Solidarity

A long , moving and confusing day in Sarajevo.

It started with a visit to the Tunnel Museum , led by our local contact Rased whose personal account of the siege as a 19 year old was intensely moving. The tunnel is my secondary picture today - the sanitised , 20 metre stretch that still exists , but still symbolic.

Then it was lunch with the British Ambassador , sitting ( almost as if out of any real country ) beneath fir trees in the immaculate Residence garden at a table with crisp linen and monogrammed silver talking EU membership , socio economic progress and geo-politics.

Then the scientific but very human ( and humane ) work of the International Commission for Missing Persons , followed by the emotional realities of the July 1995 Gallery and its disturbingly direct exhibitions and films about the genocide at Srebrenica, which we will visit tomorrow.

And finally an intense discussion with an academic from Sarajevo University about education , constitutions and the desperate need for hope and change - themes that have pervaded the whole day.

The complexity of Bosnia Herzegovina is baffling and the prospects for it's peoples opaque and complex . Perhaps that is what drew me to this blip - the extraordinarily powerful statue of Pope John Paul II outside the Catholic Cathedral, unveiled only last year.

He came here in April 1997 in solidarity with all the peoples of this fragmented , divided multi ethnic state.

So , in a much lesser way , have we in the small Scottish delegation , twenty years on when so much ( yet not enough) has changed.