Residents of Banja Luka stare at the remains of the 16th century Ferhadija Mosque deliberately dynamited by the Bosnian Serb authorities in May 1993, more than a year after the Bosnian War began. There had been no fighting in Banja Luka. © Estate of Aleksander Aco Ravlić
Ethnic cleansing, cultural genocide, the intentional destruction of religious structures and historic monuments, obliterating the built symbols of a group and their heritage, attacks on diversity and pluralism. How familiar this sounds. But this is not the latest news from Syria or Iraq. These describe the now seemingly forgotten destruction that took place in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995.
As not only famed archaeological sites like Palmyra and Nineveh but mosques, Sufi shrines, Shia hussainiyas, Yazidi temples, Christian churches and ancient monasteries – symbols both of a community’s identity and a now almost vanished ethnoreligious diversity and coexistence in the region – are being intentionally attacked and destroyed across Syria, Iraq and beyond, we should not forget the horrifying similarities and lessons that should have been learned from the same type of destruction that took place in Europe just over twenty years ago.
