Friday 6 April

Good Friday today, the start of the Easter weekend. From point of view of Biblical history, this is the day that Christ was crucified. In two days time, on Easter Sunday, the tomb where Christ was interred, will be found empty and He will have been resurrected. It is customary in places like Germany and Holland to attend a performance of the St Matthew's Passion by J.S. Bach, of which I embed a performance of the final choral.

The keyphrase runs "In tears we sit down", as the disciples gather round the tomb where Christ's body has been put after his death on the cross.

There will be many tears, silent or not, in Bosnia Hercegovina today. It is the 20th anniversary of the start of the bloody civil war back in 1992, which included the infamous siege of Sarajevo. That city was cut off for 45 months, and more than 11,000 died. Some distance to the east, the worst atrocity of all, at Srebrenica, took place in July 1995. The UN had kept a safe zone there, and at the nearby town of Gorazde, for Bosnian Moslims, only for it to be overrun by Bosnian Serbs under Gen Ratko Mladic. Troops from the Dutch UN battalion, friends of mine included, were forced to cooperate with Gen Mladic in gathering the Moslim population, separating the men and boys and putting them on buses to be taken away. All 8,000 of them were killed.

I'll have another post later today.