Remembering Ivan Stambolić: “In besieged Sarajevo I was constantly on the verge of tears”

Bosnia and Herzegovina, (Patria) - On 23 February 2004, the trial of those accused of murdering former President of the Presidency of Serbia Ivan Stambolić began before the Special Court in Belgrade. Ivan Stambolić was a democratic alternative to the criminal regime, but Slobodan Milošević ousted him from politics, creating a chauvinistic euphoria in Serbia.

After everything, the Milošević regime brutally liquidated him on 25 August 2000. Three years after the murder, one of the killers spoke up, and the remains of Ivan Stambolić were found buried on Fruška Gora. It was said that he was severely wounded and, even, buried alive while wounded.  It was a political verdict and a mafia-style murder. It is interesting that to this day, Serbian media write negatively about Stambolić, and that recently there has also been talk of a staged traffic accident involving Stambolić's daughter Bojana. She died in 1988, a year after her father's resistance to Milošević's fascism.    

The people of Sarajevo remember his visit to the tormented and massacred city in April 1995. Journalists from Radio Free Europe conducted an interview with Stambolić at the time. The most interesting parts are those that speak of Stambolić's experiences in besieged Sarajevo.

He arrived in Sarajevo with a group of Belgraders during the siege of the city. It was spring 1995. Journalists asked him why he embarked on this risky journey?

“Because of the people in Sarajevo and solidarity with those people,” said Stambolić. “But also because of those here, who were against the killing, destruction and devastation of a city and the people in it. And because of those who commanded and directed it. As I said then in Sarajevo, to show by such an act that patriotism, if it is not love for humanity, is false.”

“Every encounter in Sarajevo, during those few days, was moving. Constantly a lump in the throat and almost on the verge of tears. I remember many. The conversations and days I spent with Izet Sarajlić remain in my very deep and vivid memory. But, I would tell one, since we are talking about encounters. I was walking through the park between the Government and the Presidency. A light rain was drizzling, a woman, decently dressed and groomed, middle-aged, was walking with an umbrella in her hand and turned in that park where there were just the two of us, no one else around, straight towards me. It was a bit unusual. She approached, tried to say something, couldn't, hugged me and started crying. Then it lasted, it seemed long to me, but it was just a few moments. And my throat tightened. We were in that embrace, the woman pulled away, left and didn't say a word. I went to the Presidency and it took me a long time to calm down. That woman obviously recognized me, television had shown us a lot those days. There were many such encounters there. With old friends and with new ones we were making, who told us everything they had experienced from the shells. It was a journey that is not forgotten. And I would be very sorry, I would be much poorer, if I had not done it,” Stambolić recalled.

Due to the shelling, the group had to go through the tunnel:

“That is a journey, an Odyssey, which has its own story. First through that tunnel. They brought us to the tunnel at dusk, through protected streets. We entered it, water up to our knees. I'm carrying a small suitcase. Interestingly, it is nine hundred and something meters long, and halfway through we were all sweating. When we came out, the army was waiting for us there. They recognized us, welcomed us warmly. We stayed there a long time. We were sweaty, and it was very cold. We dried off somehow in that cold, there was nowhere to go inside. I thought I was definitely getting pneumonia. I consoled myself that we would somehow reach Split, and surely there is a hospital there. Those soldiers, every single one, asked us why we needed this, why this, why that, what we had done to ourselves. Those conversations with them were an experience, how they saw that war.”

The kidnappers and murderers of Ivan Stambolić, about ten of them, received around 200 years in prison. The war mongers of the Milošević regime are still in power in Serbia.