<div style="text-align: justify; "><b style="font-size: 1rem;">The invasion of Ukraine has brought back painful memories for those who lived through the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the bloodiest in Europe since World War II. Thirty years on, the trauma is still raw, writes Sonia Bakaric, who covered the conflict for AFP</b><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Thirty years have passed since the start of the war in Bosnia, but I can never forget its brutality. The memories have come alive again with the war in Ukraine, where civilians are suffering in the same ways they did back then in the most murderous of the conflicts that followed the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Kyiv is not much more than an hour’s flight from Sarajevo, which suffered the longest siege in modern history.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Columns of refugees have returned to Europe, as scared and exhausted faces again flee shelling and air strikes that spare neither schools nor hospitals. The same desperate cries for help from people sheltering in their basements are being heard. The hell that was visited on Bosnia is now being inflicted on civilians in besieged Ukrainian cities like Mariupol. </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">Memories of the spring of 1992 when Bosnia-Herzegovina decided to break away from what was left of Yugoslavia keep coming back.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">At the time, everyone was gripped by fear that if war came to Bosnia, it would be even worse than it had been in Croatia which had broken away the previous year.  With the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) supporting Bosnian Serbs, the nightmare of large-scale massacres in this multiethnic land where Muslims made up 43 percent of the population, Orthodox Serbs 33 percent and Catholic Croats some 17 percent, was all too real.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">The overwhelming majority of Bosnian Serbs did not want Bosnia to become independent. But Muslims and Croats would no longer be ruled from the Serbian capital Belgrade. With many people in mixed marriages, families would be ripped apart.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I had just graduated in international and European law from the Sorbonne in Paris. Brought up in France in a family which came from Croatia on one side and Bosnia on the other, I decided to move to the Croatian capital Zagreb to work as a freelance journalist.  I joined AFP there in 1993, working in what effectively became its hub for the former Yugoslavia for seven years.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I reported from many bombed and battered towns and cities, from Petrinja, Osijek and Nustar in Croatia to Mostar, Bihac and Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I can still see my mother’s family and my friends in Bosnia repeating over and over that the war would be worse there, even as they clung to the hope they would be spared.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify;">I knew they were right to worry and I was afraid for them. The luminous beauty of the Bosnian valleys of my childhood ablaze with plum blossoms was no comfort. We held our breath. The news coming out of the old wooden radios across Bosnia that spring was more and more worrying. The television newsreaders looked graver by the day as the world’s media began sending “special correspondents” to Bosnia. AFP</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br></div><div style="text-align: justify; ">bnbd24/kh</div>