Today is June 20th, and it is World Refugee Day. It has prompted me to reflect on my most recent episode, where I recorded an update on the situation in Ukraine with guests Arne and Mike. I’m heartened to see the interest the conversation has received—not for bragging rights, but because it helps, ever so slightly, to keep the attention on those who must live with the consequences of this invasion, including the more than 7 million individuals who have already been forced to flee, and whose real battle has only just begun.
An unfortunate reality of our current times is that conflicts around the world are forgotten almost as quickly as they begin. Since the world took notice of the Russian invasion of Ukraine almost four months ago, outrage and interest has subsided such that any updates on the war feature less and less frequently on most major news sites. But we shouldn’t be surprised. We only need to look at other ongoing conflicts—take Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Ethiopia, or Sudan, for example, where hundreds if not thousands of lives have been lost just this year alone—to see how quickly conflicts disappear from our collective consciousness.
Aside from the difficulties faced by the estimated one hundred million refugees fleeing various conflict zones across the globe, one of the aspects that affects and saddens me the most is the recognition that for these people, it is only after they are long forgotten by the rest of us that their true battle begins.
These conflicts are so deeply personal to me because, as most of you by now know, I am a product of the Bosnian war from the early 90’s. When the war broke out in my home city of Sarajevo, I was 10 years old. Before the war, we lived a completely regular, or even a privileged life. My mum worked as a physics professor at one of the country’s best high schools and my dad was an engineer working at one of the biggest and most-prominent engineering companies in former Yugoslavia. This was the same company that brought Russian gas into the Balkans, as well as the company that engineered Saddam Hussein’s personal bunker in Baghdad. In short, my brother, who is three years older than me, and I, weren’t left wanting for much. Apart from school, our weekdays included lots of playing and running around the neighbourhood with the dozens of other children living on our street. Weekends always included visits to my paternal grandmother, who lived in the centre of Sarajevo, as well as my cousins, both from mum’s and dad’s side. We’d escape Sarajevo to our weekend home my parents were building not far outside of the city, or to the one that my maternal grandfather built all by himself a few hours’ drive out of the city. Winter holidays were spent skiing on one of the nearby Olympic mountains dominating the Sarajevan horizon. In summer, we travelled to a beautiful coastal town in Croatia, where we kept a fully equipped trailer a stone’s throw from a secluded pebbled beach. Life was good.
As I now watch events unfold in Ukraine, I am reminded of the naivety and innocence of not only my parents, but also the rest of the country, that war could simply not occur. I mean, Bosnia is in the heart of Europe. Four hours drive and you’re in Austria, seven and you’re in Germany.  No way would the rest of the world let the Bosnian Serbs, supported intimately by Serbia, start a war. The world had moved on, Europe had moved on, from large scale military confrontations. I remember in those final days before all hell broke loose, ordinary citizens, including my parents, neighbours, teachers and just about everyone else, going to huge anti-war protests. I was glued to the TV watching as they sang ‘Give Peace A Chance’, with every Sarajevan who had a lighter, which was just about every one of them, holding it lit above their head and swaying their arms in synch with the song. Although a powerful sight, and one that I get emotional over, even today, I now realise how foolish and naïve it was to hope that Bosn