A Bosnian perspective

As a student in the honors program at Keene State College, I spent the past two weeks with nine of my peers in Bosnia and Herzegovina to participate peacebuilding activities and learn about the civil war, which just marked its twenty year anniversary.  The trip was an incredible opportunity for the ten of us and taught us about the highly complicated and deep-rooted conflict between the three major ethnic groups, the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks.

Although our trip focused on the ethnic tensions within Bosnia, I couldn't help but compare some of what we learned my own American perspective.  As I walked the streets of Sarajevo, some of which have been around since the Ottoman Empire, and soaked in the history, I reflected on the newness of our own nation.  With just a few hundred years' worth of history, we've got nothing on European countries like Bosnia.

Although our own history certainly looks limited in comparison, I realized how lucky we are.  As Americans, we are shaping that history which will be studied thousands of years from now.  Surely, we're bound to some tradition, but we're still creating that tradition and determining what America will look like in the long run.  Rather than acting in a backwards-facing manner, looking at the precedent and following suit, America is looking forward, always pushing for ingenuity and improvement.

As a group, we came to the frustrating realization that despite the urgent need for peace and good relations between the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, there is no simple answer.  Of course, finding the solution for world peace is no easy task and we didn’t expect to come back to the states with all of the answers.  But what we found during our two weeks of studying the inter-ethnic conflict is that the issues we were hoping to help ease aren’t twenty, but thousands of years old, making the thought of peace all the more daunting.

But in America, we don’t have thousands of years of religious beliefs, pre-defined national identity, and other custom to determine our actions.  We’re in a unique position that few other places in the world have.  We can create our own future.  The playing field is wide open and our regulations are few.  We have the awesome opportunity, as well as extreme responsibility, to shape our nation as best we can to continue to thrive.  But just as we can do great good for those who will follow us, we must be careful not to create great divides among ourselves, for our divides may be the wars of tomorrow.

As we enter election season, this is especially important to keep in mind.  Surely there will be disagreements among party lines, it’s the driving factor behind generating new ideas and it’s important for individuals to stand firmly behind their beliefs.  But we we must remember to compromise and we must remember our common goal in the end: a better America.  If we fail to keep our common goals in mind and allow our differences to escalate, we’re only making it easier for conflict to develop in the future.  Although we may be limited in resolving past and current conflict, we can and should work at preemptively minimizing conflict in the future.