MovieChat Forums > Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) Discussion > The 13 worse places??????

The 13 worse places??????

posted 12 years ago by Terrapin2212
2 replies | jump to latest

With the movie set in the early 1990s I'm just guessing. I don't know if its 13 worse wars or just 13 worse places in general as some places can be hell without a war, like Haiti. Just a guess on maybe the 13 worse than Sarajevo in the 1990s.

- Afghanistan - nonstop war since 1979 and the Soviet invasion. During the 90s was when the Soviets left and Afghanistan descended into civil war between warlords this was actually what laid waste to the entire country.

- Iraq - Gulf War just ended, and this was when Saddam was massacring all the Kurds and *beep* who opposed him, this was also what caused the UN to implement the no-fly zone in northern and southern Iraq (and to prevent another invasion of Kuwait)

- Somalia - Black Hawk Down takes place in the same timeline as Welcome to Sarajevo.

- Chechnya?

- Rwanda - Hotel Rwanda is also set in the same time

- Sierra Leone/Liberia - as was Blood Diamond
- Lebanon - that country has been at war since forever
- I'm guessing Haiti must be on the list

I've heard the Siege of Sarajevo is seen as the longest siege of a major city in modern warfare but i wonder how that is defined. I know that as bad as it was, Kabul, Beirut, and Mogadishu had it even worse. All these cities were at war for much longer and saw a lot of street fighting and destruction. Beirut was a notorious place with dozens of factions fighting plus airstrikes from the Israeli military and involvement of Palestinian terrorists and Syrian military and bombings happened almost every week. The Siege of Leningrad in WW2 was deadliest of them all even though it was shorter.

[–] antonioapi 11 years ago

Bosnia and Croatia are beatuful today. There is no war there for 17 years now and all people (except Serbs) of western balkans live in a friendly enviroment, without ethnic tensions and with occasional travel between countries.

Sarajevo is arguably most beautiful capital in the balkans, with wonderful people, religious and architectual diversity and amazing food and music. Belgrade is also nice, but its horribly poluted, people arent exactly nice and crime rates are through the roof.

Croatia has wonderful coastline and incredibly natural diversity where you can see just about every kind of enviroment you might desire. Seaside, snowy mountains, sprawling plains, urban and rural communities. And all that in one of the smallest countries in Europe!

[–] murph24 11 years ago

It was Boutros Boutros-Ghali, at that time the UN Secretary General, who came to Sarajevo in December 1992 and proclaimed "I can give you a list of ten places in the world where you have more problems than in Sarajevo."

Journalists in attendance who'd been covering the world's hot spots couldn't believe their ears. In his book Love Thy Neighbor, Peter Maass described the scene -

I remember thinking that the Secretary General was mad. Kabul was worse than Sarajevo, that's true, and perhaps Huambo, a hellish city caught in the middle of Angola's civil war...But his number stuck in my mind. Ten? It seemed so absurd that neither I nor any other reporter in the room bothered to ask him to name the ten.

Recently Hurricane Sandy destroyed homes in parts of New York and New Jersey, leaving thousands without power, running water, and gas for a few weeks. People couldn't believe how miserable their lives had become. Sarajevo suffered the same fate, but that city's misery lasted three-and-a-half YEARS. And throughout that time, Serbs in the surrounding hills fired a seemingly endless stream of artillery shells, mortars, bullets and whatever else was handy on the people of Sarajevo.

Boutros-Ghali, of course, did nothing; his lack of compassion for the people of Sarajevo was shocking. He called the conflict a "rich man's war" and considered Bosnia a pesky annoyance that was eating up the UN's time and budget. Two years after his jaw-dropping statement about "ten places in the world" being worse than Sarajevo, he oversaw an equally impotent UN response to the genocide in Rwanda. Boutros-Ghali ended up serving only one term as Secretary-General, when the tradition is two

To the people of Sarajevo, he was known simply as "fascist," "killer" or "the Egyptian mummy."

Or all of the above.