I snapped this particular photo in April 2005, while Crystal and I were on our “three countries in one day” Balkans extravaganza. We had taken a bus from Dubrovnik, Croatia to Trebinje, a small town located in the Republika Srpska of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Although Trebinje was mostly spared the overwhelming destruction that was inflicted upon other Bosnian cities such as Mostar, the scars of war were still very much apparent when we visited ten years later. It was in Trebinje that Serbian and Montenegrin units of the JNA launched an artillery attack on the beautiful city of Dubrovnik during the Croatian War of Independence. Later, during the Bosnian War, Trebinje’s Muslim residents were forced to flee the town during a campaign of ethnic cleansing, while their mosques were burned to the ground by Serb militants. At present, NGOs are still clearing landmines from the area, ethnic tensions occasionally flare up, and Radovan Karadžić, a former poet/psychiatrist/politician turned war criminal, often takes refuge in Trebinje, where, to this day, he remains very popular with the Bosnian Serbs that populate the city. As such, despite the thousands of leaflets distributed by NATO peacekeepers (now EUFOR), don’t expect one of the residents to collect on the $5 million bounty the U.S. Government has placed on Karadžić.

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