by Adisa Broadhurst, Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge
The year was 1992. Exactly 30 years ago. Overnight, my world was turned upside-down. The country that I was born in, Yugoslavia, was literally falling apart. One day I was living a carefree childhood, going to school and playing with my friends, and the next, uniformed men and guns were everywhere. For a few months leading up to that April, there seemed to be a lot of tension in the air and I remember my father constantly watching political programmes on tv. All of a sudden, everyone was talking about war. Although Croatia, situated next to Bosnia, was already war ridden, the adults around me said that there was no way that it would ever come to Bosnia, where we all loved and respected each other. Some of our extended family left but my father said that we would stay as we hadn’t done anything wrong and therefore we would be ok. I was 11 years old and didn’t in any way grasp the magnitude of what was happening. I wrote in my diary how everything would be ok because the soldiers were there to protect us. How wrong we were...