One great love tragically ended in May 1993 and became a sad metaphor of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Amidst a brutal Balkan war pitting Orthodox Christians against Muslims, a young couple lie dead in each other's arms on a bridge in Sarajevo, Bosnia, shot by sniper fire while trying to escape in the besieged city. She is Admira Ismic, a 25-year-old Bosnian Muslim and he is a 24-year-old Orthodox Serb named Bosko Brckic. The international media dubs them "Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo", depicting them in death as a 20th-century version of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers.
This war was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia. The multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – which was inhabited by mainly Muslim Bosniaks (44%), as well as Orthodox Serbs (32.5%) and Catholic Croats (17%) (Akrap). A country torn apart by civil war. With the rising nationalistic tension and ethnic conflict, relationships such as lovers, friends, neighbors, coworkers and so on were broken. In the war, people stopped being able to see their friends of different ethnicities as human or in some cases had to ‘betray’ their ethnicity and run away from the conflict to avoid killing people. Such as the sniper who killed these two young lovers stopped seeing other ethnicities, and ethnic ‘traitors’ as humans, erasing all the connections they had.
“Love can’t win over people who don’t believe in love.
For those people who are shooting at us don’t believe in love.
For them, love doesn’t exist.
Their love is a bullet, and NOTHING MORE.”
———— Admira’s father (‘Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo’ 1994)
The unattended memory of bloodshed chaos and loss curdles into an unknown interior presence. Broken relationships and people disconnected from each other became their trauma.
Qingyun Cai
Original images:
National Film Board of Canada. “Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo.” National Film Board of Canada, John Zaritsky, 1994, www.nfb.ca/film/romeo_and_juliet_in_sarajevo. Accessed 14 Dec. 2020.