Today is the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, the worst war atrocity in Europe since World War II.
An estimated 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered during the Bosnian War.
Hearing this on the BBC News today took me back to a sad glimpse I had into the ravages of this war. We think of war as a mass of bangs and crashes. Hollywood shows us valiant soldiers armed with top flight technological weaponry, generals strategizing, heroes triumphing against all odds.
But that isn't how the average person experiences war. I learnt this in 1997.
I was between jobs, and took a secretarial gig at a law firm. The firm specialized in helping people seeking political asylum.
Every day I had to type up the statements of young men sent by the families, at great risk and expense, to England. The statements were dictated by the lawyer, after meeting with these boys and a translator.
They were always boys - because it was young men that were the key targets of the ethnic cleansing.
They'd sit in the reception area waiting for their appointments, confused, pale, scared. I felt like hugging them.
And then, an hour or so later, I'd hear their stories. They were all strikingly similar.
They'd tell of how thing deteriorated slowly in their country. They took part in a march and were teargassed or caught by Police and beaten, but still believed they could change things politically.
Then, one day, men would come to their house and say that they had to take the men in for questioning. The father of the house and any boys in their teenage years or older would be taken away. They'd be interrogated, asked where they were hiding guns, and beaten, for days.
When they got home, the parents would hear that this had happened to other families and that the next thing that would happen was that the men would come again, and say that the males in the household had to come and join the cause.
They never returned.
And so the families somehow found coyotes and gathered all the money the could to smuggle the young men in the household out of the country.
What struck me about this was how insidious it all was. Things start to change in your country, a tide starts to rise. But you think that it's just politics, you protest, you organize a march. But it gets worse, in little ways, and people start to disappear.
At what point do you realize that you are in real danger? At what point does the man who was your neighbor or customer or bus driver become the man who comes to "arrest" your son?
Hollywood likes to make it seem that things are cut and dried. War is contained in a "theatre" and we know who our enemies are. But real life isn't like that.
Day after day, no matter how many I typed, I cried as I transcribed those statements.
Always baffling and incomprehensible, man's inhumanity to man.
To read more in this series, click here.
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