Flying to Sarajevo turned out to be much more expensive than I expected. So, I decided to fly to Belgrade and take a bus from there to Tuzla. My itinerary also allowed me the opportunity to meet some old friends from Serbia.

The people I met in Serbia were interested to know the purpose of my stay in Bosnia. I noticed mainly two kinds of reactions when I told them about my fellowship. While most people simply changed the subject as soon as they heard the name Srebrenica, others became defensive and emphasized “their own” suffering. One of my acquaintances said, “Your fellowship sounds very interesting, but I am afraid that you might hear only one side of the story. It is true that more Muslims were killed in Srebrenica, but a lot of Serbs also died during the war. You should remember that every story has at least two sides.”

However, something very surprising happened on my last night in Belgrade. A friend of mine suddenly told me, “I am sorry.” “For what?” I asked without understanding what he was referring to. He said, “It is very sad that most Serbs avoid talking about anything related to Srebrenica. They simply don’t wanna know what happened. It will probably take another five or ten years until Serbs can finally talk about this subject. But I do wanna know what happened. And I am sorry.”

This short conversation truly touched me, perhaps because it was genuinely sincere or because I never expected to hear something like this from my friend whom I tended to see as a Serb nationalist. I wish more people had the same attitude as my friend – not necessarily the apologetic attitude but the curious attitude – because we can learn from the past and build a better future only by wanting to know about what happened free from personal and group prejudices.