Welcome to the Rudloe and environs website.
Here you will find news, articles and photos of an area that straddles the Cotswold Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in north-west Wiltshire.
Contributions in the form of articles or photos are welcome. Even those with completely contrary views to mine!
Thanks to the website builder 1&1 and Rob Brown for the original idea.
Rudloescene now, in January 2014, has a sister, academic rather than anarchic, website about Box history here: http://www.boxpeopleandplaces.co.uk/
It contains thoroughly professional, well-researched articles about Box and its people.
Contact rudloescene through the 'Contact' page.
Aftermath of war in Bosnia - Sarajevo, 1997
View east from the hills surrounding Sarajevo - June 2000. Whilst the whole peninsula is known as the Balkans, the actual Balkan range is further east. The hills here are part of the Dinaric Alps.
Sarajevo from the hills east of the city - the yellow building is the 'famous' Holiday Inn - this view from June 2000
Monument to 11,000 WWII dead in Vraca Memorial Park near Sarajevo. The park was destroyed by the retreating Serb army in 1996
Gutted houses at one side of the tunnel which ran underneath the runway of Sarajevo airport. The tunnel enabled passage from one part of the city to another without being targeted by snipers.
(See the last photo in the gallery above - text from Berliner Zeitung - 1997)
German removing mines and grenades in booby traps behind every door
Dietmar Höhne from the blasting school Dresden will clear mines in Sarajevo in the coming months and bring ten Bosnian colleagues to the latest state of the art. What the men are expecting in their life-threatening work in the formerly highly contested district of Dobrinja at the airport of Sarajevo, they already know all too well: "Above all, everywhere explosions - from unlocked hand grenades behind leaned apartment doors over tritium in wooden stairs to blastfalls between the houses In rubbish, debris and car wrecks" says the managing director of the blasting school, Wilfried Reithe. The specialists will need about half a year to clear the 120 houses and the 500 by 300 meter site in Dobrinja.
The tunnel built by the Bosnian Army during the Bosnian War to link the city with Bosnian-held territory on the other side of the Sarajevo Airport—the airport itself was controlled by the United Nations. The Bosnian Army used this tunnel to shuttle food and humanitarian supplies into otherwise landlocked Sarajevo neighborhoods. It also helped the Army bypass the international arms embargo and smuggle weapons into the city.
Picture and text from https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-crumbling-ruins-of-sarajevos-1984-winter-olympics
Since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Bosnia and Herzogovina has fallen under the 'control' of NATO's IFOR, SFOR and, since 2004, the European Union's EUFOR. This will be, presumably, another area of responsibility lost to the United Kingdom if and when our exit from the Union comes about. This is EUFOR's website: http://www.euforbih.org/eufor/index.php
Kosovo still falls under the 'control' of NATO's KFOR whose website is here: http://jfcnaples.nato.int/kfor
Just twenty-five years ago, the thin veneer of civilisation in Europe fell away. We now rely on small multinational forces to maintain peace.
Who would have known when Torvill and Dean were performing their magic at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, just five or so years later Yugoslavia would be torn apart by war and the very Olympic Hall which echoed to Bolero would be, effectively, destroyed by shelling. This website shows some images of the ruins of Sarajevo's Olympic infrastructure: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-crumbling-ruins-of-sarajevos-1984-winter-olympics
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