Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Day 11, Mostar, bus to Sarajevo, overnight bus to Pristina, Kosovo: Suny and Fred Cunny

I had big expectations of Sarajevo but after a day there I thought it was a soulless, ugly pit, torn apart by war, offering a fake little old town, a famous assassination site and lots of recent tragic history, including the death of their popular president just days before we arrived. As our tour guide would tell us, between comments about how this would be the last famous “Sunny” tour because his boss didn’t respect his big talents, Bosnia is supposed to be run by a Croat-Muslim Federation and Serb Republic, with the Muslin-Croat Federation running the core of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Serbs running the anterior parts. In reality, the Croats don’t talk to the Muslims and the Serbs don’t talk to anyone. So the West runs the country and peace is ensured by an international Stabilization Force of soldiers/tourists. War is likely to erupt if the coalition ever leaves. Things got interesting when I asked Sunny about Fred Cunny. Scott Anderson (a journalist for the NY Times) wrote “The Man Who Tried to Save the World” about Cunny, a renegade natural disaster area and later war torn area consultant who disappeared and was probably killed in Chechnya. As Anderson writes, Cunny was a consistent liar, often inflating his accomplishments, and making people believe he was CIA. Even still, Anderson writes that Cunny’s four water filtration devices that he got through Serbian forces and installed during the siege of Sarajevo to bring water to the trapped 300,000 people was his crowning achievement and made him extremely popular in Sarajevo. So, I asked Sunny if he knew of Cunny. “No.” I explained how he helped bring water to the city during the siege. Sunny laughed and became offended then said he lived through the siege, and that there was never any water restored in the city nor was there any consistent running water until ’98, three years after the siege ended. He then asked a few others nearby, including Bosnian soldiers, and they all never heard of Cunny or the supposed water project. Since they were the ones operating the Sarajevo tunnel that brought supplies under the UN controlled Airport and to the starving population, they would probably have known. So as Anderson asks “What happened to Cunny, and who was Cunny?” I must ask, “What kind of research did Anderson do?” “Is his book more fiction than truth?” or “Are Bosnians a bit bitter that the world watched too long and did little to stop the massacres?”