The column of in-depth analysis curated by Michele Muratori, group leader of Libera, continues, dedicated to examining current political affairs, the main institutional challenges and the issues of greatest interest to the Republic of San Marino.
They call them the Roses of Sarajevo, but anyone who has walked along that avenue where the stories and legacies of a thousand-year-old city meet knows that those red marks etched into the stone have nothing to do with the elegance of nature.
They are the scars left by mortar rounds, explosions that tore into the earth and which citizens chose to fill with a dense resin, the color of clotted blood. Every petal traced onto those streets marks the exact spot where a life was cut short while searching for a bucket of water, a loaf of bread at the market, or simply survival. They are testimony carved into stone of a nightmare that lasted one thousand four hundred and twenty-five days, the indelible mark of the longest siege in modern history.
Violence unleashed upon a city that had been the beating, tolerant heart of the Balkans, a place unique in Europe where mosques, Orthodox churches, Catholic cathedrals and ancient synagogues stood just a few meters from one another. Only a few years earlier, in 1984, the city had celebrated the meeting of peoples by hosting the Winter Olympics, showing the world the best face of coexistence. Less than a decade later, along those very same bobsled tracks on Mount Trebević, built for the celebration of sport, artillery batteries and sniper trenches were positioned, turning the reinforced concrete curves into a deadly outpost aimed directly at the population below.
For those who, in the 1990s, were just children on the other side of the Adriatic, that war arrived every evening through the living room television. We watched those images with the innocent gaze of childhood, unable to understand why a sea so close, the same one on which we played in summer, separated our serenity from hell. There was a quiet dread in knowing that, a short distance away as the crow flies, other children were learning to distinguish the whistle of a mortar shell before they even started school.
The figures of that tragedy tell of a strategy of extermination calculated to the millimeter. Between 1992 and 1996, the streets of Sarajevo endured an average of more than three hundred artillery strikes a day, with insane peaks of nearly four thousand shells in just twenty-four hours. More than eleven thousand people died in the city, including one thousand six hundred children. Behind that war machine lay the political design of Slobodan Milošević in Belgrade, carried out on the ground by Ratko Mladić, supreme commander of the Army of the Republika Srpska, the general who ordered his men to fire on civilian neighborhoods with the sole aim of breaking the will of the population.
The deepest abyss of that alliance between Milošević’s strategic cynicism and his general’s operational ruthlessness was reached in July 1995 at Srebrenica, the first genocide recognized in Europe since World War II. Television cameras of the time captured Mladić walking among the terrified crowd of refugees. With a false, reassuring smile, he stroked the heads of Bosnian Muslim children, handed out candy and told them not to be afraid, that nothing would happen. Just hours after those hypocritical gestures, as women and children were loaded onto buses and deported, men and boys between the ages of twelve and eighty were separated from their families. In little more than a week, more than eight thousand were executed, then buried by bulldozers in hundreds of mass graves to erase the traces of the massacre.
Even before justice at The Hague delivered its verdicts, a terrible sentence had already arrived inside the general’s own home. In March 1994, his daughter Ana, a twenty-three-year-old woman raised on the myth of her heroic father, discovered the reality of the massacres during a trip to Moscow. Overwhelmed by the unbearable weight of that discovery, Ana returned to Belgrade, took her father’s favorite Zastava pistol, the very one with which he had taught her to shoot, and took her own life. A desperate act that was a tragic cry of repudiation, the inability to survive the monstrousness of her own blood.
Years later, before the International Criminal Tribunal, Mladić appeared without a trace of remorse, mocking the judges and the mothers of the victims. His life sentence for genocide closed the judicial account, but the true answer to his iron grip remains written in the earth of Sarajevo. During the years of the siege, the city’s salvation did not come from the negotiating tables of diplomacy, but from the mud. Dug by hand in the dark, an eight-hundred-meter tunnel passed beneath the airport runway, connecting the city to the free world. Just over a meter and a half high, and used to move weapons, food and the wounded, that passage was the jugular vein that kept the capital and its dignity alive.
Srebrenica, by contrast, left an indelible shadow on the very architecture of Western security. The proclamation of the enclave as a United Nations safe area proved to be a dramatic illusion. The battalion of Dutch peacekeepers, Dutchbat III, understaffed, lacking a clear mandate to engage and abandoned by the chain of command without air cover, passively watched as the population was disarmed and the victims handed over to their executioners. An institutional and ethical collapse that, years later, led to the resignation of the entire government of the Netherlands and to the landmark rulings of the Dutch Supreme Court on the state’s civil liability.
The story of Ratko Mladić and the trajectory of Milošević’s regime transcend the individual criminal figures to become a historiographical and ethical lesson on the drift of ethnic nationalism. The general’s death in the darkness of a cell at The Hague, which occurred just a few days ago without a single sign of remorse, closes the final earthly chapter of a man who believed he could make history through violence. But his passing leaves us with a precise and bitter lesson. It teaches us that human justice, however fundamental, often arrives too late to heal the voids left by terror. It reminds us that history’s monsters are not born as giants, but are fed by silence, political complicity and the ethical collapse of international institutions. Beyond the biological end of the executioners, beyond the rubble and the silence of the courts, those red resin stains on the asphalt continue to speak to us. The Roses of Sarajevo are not flowers, and they are not pity, but the stubborn refusal to forget. They remain there to remind the world that while tyrants sooner or later fall, consumed by their own guilt, the dignity of those who survived hell continues to bloom upon history’s scars.
