The first pilgrims, mainly form neighboring Croatia, started flocking into Sarajevo on Friday (June 5) as the city prepared for Saturday's (June 6) visit of Pope Francis.

 

In his message last week Pope Francis said he would call for lasting reconciliation when he visits Sarajevo on Saturday, 20 years after the end of the Bosnian war, lending his weight to a new bid by the West to bring change to the troubled ex-Yugoslav republic.

 

The one-day visit marks the third by a pope to Bosnia since it broke away from socialist Yugoslavia and descended into a war that claimed 100,000 lives.

 

"It was rather destroyed twenty years ago when I was last time in Sarajevo. I met my husband in Sarajevo and now I came back here after twenty years", one Croatian who lives in Germany, Sanja Pausevic, said. She arrived to Sarajevo on Friday to attend Pope Francis' mass with her husband.

 

"I feel that there will be peace here, that it will spread among people and that people will realise that without peace there is no life, or future", another Croatian visitor, Slavko Baticeli, said.

 

In April 1997, visiting a devastated and snowbound Sarajevo less than two years after the war's end, John Paul II urged "the courage of forgiveness" and reconciliation; but 18 years on, Bosnia remains hamstrung by the legacy of conflict, politically divided along ethnic lines and trailing its ex-Yugoslav peers on the road to Western integration.

 

Francis arrives just days after the European Union set into action a long-delayed agreement on closer ties with Bosnia, a first step towards possible membership.

 

The move is part of a new Western initiative to encourage political and economic change with EU money, and address frustrations over poverty, unemployment and corruption that were behind widespread civil unrest in February 2014.

 

It faces hurdles, however, with threats to secede growing louder from Bosnia's autonomous Serb Republic, emboldened by ally Russia's actions in its ex-Soviet backyard and signs of renewed Kremlin interest in the Balkans.

 

"I'm very happy and honoured, I hope that we are worthy of such a great man coming to our small town," Sladjana Serdarevic said between taking photos of herself and her friends in front of a monument of John Paul II.

 

Some 65,000 people are expected to arrive in Sarajevo overnight from neighbouring countries, 35,000 of them from Croatia.

 

Francis, in a video message this week, called on Catholics "to stand side by side with your fellow citizens as witnesses of the faith and love of God and to work for a society that walks towards peace in friendship and reciprocal collaboration".

 

The Vatican's chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, said the message of the trip was one of "peace, reconciliation and joint building of the future."  — Reuters