is a retired air force officer. He served as High Commissioner of Bangladesh to Brunei Darussalam from November 2016 to September 2020. He served as the Chairman, Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (CAAB).  Presently, he is working as the Distinguished Expert at Aviation and Aerospace University.

I was then working as a military observer in Sarajevo, and visiting Zagreb for some official purpose. Jean Marc, one of my French colleagues wanted me to do a favour to a Serb woman. Her name was Tania, an interpreter in the UN Headquarters. Initially, I was reluctant as rules disallowed peacekeepers from acting as a carrier of any warring parties. But Jean Marc seemed to have developed a strangely innocuous feeling for her as one develops for his or her loved ones in inscrutable pain. But on hindsight, it was more than his insistence that convinced me not to fail in my duty to another human being merely on grounds of institutional absolutism. It was her sad voice suffused with the succinctness of a crying pathos that made me aware of an indescribable tragedy. 

“Will you carry for me this letter to my friend, Samir”, she asked and handed me over a brown envelope strung with a silk red ribbon whose ends were cut in the shape of neat triangles with a missing base, and whose middle was designed into a floral pattern evoking ‘the symbol of love’. She briefly told me the story for which I had to be the shipper of her article in half-torn, half-insensible and half-bitter sentences that succeeded in carrying their full instructions to my conscience. Samir was her fiancé and both of them had studied together at the same university, but it was the Balkan War that came as a fateful violator to their happy life. Samir was a Muslim, and had to leave Zagreb for fear of being arrested and prosecuted. His religion became a logo of striking manifestation of his “otherness” in a country which for forty years under the iron-lid of Marshal Tito’s communist rule prospered as a single state. Suddenly, religion got inflicted with the narratives of xenophobia, and people started choosing for themselves their destiny excavated from the dead history of the past. I often wondered aghast at the telling of a Serb ‘that the Muslims had no place in Yugoslavia, that they were brigands who murdered and pillaged their country under six hundred years of Ottoman rule, and that they should find their place outside the soil of Europe’. It was useless arguing with them. God’s greatest gift to man is ‘Reason’. If reason fails to make man understand the universality of his individual soul, philosophy painfully retreats into a terribly miserable experience.

“What is there inside the envelope”, I asked Tania. “Just words”, she replied, and to which I was not to be a privy despite being its courier. I realized that Tania had applied a sort of permanent fragrant perfume on the envelope that gave some hint to its passionate spirit.  

The route from Zagreb to Sarajevo was winding and tortuous with splendid spectacle of mountains running down to the plains where villages stood out at respectable distances from each other, the red tiles of brown brick houses on roof shone from afar in the scintillating glow of a brilliant sun. My vehicle was wearing a UN flag and fortunately had a free pass through numerous barricades. But all the time, an eerie apprehension was gnawing at my heart; if any of the local gunmen at these check points forcibly wanted to inspect my briefcase, he would have located the envelope by its peerless fragrance, and that could be the end of my story. Pathological idiosyncrasies of a Balkan irredentist could be excited to such morbidity that it beggared explanation. Many peacekeepers faced deaths for seemingly sympathizing with one of the weaklings that belonged to the other group. No people demonstrated quite so frighteningly as the former Yugoslavs the hostile metamorphosis of human character associated in the process of national disintegration. I could only draw its parallel to what happened to our country in 1971 when the Pakistani military and their turncoats unleashed the behemoth of vengeance on our soil ——- killing, rape, hatred, destruction —- is no story telling but a living nightmare. Despite all those ideas affecting my sullen and morose mood during that long meditative journey, I reached Sarajevo with the hope of redeeming the separation of two young couple through the mercy of an envelope. 

In Sarajevo, I took the help of my interpreter Radia to find Samir. Tania gave me some hints where I could find him and deliver the letter; she had given me the address of his house. But to my utter consternation, when Radia told me the story of Samir, I was completely disarmed. He had joined the Bosnian army, and was killed by the Serbs in one of the skirmishes at Mount Igman. In the course of the Balkan conflict (1991-1995), Mount Igman became an area of major strategic importance. Serbs had executed a siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995 with Mount Igman encircling as perimeter. Strategically, Sarajevo is a defender’s nightmare, and attacker’s paradise, if the control of the mountain is lost. The siege of Sarajevo (1,425 days) is the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare.  The blockade of Sarajevo has become a part of the UN tragedy that took the lives of US diplomats when their UN Armored Personnel Carrier (APC) rolled down some 400 meters into a ditch while carrying the UN Peace Mission headed by Richard Holbrooke; because of the blockade, the Mission had no choice but to take narrow route through Igman to reach Sarajevo.  

Next day, Radia decided to take me to Samir’s house; I had not disclosed anything about the letter to her since it was Samir’s exclusive property. It was a two-storied house which needed repair at places where frays had come off the wall. War had completely stopped any kind of public works; it was of no use because shells and bombs were good enough not only to damage property again but also the aesthetic being of human craving. People seemed to wait for eternity for reliving their past happiness. Samir was survived by his old Bosnian mother, and a young sister. His father was a Serb, a mechanic who joined the enemy Serbian army during the conflict, and was killed in the front-line by Bosnian bullets at Mount Igman. Beginning of the conflict, he had left his family to perform a moral act of uniting with Serbian nationhood.  

After introductory notes, the first thing Samir’s mother asked me was, “How is Tania?” “She is fine”, I replied. For a moment, there surged an indestructible anger in her eyes. She exploded, “She is Serb; she is our enemy; my son’s greatest sin was to fall in love with an enemy. Imagine how peaceful his soul would have been if he had a Muslim wife to visit his grave”. Suddenly, everything began to whirl about my head. I felt giddy. She forgot that her own husband was a Serb whom she as a Muslim had married by an act of pure love. War gives height to the pride of a nation but it also takes away the power from conscience to say “no” to what is abstract. If war had been an instrument of politics as Carl Von Clausewitz epitomized, it could be controlled, but when politics becomes an instrument of war, it manifests itself in uncontrollably poignant realities. 

Next day, I decided to visit the war cemetery to bury the letter in Samir’s grave, so that its words could reach his departed soul. Radia accompanied me but had no idea of my resolve. The Muslim cemetery dedicated to the victims of Bosnian War is one awe-inspiring sight of sepulchral gloom penetrating into the forbidding rocks of the distant hills that shielded Sarajevo. The evening light had cast shadows of irreparable loss off the tomb stones that lay scattered across the grandiose landscape of this ancient city. Each grave had an epitaph suggesting the irony of a senseless conflict where both men and women, young or old, could be sacrificed in the name of crazy xenophobic ideals. On our walk to the graveyard, I told Tania the story of my country which gained independence at the cost of million lives; those who died in 1971 refused to swear allegiance to injustice, inequality and discrimination committed by rulers of a different nation. In that sense, both her and my country shared a common destiny whose remarkable feature for someone was to be true to one’s own land. 

I placed few stray flower stalks on the grave that I bought from a local floral shop, and stood before the grave of this young man whom I had never known and seen. My vague relation with him was through Tania who wanted me to hand over a letter to him. I asked Radia to leave me for some time alone at the grave. Initially, she was startled, and then realizing that the somber solemnity of the evening had overwhelmed me, she started towards the gate with her back towards me. As I was out of her sight, I gently stooped over the grave and dug out some earth with the fingers that displaced some green grass off the surface. After laying the envelope which still smelled of the sweet fragrance, I overlaid the torn surface with the gentle and sad caress of my palm. The letter was now in the safe custody of a dead man. 

At night as I lay on my bed, I saw through the window the blue sky with stars looking down upon Mount Igman re-creating retrospectively the battle hymns of young soldiers ready to die at the call of a nation. That night I dreamt of a War that was waged far away in a different continent that gave freedom to my country.

Few years later, Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia became independent states through international intervention. I never met Tania again, and do not know if she ever came to know the truth of Mount Igman and Samir’s death. In a way, all wars are the same in human catastrophe. Clausewitz had explained only the political and military side of its institutional character. It has a deep humanitarian aspect. If protracted for a long duration, it turns into an absurd irrationality. Choice of putting people in the harm’s way for political gains has social implications. The scourge left by the Balkan war still carries its weight in the soul of Europe. 

At the end, when peace returned to former Yugoslavia, it was in the form of a truncated reality. Today, the old territorial integrity of the country is lost in the debris of history. The country is now three separate states named Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the most important truth is that the mission of the Serb leaders to ethnically cleanse Muslims of Sarajevo has not only failed but have put a permanent scar on the pride of an once proud nation.