Poverty and War: Lessons in Bosnia /
The first home I visited in wartime Sarajevo belonged to a middle-class family, comfortable before the war, car owners, accustomed to Adriatic vacations.
By 1994 they were reduced to a couple of habitable rooms, surviving on humanitarian handouts, yet hospitable in the Bosnian tradition. They offered coffee; I declined, thinking I’d save them the couple of dollars it cost per cup on the black market. They made it anyway, adding the sugar that was probably worth more than its weight in gold. I forgot an almost-full pack of Marlboros, worth almost $20 on the street at that time. They sent a child scurrying after me to make sure I got my cigarettes back.
Whatever their situation today, they are probably still struggling. War is a great leveler – it brings poverty to just about everyone caught up in the conflict (save for the profiteers doing business across front lines). So a European country, host to the 1984 Winter Olympics, post-Communist yet prosperous enough to send tourists to Italy and beyond, was reduced to penury in just four years.
Bosnia’s bitter aftermath suggests useful lessons on what nations at war can do when the fighting stops.
During the siege of Sarajevo, people traded wedding rings for a few German Marks and burned furniture to stay warm. The rich and connected might buy a ticket out early on in a conflict like that one, but after a while it’s too late. And you can’t eat diamonds, or block bullets with fur.
Soon enough, everyone who remains is living at a basic level, huddled into a few rooms, surviving on humanitarian aid rations, without running water, electricity, or heating, tearing up books to burn as fuel, teeth rotting without dental care, health care reduced to emergency hospital trips – the emergency usually being some kind of war wound.
It’s no wonder that while war goes on, people wish only for it to end. Once the fighting stops, though, it becomes clear that the absence of war is not enough, and it is then that the pain of poverty is bitterly felt. It is then, in the peacetime reconstruction, that a society can meet the challenge to lift as many as possible out of poverty, or not.
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