The Quick and the Dead: Under Siege in Sarajevo

"I know Janine personally. She is a friend and colleague. I’ve served as her fixer and translator many times. That’s how I met her. For me, Janine has this incredible way of writing, which is really descriptive storytelling and understandable for a broad public. She was a war correspondent for many years and she was covering a number of different conflicts around the world. She was here in Sarajevo during the siege as a young woman, living the daily life of the siege with Sarajevo’s citizens. I chose this book because it speaks about the struggle of ordinary people in Sarajevo who were forced to live extraordinary lives. Bosnia and Herzegovina resembles a small Yugoslavia within its borders, especially Sarajevo which has symbolized Bosnia and Herzegovina’s rich tradition of multiculturalism and multiethnicity for centuries, creating a melting pot of cultures. In Bosnia we had a large number of mixed marriages in the former Yugoslavia. Before the war that was quite common. Sarajevo had the biggest number of mixed marriages. We had the biggest number of people who really didn’t care who belongs to what ethnic or religious background, who just liked living together. We had lived together in peace for decades. So, with the beginning of the war and the siege, people couldn’t believe a war was being waged and in April 1992 they went out on the streets to protest against the war. A large number of people gathered in front of the Parliament. During that protest, two women were killed, Olga Sučić, a Croat, and Suada Dilberović, a Muslim. They were among the first victims of the siege. It showed how diverse the city was and how complicated and bloody the war would be, especially for Sarajevo and its citizens. This book portrays ordinary people and their struggle to survive while heavy artillery was placed all around the city, and the city was completely blockaded, with just small channels to deliver humanitarian aid, with no food, water, electricity and Sarajevo airport closed. The defenders of the city were civilians, young men in jeans and sneakers, often without even adequate weapons because of the arms embargo imposed on the former Yugoslavia. Janine has this wonderfully descriptive way of describing the struggle of ordinary people to survive, and actually to fight the aggression. Despite all adversity, the citizens of Sarajevo have shown incredible courage and resisted aggression through art and culture. Sarajevans showed an incredible spirit of resistance trying to create a glimpse of normal life. It was during the siege of Sarajevo that the Sarajevo Film Festival was born, which is now one of the leading European film festivals. During the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted 1,425 days and became the longest in the modern history of warfare, the cultural life of the besieged city gave rise to perhaps the most avant-garde theatre scene in the former Yugoslavia. Janine portrays all this and the incredible resilience of ordinary people, their struggles to survive and stay sane in the face of everything that was going on. She portrays these human stories and explains to a larger foreign public how diverse the city used to be. She tells the stories of mixed marriages through, for example, the personal testimony of a Serb woman married to a Muslim man. It’s one of the most important testimonies about the siege of Sarajevo, through the eyes of an international reporter who was really fair and balanced. She was living the siege every single day with ordinary citizens. “The facts proved by different courts about what happened at Srebrenica is being subjected to a growing chorus of denial” Janine wasn’t the only international reporter there. There were many reporters living with the people through the siege. The war was extremely well covered and journalism was essential in reporting everyday life during the Bosnian war. This is proved by the fact that various journalistic reports and photos were taken as court evidence by the ICTY . They encouraged NATO intervention which helped the end of the war. For example, Christiane Amanpour also did a lot of important reporting from the Bosnian war, breaking stories about rape. Then we had Ed Vulliamy and Roy Gutman reporting on and bringing us stories on concentration camps , and many others. After the war, photos and reporting by journalists who had covered the war were used as part of the core process at the Hague Tribunal. The journalists really did sympathise and understood that this war was not a civil war as it has sometimes been presented, but a clear act of aggression against a country, Bosnia, and one city in particular, Sarajevo. This book by Janine is a brilliant memoir of the siege of Sarajevo and I will always be grateful that she wrote it."