by Gérard Cardonne, Reporter without borders, Strasbourg
(Hartmut Bühl) After writing the foreword to his book “The Violinist of Sarajevo” (Le violoniste de Sarajevo, 2023), I had the pleasure of presenting the CIDAN Prize for “European Values” to Gérard Cardonne in Berlin in November 2024 as a reward for his journalistic and humanitarian commitment. I asked him to write down for our magazine some very personal experiences of his travels through southeast Europe, in particular Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country that is close to his heart.
Gérard Cardonne (left) receiving the
CIDAN prize for European values,
Berlin, 18 November 2024
(Gérard Cardonne) My Bosnian adventure began at the Staff College in 1964. I had sponsored a Serbian officer, Jovan Divjak. We became inseparable friends in peace and war. For the inauguration of the Sarajevo stadium, he had me invited by Marshal Tito. I discovered a country that was endearing in its rejection of Soviet communism and its attraction to European democracy.
With the emergence of Milosevic, the Balkan ambiguity reappeared. War between peoples divided by religion set Europe back centuries.
When I returned from Afghanistan, I was free again. In Paris, I met the Bosnian ambassador and offered to commit myself to the Bosnian cause. He pointed to the walls of the room (!) and so we had coffee outside to talk safely. As we were leaving, he wished me luck and slipped a piece of paper into my hand. We had understood each other!
Back in Strasbourg, I went to Kehl in Germany (!) to phone the number on the paper. Three weeks later, with a group of 15 European volunteers, we slipped into the tunnel, secretly dug under the Sarajevo airfield to escape the vigilance of the UN. There I met up again with my friend Jovan Divjak, the Serbian general who was defending the city against Milosevic’s hordes: I had chosen the right cause!
Peace, restored as part of the game of dominoes conceived in Dayton in 1995, continues to seek its place in a quasi-artificial country with borders between three quasi-religious entities and a tripartite government under European oversight: a ploy to create a homogenous nation.
Europe has failed to understand that its commitment must be kept, as it is only the ideal of freedom that can keep the subject on a straight and narrow path.
By referring to “a jihadist time bomb” in Bosnia that is “ticking next to Croatia”, France has thrown a spanner into the European works. Confining the danger to Bosnia alone is to point to just one tree in the forest. The process of balkanisation by internal divisions is laying the groundwork for the same civil war that caused 100,000 deaths between 1991 and 1995. Since then, Salafism has settled on the Bosnian fault line and inspired Vladimir Volkoff’s novel, La Crevasse.
During the war, Izetbegović enjoyed the support of the international community. Muslim countries from the Gulf, Iran and Turkey dispatched fanatisised volunteers. Clandestine airdrops and pseudo-humanitarian NGOs transported weapons, equipment and other supplies in return for the adoption of sharia law and customs. Bosnian women felt obliged to wear the islamic headscarf for their own security. This war of attrition led the population to visibly, but insincerely, embrace Islam.
Today, Islamist networks are making insidious attempts to extend the “Sarajevo tunnel” all over Europe.
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia have since become independent states, a process that has cost thousands of lives. The European integration of these new states is proceeding with some difficulty. Slovenia (2004) and Croatia (2013) have already joined the European Union (EU), while Montenegro, though not a member of the EU, became NATO’s 29th member in 2017. Bosnia-Herzegovina applied for EU membership in 2016. Serbia is struggling to join the EU.
A “black hole” at the heart of Europe.
Far from the promises of prosperity and security, most of these new states are fragile. Some are on the verge of becoming “failed states”, according to political scientist Robert Bates. The endemic corruption of the region’s political elites, the exponential expansion of criminal gangs and the chronic instability caused by the failure to eradicate poverty, as well as the persistence of territorial claims along ethnic lines, are a breeding ground for trends that could plunge the Balkans into chaos and spread to the rest of Europe.
As a counterpoint to the West’s optimistic scenarios for the region, a different reading of these divergent viewpoints should help us produce a fresh prospective analysis for a region of great geostrategic importance, whose evolution will have an impact on the whole of Europe.
I shall always hear the cellist Vedran Smailovic playing Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor in the ruins of Sarajevo under Serbian sniper fire…
