In 1994 and 1995 the author was sent as a voluntary conscript by UNPROFOR (United Protection Force, the U.N. armed force in former Yugoslavia) to war-torn Bosnia. He served in a Dutch Army combat engineering platoon for Support Command, the supporting unit of Dutchbat, the Dutch Army unit which was mainly located in the enclave Srebrenica.
In 1992, after the start of the war in Bosnia, the area around Srebrenica in Eastern-Bosnia had turned into hell on earth, and tens of thousands of refugees were packed in a restricted area that was, in fact, an open-air concentration camp. This gruesome war, which raged the country from 1992 to 1995 and was almost daily front-page news, resulted in more than 100,000 deaths and more than 200,000 injuries. Nearly half the population of four and a half million people were on the run. The Bosnian war was marked by bitter fighting, violent shelling of towns and villages, horrific massacres, ethnic cleansing, and systematic rapes.
In the summer of 1995, Bosnian Serb troops, were ordered to capture the entire enclave, which happened on July 11, 1995. In the aftermath more than 8,000 men and boys were killed and between 25,000 and 30,000 Bosnian Muslim women, children and elderly were expelled from the enclave.
During his stay in Bosnia the author felt little more than a cog in the U.N. machinery for six months in that war. He experienced powerlessness and frustrations, saw the suffering of the Bosnian people, and was sometimes trapped in the small-minded, sometimes very oppressive U.N. camp life where he tried to do his daily tasks as combat engineer.
This book describes the author's story based on his experiences between 1994 and 1995, during one of the darkest times in Bosnian history. It is not a book about heroism nor a description of the entire course of the war in Bosnia and in Eastern Bosnia or Srebrenica.
This book is mainly about everyday life, UNPROFOR's impotence and incompetence, and the enormous chaos in the U.N. command. It's about the U.N.'s totally impossible mandate which had too few and insufficiently armed peacekeepers. And, finally, it's about the complete misrepresentation and promises made to the world and to the local people
It seemed like the U.N. was doing nothing, and yet the U.N. peacekeepers were increasingly being abused, shot at, attacked, and taken hostage by the warring parties. The peacekeepers were sometimes frustrated like crazy because the war dragged on and on. They witnessed so much misery and hopelessness in Bosnia that others could never fathom.
An outsider might not understand or appreciate their conduct or state of mind at the time. They witnessed so much misery and hopelessness in Bosnia that others could never fathom.
This book also describes the authors war against PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) which hit him severely after the war and how "the war inside his head" very unannounced, very unreasonable, very unpleasant, and usually very incomprehensible flared up again and again.
His trips to Bosnia in 2018 and 2019, the conversations he had there with people who had experienced the war personally, and his healing process from PTSD led him to write this book.
By writing this book, the trips he made to Bosnia, the people he met and the open conversations the author had with them, the burden of the past twenty-five years has practically melted away. His shame about the failed Dutchbat mission in Srebrenica has disappeared, he doesn't sweat anymore when he talks about Bosnia and the pit in his stomach is gone.
He cannot be at peace with the fall of the enclave and how the people of the enclave, Dutchbat, Support Command, other UN soldiers and Bosniaks were used as pawns in a chess game. He will have to learn to live with that, which won't be easy. And it doesn't have to be. But after twenty-five years, he can finally accept that he was not the UN soldier that he wanted to be.
