently returned to Bosnia for the first time in 20 years and kicked off the discussion.

Describing Bosnia as two countries, Loyd said: “In most of the towns they seemed as depopulated as they had done in the war… Sectarian divisions were more glaring than ever before and had been entrenched by Dayton. It seemed a sad and zombified place.”

Kemal Pervanic survived the atrocities of the Omarska concentration camp and has since dedicated his work to education and reconciliation in Bosnia. He painted a picture of a country whose youth are seeking to heal the wounds of the past and look to the future. “There’s a crop of new people, born towards the end of the war, a small group of people who want to see real change.”

Describing the often tortuous reconciliation process, Pervanic told of a fellow volunteer who had tried to kill him during the war. “We reached a point where he kind of apologised to me,” he said. He also blamed the government for the country’s division, saying: “Politicians are driving a wedge between us and young people.”

Zrinka Bralo was a radio journalist in Sarajevo and came to London in 1993 where she has fought for social justice and refugees’ rights. She described how “consumerism and capitalism [had] moved in and glossed over” many of the country’s issues, particularly the lack of democracy in the Bosnian constitution which reserves the highest political positions, including the Presidency, to three “constituent peoples” – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

Paddy Ashdown served as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union special representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from May 2002 until January 2006. He was instrumental in ensuring the success of Dayton in the early years. His outlook for the country’s future was bleak. “The sky is darkening in Bosnia, by the day, by the month and by the year,” he said.

Ashdown was particularly critical of the international community for failing maintain peace and stability in the country. “It takes a long time to wash away the aftermath of conflict. You need strategic patience to see it through and the international community has failed to see it through.”

He described the first ten years after the Dayton agreement as “brilliant” but through neglect, the progress of the country “has been allowed to unravel.”

"The international community is going to do f*ck all for us," @KemalPervanic on Bosnia's problems @frontlineclub pic.twitter.com/gZZM92W2Uw

— Harriet Agerholm (@HarrietAgerholm) November 4, 2015

Bralo and Ashdown both spoke of a country returning to a “three mono-ethnic state” – Bosniak, Serb and Croat – in which multi-ethnicity is in “severe danger.” Bralo lamented the fact that Jews and Protestants are blocked from standing for president.

Among the audience questioners was Clive Baldwin, a lawyer for Jakob Finci, a Bosnian Jew who successfully launched an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights on the basis that Bosnia’s Constitution violates the European Convention on Human Rights. Baldwin pointed out that six years later nothing has been done and the constitution has not been changed. “It’s because Europe has given up on Bosnia,” Ashdown said.

Bralo agreed, saying: “Bosnia wanted to become more like Europe but Europe is becoming more like Bosnia.”

Pervanic, to the agreement of the panel, identified the youth and grassroots level initiatives as the key to the country’s development. Ashdown added: “They need time and need to get rid of generation that ran the war. The people in charge are exactly the same people at Dayton and they use peace for the same purposes of the war. They need to create a state were younger people can break through.”

Almost 20 years ago, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina came to an end. Children born after the fighting stopped are entering adulthood today, but are still facing violence, abuse and abandonment. Through the stories of four remarkable young people, filmmakers Sophia Scott and Georgia Scott capture the hopes and dreams of this new generation, forced to live with the ongoing effects of the war.

Ante is struggling to define his own identity after his father was convicted of war crimes, for which he is now serving a 20-year sentence. Magdalena’s abusive father struggles to recognise his post-traumatic stress disorder. Ilija has been rejected by his mother who refuses to tell him who his biological father is.

In the Shadow of War is a poignant account of the ongoing consequences of war – of its psychological effects that can last for decades and the great strains it imposes on society as a whole.

Directed by Sophia Scott and Georgia Scott
Duration: 89′
Year: 2014

A documentary that looks at the 677 concentration camps, rape houses and prisons set up during the Bosnian war and their legacy today in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia & Herzegovina.

Three camp survivors and three teenagers born after the war share their memories and hopes for a better future.

Two decades after the war tension remains high and the threat of violence is still present. Can a younger generation of Bosnians, Serbs, Croats and Muslims overcome their past and find a way of living peacefully together?

Director Mirko Pincelli addresses the complexity of post conflict society, where everyday life exists somewhere between past and present.

Directed by: Mirko Pincelli

Produced by: Enrico Tessarin and Velma Saric

Year: 2011

Duration: 88’

It was a full house at the Frontline Club, the audience gathering to mark two decades since the ill-fated weekend in April 1992 when first shots were fired in Bosnia. The worst carnage in Europe since World War II was about to unfold. Over 100,000 people were killed, out of whom about 11,000 in Sarajevo, which was under siege from Serbian forces for almost four years.

Ed Vulliamy, writer for the Guardian and Observer, was on the ground from the start.

By July 1992 the Bosnian Serbs “unleashed a hurricane of violence” across the land, burning Muslim and Croat villages and towns to a cinder.

Vulliamy, together with Penny Marshall of ITN, was first to discover concentration camps in the far north-west of Bosnia – Omarska and Trnopolje – into which thousands of non-Serbs were gathered like cattle. Many were killed, countless tortured and raped. Survivors were deported.

Vulliamy‘s new book The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning charts this discovery. What is even more illuminating is that he has kept in touch with many of the people he met two decades ago, who are now scattered all over the globe trying to come to terms of what has happened to them.

It is an insight into what life is like for the survivors now, long since the attention of the world’s media shifted elsewhere.

Vulliamy writes about the Bosnian war’s aftermath, revealing the human consequences as well as the traumas, joys and challenges of exile or homecoming.

His message is that only through the eyes and memories of the survivors and the bereaved – and, in different ways, the perpetrators – we can really understand the bloody catastrophe in Bosnia.

Vulliamy was keen to stress that he does not see the Bosnian war as “civil war,” as it signifies a “perpertratorless war” where all parties are as “bad as each other.”

He also offered a damning assessment of the (lack of) involvement of Western countries,in particular the UK, which he believes should have protected the persecuted, mainly Muslim and Croat population.

“It is a typical British thing, to side with the local bully. Because, after all, that is stability old boy!”

“We found concentration camps, we saw people being slaughtered and deported. We saw the mass rapes, the sexualisation of war, the shelling of civilian towns. This went on for three years before we got to Srebrenica. And somehow, this was OK, while the repulsive political and diplomatic class contrived yet another pointless peace plan.”

“This is not a prescription for Iraq, but in 1995 NATO basically sacked the UN and they bombed some Serbian forces, damaging basically a couple of chairs and a garden shed, and Karadzic and Mladic caved in immediately."

“I am convinced, and I am not the only one, that had NATO conducted moderate air strikes earlier things would have been different.”

When asked about the aftermath of war and what the ICTY – International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia – in Hague achieved, Vulliamy called it “an act of ambition and contrition.”

“It is also a great big tax free bonanza for some international community types. But, some really great people work there and prosecute there.”

What was on most people’s minds was the question of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s present and future.

Its fairly complex political structure was created in 1995 during the Dayton peace accord, which ended the Bosnian war.

Two separate entities were set-up; a Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, and the Bosnian Serb Republic, or Republika Srpska, each with its own president, government, parliament, police and other bodies.

Overarching these entities is a central Bosnian government and rotating presidency. And to complicate things further there exists the district of Brcko which is a self-governing administrative unit, established as a neutral area placed under joint Serb, Croat and Bosniak authority.

With a country so ethnically divided, where “ethnic-led corrupt” politics offers very little to the young people and where justice for minorities in their respective entities is still elusive – the question on everyone’s mind was: Is there hope for Bosnia?

“If there is any hope of redemption in Bosnia, it comes from the extraordinary strength of will of individual Bosnians, it has nothing to do with the UN, nothing to do with the diplomatic and political strata, which have established themselves as basically parasites earning nice tax free salaries there.”

“Women have been much better at it than men. Irrespective of their ethnicity, they come together and form organisations that help victims of rape and human trafficking. They have done some amazing work.”

“One thing is for sure, Bosnia as a way of life, Bosnia as a way of enjoying yourselves will never die.”

Twenty years after the beginning of the Bosnian War, Ed Vulliamy still rages against the powers that failed to act, the perpetrators not held to account, and the international organisations continuing to profit from the fractured regions sufferings.

“It’s not just about the war but about the peace after it… wars, and we talk about wars a lot in this room, come and go… but for the people whose lives are shattered by them, they never end.”

In August 1992, Vulliamy and Penny Marshall – also in the audience last night – were the first journalists to report on the Serb-run concentration camps at Omarska and Trnopolje. Chair and Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith asked Vulliamy about this continuing controversial term, ‘concentration camp’.

“The first thing I saw were the shaven-headed inmates of Ormarska coming out of a hanger” said Vulliamy. “I think it is the right term. They were locations for the concentration of civilians for murder, rape, torture, deportation.”

Vulliamy described the international reaction at the time as “appeasement at best, encouragement at worst of continuing mass-murder”; while phrases such as ‘moral equivalence’, ‘perpetrator-less crimes’ and ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ were used to shun involvement. He explained how the truth is in the ground, with 100,000 dead – the majority of which are Bosnian Muslims – and 10,000 still missing.

During the Q&A, Vulliamy was asked whether the current economic climate could spark another conflict.

“I can’t see another war like that one, but it is a fool that predicts… I can see it degenerating into something differently nasty – crime going into a whirlwind of part-ethnic, part-drugs… I can see it degenerating with all these things exacerbated by these open wounds of war. On the other hand it may take a small incident in a place like Srebrenica… But you hear more violence than you see. The physical violence hasn’t happened yet, but it might… I think it’ll be murkier – like other capitalist slagheaps.”

Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director at Amnesty International, asked whether there were any signs of reconciliation with the new generations.

Vulliamy said: “There is no sign at the moment that young Serbs have made any overtures. I think the reckoning will come through people falling in love, rock and roll, the social intercourse, as these monsters die off.”

Vulliamy’s great empathy for the people he wrote about 20 years ago was clear when asked about his book launch in Sarajevo last month.

“It was extremely moving… with old soldiers, old hacks, with a few comrades and renegades and alcoholics. It was great, with speeches I couldn’t understand, gifts that reduced me to tears. I’m a very, very lucky man to know these people and they’ve enriched my life more than I have words to say but my greatest wish would be that I’d never met any of them or that I’d met them by pure coincidence while on a train ride through Prijedor and not the way I did.”

In conclusion, Vaughan Smith said that for all their talk of missing monuments, perhaps Ed Vulliamy’s new book The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning, goes some way to building one.

It is 20 years since the beginning of the war that unleashed a wave of violence against Bosnians and Croats at the hands of Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic and his allies, the Bosnian Serbs.

During the three and half years of conflict sparked by the break up of the Yugoslav republic, countless UN Security Council resolutions did little to halt the indiscriminate shelling of cities and towns, ethnic cleansing and genocide. The international community proved powerless as journalists uncovered evidence of systematic mass rape and the existence of concentration and death camps.

Memories of that conflict have been evoked in recent months not only because of this anniversary, but because of fears that Syria is following the same pattern. But after the eyes of the world have moved on, what has happened to the people of Bosnia?

Ed Vulliamy writer for the Guardian and Observer will be joining Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith in conversation to look back at the impact of the war both then and on people’s lives today.

Ed Vulliamy, writer for the Guardian and Observer. He is author of Amexica: War Along the Borderlineand most recently The War is Dead, Long Live the War – Bosnia: the Reckoning documenting the war in Bosnia.

Chaired by Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith, who during the 1990s worked as an award winning independent cameraman and video news journalist covering wars and conflict in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo and elsewhere.

Picture credit Robert King

When the Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from power it brought to an end a 13-year rule that had seen the country torn apart by bloody conflict, with thousands of people killed. 

The man who had been feted by world leaders at the height of his powers as Serbian President in 1995 was forced out of office amid street protests and a general strike after losing the September 2000 election and later faced trial in the Hague for war crimes in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo. 

Ten years after the October 5th revolution we will be bringing together journalists, fillmmakers and experts who were there to discuss these remarkable events and their impact. What was the legacy of the former President who died in his cell in 2006?

Chaired by Bill Neely, International Editor for ITV News.

With:

Steve Crawshaw, international advocacy director, Amnesty International and co-author of Small Acts of Resistance How courage, tenacity and ingenuity can change the world;

Norma Percy, co-executive producer (with Brian Lapping) of the BBC series, The Fall of Milosevic;

Allan Little, BBC News special correspondent and programme presenter;

Maggie O’Kane, editorial director of GuardianFilms and former foreign correspondent with the newspaper, she has covered most of the world’s major conflicts over the last decade.