We did this partly as committed journalists. Our time in Sarajevo would finish when the trams-whose service stopped when their main route became known as Sniper’s Alley-finally started again and we heard the bells ringing. My colleagues and I vowed to stay until the end. I was there along with my colleagues who had reported the war as a testimony so that we would never forget what happened during the siege. I can say without drama that those years, 1992 to 1995, were the most potent of my life: professionally, personally, emotionally. The hell of Sarajevo finally lifted after more than 11,541 people died-over 500 of them children.
Sieges destroy the body-as was clear in Bosnia then and in Syria now-but once again, what’s far more damaging is the annihilation of the soul.Īmerica’s China Strategy Is Working Michael Schuman In Sarajevo, even more than the crashing shells, more than the snipers’ bullets embedded into knees and spines and lungs, more than the exhausted surgeons I watched perform in the battered war hospital, perhaps the cruelest thing was the attempt to destroy the spirit. Similar hideous scenes occur daily in Eastern Aleppo, where some 250,000 people have been under government siege since September and enduring wartime strife for five years, and Daraya, where 8,000 people withstood four years of siege before the city fell at the end of August. It was gruesome, but by then the population was so psychologically weary that my Bosnian friend, Gordana, looked up from a sandwich (the bread of which was largely sawdust) and said, in the flattest of tones: “That dog. I don’t remember cannibalism in Sarajevo, but I do remember a bleak day in the winter of 1993 when a dog with a human hand limped by-no doubt also starving-from the site of a nearby shelling. It was longer than the military blockade of Leningrad, a period when people were so hungry they resorted to cannibalism.
#City siege download for android plus#
Beginning in 1992, the siege of Sarajevo lasted a total of three miserable years, plus 10 months, three weeks, and three days.
0 kommentar(er)
