Скачать с ютуб A hostel in Bosnia recreates war time conditions в хорошем качестве

A hostel in Bosnia recreates war time conditions

(16 Nov 2016) LEAD IN: A hostel in Bosnia is offering visitors a unique experience: the opportunity to live like civilians in a war zone. But at the Sarajevo War Hostel, guests have the luxury of knowing they won’t be killed, starved or lose family or friends. And unlike the Sarajevans who actually endured the 1992-95 war, the visitors can leave any time. STORY-LINE: The conflict in Syria is currently dominating news headlines, but two decades ago the war in the former Yugoslavia was causing a humanitarian crisis. In 1995 the Dayton peace accord was signed which ended the three-and-a-half-year-long war in Bosnia – the most violent conflict in Europe since World War II. 25-year old Arijan Kurbasic was a young child when the war ended, but for him the memories remain fresh. Now he has opened a hostel, in a war damaged building in Sarajevo that transports guests back twenty plus years in time, to when dog food was on the menu and bombs cascaded from the sky. Those who check in to the War Hostel are greeted by the owner wearing a helmet and a flak jacket. They get to sleep in rooms with just one bulb on the ceiling, running on a car battery. The plastic sheets on the windows are just like the ones the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees handed out to Sarajevans so they could replace window glass shattered by bombs. At night, they use candles to move around the hostel and to read by. The walls are plastered with wartime newspaper articles depicting the daily struggle in besieged Sarajevo. At the War Hostel, visitors quickly discover it is one thing to watch people surviving wars on TV. But it is really something else to spend the night on a sponge mattress on the floor, covered with military blankets, and in the darkness listen to the sound of exploding bombs outside. A tape of the bombs plays all night long. Guests appreciate the intensity of the hostel simulation. “The best way to learn about something is usually experience,” says Andrew Burns, 21, a hostel guest from the U.S. “It provides emotions behind events. I can read a textbook all I want, but most of that information escapes from the mind immediately. But when I come here and I see people who talk about their experiences, that makes it real, that makes me want to learn about it, to try to help, try to love.” The hostel also offers special wartime meals cooked over the fire, which consists of what citizens of the city ate during the siege of Sarajevo. "This is the food aid citizens would receive here in Sarajevo every 15 days and this is actually what I grew up on. It is pasta, lentils, sugar, milk powder, salt, rice, plain flour, it actually says canned beef, but it is dog food," explains Kurbasic. Most guests politely refuse his offer to create a meal over the fire. In a makeshift bunker and by candlelight, Kurbasic shares with guests his childhood memories of wartime and the postwar era, and tells them how wars can influence people’s lives forever. His birth name is Arijan Kurbasic, but he calls himself Zero One, the wartime code name used by his father, who was a soldier in the Bosnian Army. The codename conceals his ethnic background. The war unfolded after Yugoslavia fell apart and its republics declared independence one after the other. Nationalist politicians were determined to divide the new country of Bosnia and Herzegovina along ethnic lines and pitted the country’s Muslim Bosniaks, Roman Catholic Croats and Christian Orthodox Serbs against each other. Over 100,000 people were killed during the Bosnian war - 11,541 of them in Sarajevo. Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork Twitter:   / ap_archive   Facebook:   / aparchives   ​​ Instagram:   / apnews   You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you...