Before the Trip

I've been telling people about this upcoming trip to Bosnia/Herzegovina with the Week of Compassion for months, and usually the first response is something to the effect of "Why on Earth are you going to Bosnia? / Why on Earth would you want to go to Bosnia?" It's not the tourist capital of Europe, and the name "Bosnia" usually gets tied in our minds to other, more sinister words like "genocide", "ethnic cleansing", and "civil war." So who in their right mind wants to take 12 days to up and go to a place so synonymous with such evil things?

First, let me explain a little about where and what Bosnia is. Bosnia exists, as it is today, is a sovereign nation that was a part of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia literally means "land of the South Slavs", and so the country itself was a conglomeration of several Slavic peoples. Once the Iron Curtain began to fall, these individual nations began to declare their independence from the Yugoslav government. First the Slovenes formed Slovenia, then the Croats formed Croatia, and they were followed by the Macedonians and then the people of Bosnia & Herzegovina. Other nations that used to be part of Yugoslavia are Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia.

To see how the whole of Yugoslavia dissolved into its current form, click here.

Obviously there are books written about this dissolution of Yugoslavia, but here is briefly how I understand these events. The Serbs had, by far, the strongest military of the former Yugoslav nations. And during the eighties and early nineties, the Serbs were more or less in charge and thus had the most to lose by these nations breaking off and declaring their independence. So when Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia started to declare independence in 1991-1992, the Serbs made use of their superior military to hold the old conglomeration together.

Soon, however, it was apparent that this was not going to work. Slovenia was recognized by many Western nations and Croatia and Bosnia were soon thereafter. At this point, the Serbs tried to cut their losses, and ensure that when all was said and done, that they had a big piece of territory to call "Serbia." The point was to expand "Serbia" to include all the land where Serbs lived. They were concerned that pockets of ethnic-Serbs would get caught on the wrong side of the border as these new nations were carving up the old Yugoslavia. They believed that Serb minorities in these new nations like Croatia and Bosnia would be oppressed and abused under these newly forming governments.

Thus, the Serbs, under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic, began to use their military superiority to not only expand the boundaries of "Greater Serbia", but also to "cleanse" cities and territories in Bosnia of non-Serbs in order to ensure a Serb majority in their new country. This is why we, even today, connect words like "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" to Bosnia.

The scale of the killing in Bosnia / Herzegovina was not on that of the Holocaust 50 years earlier, but the stories and personal accounts that have survived sound shockingly reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps. Individuals were terrorized, killed en masse, and subjected to brutal forms of torture - all at the hands of people who may have once lived next door to them.

So this, oddly enough, leads us to why we seminarians are going to Bosnia. In response to these atrocities and catastrophic violence, nation states hemmed and hawed and shrugged their shoulders at the problem. Even on the doorsteps of the West, on the continent of Europe no less, the powers-that-be, yet again, allowed ethnic cleansing and genocide to occur right in their backyard.

But it has been the church who has stepped up to the plate and done perhaps the best humanitarian and reconciliation work in this region since the wars in the 1990s. Church World Service (CWS), a partner organization of the Week of Compassion, has been doing the hard work of trying to reconcile neighbors and bring true peace to a region so starved of it as is Bosnia/Herzegovina. And we, as seminarians and future pastors in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are heading to Bosnia to observe this work first hand; to speak directly with the people of faith working on the ground in this blighted land to pick of the pieces; to listen to the stories of the people of Bosnia who have suffered greatly, but who have persevered through that suffering and serve as beacons of hope to the rest of us in the world .

This will no doubt be an incredible trip. It is a blessing that the Week of Compassion continues to send seminarians to Bosnia to hear these stories of hope, and that we seminarians bring those stories back to our communities and share them. That is what I hope to do with this blog - not necessarily just chronicle the events and the sights of the trip, but to communicate the ways in which I experience God working in this land and through the people of Bosnia.

I look forward to your comments and feedback!