The end for Yugoslavia

From tomorrow, the .yu Internet domain will cease to be available anymore. The extension, assigned to the former Republic of Yugoslavia, has been substituted by .rs (Serbia) and .me (Montenegro). But this ends means for me something more. It means too the lock to another lock in a cycle started in 1992.

There is a point in every person’s life when you start to realize about the world around you. In an adult way. For me, that’s talking about 1992. The International Exposition and the Olympic Games (both in Spain) are the first pre-teenager memories -those that start forming your character- that I have clear in my mind. But talking about 1992 is talking as well about the Balkans.

Then, a Spanish reporter named Arturo Pérez-Reverte was paying his bills going around that doomed land of Europe making news for TVE, the Spanish national broadcaster. Those reports, the images from Sarajevo recorded in my retina, and that reporter are to blame of the path I chose to follow.

In 2006, still studying and with no money in my pockets, I managed to save enough to plant my boot in the Balkans. Bosnia was for me my solo fire baptism, after the test in Palestine two years before. Less special effects, less shots and fewer shouts; but much more journalism. Thanks to Dzermina, my interpreter (pictured in the photo in front of me), I was able to talk to many people during the two weeks I spent there. Some others, I just met them -in a shared taxi, in the Mostar-Sarajevo bus, in the Galerija coffee shop in Sarajevo, in the Nora hotel bar in Pristina...

Thanks to all of them I could later write my first major international story, published in a double page in the newspapers of the Grupo Izoria (parts 1 and 2). And thanks to that, I could continue publishing more stuff later about Palestine, Israel and Western Sahara.

That’s why, when I read that the last symbol of a better time -the only thing that I heard everywhere and from everyone- was about to disappear, I felt a bit nostalgic too. Another lock in a wound still not closed.

In an interview at the Veterans House of Gorazde.


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