SARAJEVO - With lines of empty red chairs, one for each of the 11,541 victims of the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia on Friday remembered when war broke out 20 years ago and the West dithered in the face of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War Two. The anniversary finds the Balkan country deeply divided, power shared uneasily between Serbs, Croats and Muslims in an unwieldy state ruled by ethnic quotas, and languishing behind its ex-Yugoslav neighbours on the long road to the European Union. Underscoring the disunity, Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic ignored Friday's solemn remembrance of the day shots fired on peace protesters in downtown Sarajevo marked the start of the 1992-95 war. Between April 1992 and December 1995, some 100,000 people died and almost half the country's 4.4 million people were forced to flee their homes; all on NATO's doorstep, a few hours' drive from Vienna or across the Adriatic from Italy. The siege of Sarajevo by Serb forces that held the hilltops lasted 43 months. Queuing for water or shopping at the market, Sarajevans were picked off by snipers and random shelling. More than 600 children were among them. In a blood-red symbol of loss, empty chairs stretched 800 metres down the central Sarajevo street named after socialist Yugoslavia's creator and 35-year ruler, Josip Broz Tito. Tributes will include a choir performance of 750 Sarajevo students. "We were moving targets with only one priniciple left -- that we would stay in the city," Bosnian artist Suada Kapic said of the siege. On Thursday, cellist Vedran Smailovic, who became an icon of artistic defiance when he played on a central Sarajevo street as the city was shelled, played again for the first time in his hometown since he left in 1993. "I think the majority of the people in this country realises that all of us came out of this war as losers, but I fear the majority has also failed to learn the lessons," said 46-year-old Radoslav Zivkovic, a Serb in the wartime Serb stronghold of Pale.
