The daily round in Sarajevo is one of dodging snipers, scrounging for food and water, collecting rumours, visiting morgues and blood-banks and joking heavily about near-misses. The shared experience of being, along with the city's inhabitants, a sort of dead man on leave makes for levelling of the more joyous and democratic sort, even if foreign writers are marked off from the rest by their flak-jackets and their ability to leave, through the murderous corridor of the Airport road, more or less at will. The friendship and solidarity of Sarajevo's people will stay with all of us for the rest of our lives and indeed, at the present rate of attrition, it may be something that will only survive in the memory. The combined effect of incessant bombardment with the onset of a Balkan winter may snuff out everything I saw.

LRB 10 September 1992 | PDF Download