I used to live as a student with a girl who had escaped Sarajevo during the siege. As well as what actually happened being traumatic, her entire world view was shaken by the fact that people who had been cordial neighbours started killing each other. She said that that breaking of all that was normal and accepted was as bad as her personal circumstances.
When people used to trot out the ‘it could never happen’ about stuff, she had a pretty good argument that actually, it could.
Today is a day for weirdness for me, it seems.
I was in Sarajevo on an aid project just after the agreement. One night, it started raining as I was walking back to digs. I turned a corner by the old Holiday Inn, and for a minute, the whole place felt like Manchester. It was uncanny.
And I started thinking: what if this was Manchester? And that thought has always haunted me, because I could see how it might happen. One stupid policy, one event, one disaster...that can be all it takes.
My grandfather was from a country where something beyond the pale occurred and he always said that you had to be careful, that it really doesn't take very much. For him, there was just an announcement on the radio, everything went quiet and then two weeks later, his father was taken away at gunpoint. Two weeks after, they came back for him and his mother and siblings. A month prior, life had been normal.
I think Brits don't tend to understand this because we're an island. We have that protection. And mainland Britain was never invaded during the Second World War, so we never had that experience of a hostile force in the country that sought to oppress us and an administration that loathed us.
So all this, I think, has been a bit of an eye-opener.