I have just finished reading a rather compelling book by one Savo Heleta, entitled Not My Turn to Die, in which the author details his extraordinarily harrowing childhood living in war-torn Bosnia. As a Serb in the predominantly Muslim town of Goražde, Savo and his family endured extreme hardship and daily terror for two years. His accounts of daily turmoil become gradually less-immediate and wearier of the whole affair. When living in a besieged town, surrounded by an ethnicity that for the most part want to kill you, results in a young child becoming increasingly desensitised to it all, one can begin to understand the horrors of civilians caught in conflict.

But what frustrated me most about the book was Heleta’s recounting on several occasions of his father and mother appealing to Red Cross and UN officials to help them get the hell out of Goražde, only to be met with utter indifference at every turn. From the food aid sent into the town being taken by those who really didn’t need it, to the outright unhelpfulness of Red Cross officials in attempting to get the Serbs out of the town before they were all completely massacred. I’ve never been a fan of these monolithic aid organisations, especially when more of their time and resources are spent making sure it’s safe for them to go about saving lives rather than actually saving lives.

From an external viewpoint, this kind of incompetence from the people who are supposed to be there to help those in dire need is rather depressing. When one hears of a UN humanitarian mission in some war-torn part of the world, one relaxes a little bit, knowing that they can at least provide some modicum of aid to the innocents caught in the crossfire. But whether it’s Bosnia, Somalia or Afghanistan, too often these organisations are far too top-heavy and unwieldy to actually make any difference on the ground, other than fueling a black market for luxury food items. Indeed, most of the aid work done in Afghanistan is ironically organised through American contractors, rather than UN-sponsored missions, a sad testament to their inability to truly make a difference. When your organisation talks of a timeframe in terms of years to deliver substandard humanitarian aid, I have to really ask, what on earth is the point? Far rather contract to private contractors who will run their aid missions like a business, ie efficiently, than rely on ungainly government programmes which, like most government programmes are wont to do, take a far larger budget and amount of time to do a less-effective job.

For the author and his family, I would think that being let down time and time again by those very officials who should be helping you get out of this man-made hell would make one very bitter. But in times of conflict, it is very easy for these organisations to run amok with little to no oversight. It’s easy to make excuses for poor service delivery when you’re amidst an ethnic cleansing. But that doesn’t make it right, nor should it. If you’re going to go into a besieged town and try and help the population, do it right or don’t do it at all. Because a half-assed job means that those other organisations who could potentially help stay away, thinking that all is fine and dandy in Goražde, when it’s anything but. But who on earth would want that unsavoury task of scrutinising aid organisations? It’s akin to asking Mother Theresa for more bread and medicine, or something. But the dark truth of it all is that this is precisely what’s needed for a real, swift response and difference to be made. Yet it seems that ethnic cleansing still occurs while these organisations sit idly by, tied by bureaucracy and ridiculous legislation. When you’re a 14 year-old boy in a hostile town besieged by Serbian forces, pieces of paper with signatures restricting their employees to help get victims out of the line of fire are hardly comforting.

But Savo Heleta and his family did eventually get out of Goražde, by swimming the Drina River for almost an hour, and finally managed to get to safety. In a country that the UN has often touted as its special case, the only apparatus that could save Heleta’s family were the bonds he and his relatives had formed with close friends, Serb and Muslim alike, rather than on external UN or Red Cross sources. Put simply, if they were to rely on aid organisations for… well… aid, they would now be among those many Serbs killed in Goražde by their former neighbours, co-workers and friends.

The book hits shelves on the 20th of March and is well worth a read. It’s not so much a political insight into the hellhole that is Bosnian contemporary history but more a personal account of one Serbian family’s misery at the hands of forces well beyond their control. This is the book to read to put a human face on the misery experienced by so many in Bosnia. As someone who has already admitted to a deep ignorance on the Bosnian genocide and subsequent Balkans-related disasters, I found it a rather illuminating read. Just don’t expect to put on a happy face while reading it.