Newspaper under fire: - during the seige of Sarajevo the newspaper oslobodjenje was produced under fire

For A Change, Dec-Jan, 2000 by Kemal Kurspahic

During the 1992-95 siege of Sarajevo, Oslobodjenje newspaper was produced under fire. Never before had a daily paper been produced within 150 metres of artillery, sniper and machine gun positions. When the basement of our ten-storey building was under construction in the early Eighties, we asked, `Why do we need a nuclear shelter in a modern glass and aluminium building?' At that time nuclear shelters were built in all large public buildings in former Yugoslavia, for fear of Soviet invasion.

When artillery ammunition set fire to our building on 20 June 1992, the basement turned out to be the only place where we could produce the paper. We improvized a newsroom-cum-bedroom in the shelter where ten journalists and ten printing press workers slept and worked for seven days.

A fireman was killed in the blaze and a journalist was wounded by a sniper as he helped to put the fire out. Meanwhile, in the nuclear shelter, the journalists put the paper together. The fire was out by 6am, printing started at 6.05am and soon after we were on sale in the city. People had seen on the late night news that our building was on fire and no one had expected us to come out that day.

During the war there were many acts of incredible individual sacrifice in the pursuit of professional journalism. Kjasif Smajlovic reported for Oslobodjenje from the small Bosnian town of Zvornik, bordering Serbia on the banks of the river Drina. He sent his last report on the day before the Serb forces crossed the river and entered Zvornik. It was headlined, `Three Arkan men caught in Zvornik'--Arkan was the leader of a Serbian paramilitary unit which committed crimes in Bosnia, and who was later assassinated. In the article, sub-headed, `Soldiers say they came to Zvornik because they were worried about the armament of Muslim militias', Smajlovic gave a voice to the opposing side to his own.

Tortured to death

In so doing, under imminent threat to his life, he showed the highest imaginable level of professional objectivity. The next day he was at his old-fashioned typewriter in our ground-floor office when he was seized and tortured to death. We learnt about it 15 days later, from a neighbour who had seen his body being dragged out by the feet and loaded on to a truck. He was one of some 90 people killed that day in his town.

We had many challenges at that time. There were no vans or trucks to deliver the paper, so journalists would load 400 or 800 copies into the back of their cars and become newsboys for two hours. There was no power and no petrol stations. We had to buy--on the black market--the 100 litres of diesel we needed to run the generators to type and print the paper. We were not making money, but fortunately we received some international awards, which we spent on buying fuel from UN soldiers.

At that time, our paper and most of the Sarajevo media were still reflecting our tradition and history of tolerance, both in their content and in their personnel. That became more and more important, and some of it survives, though some was destroyed.

Five years after the Dayton agreement, our peace resembles those greetings cards which say on the outside, `You are the answer to my dreams', and on the inside, `But you are not exactly what I dreamed of'.

In the same decade that the world was celebrating the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the fall of apartheid, we, under international sponsorship, experienced a new apartheid, in an area that had a history of respect for differences.

Today we are separated by language, developing separate TV channels in our different languages, even though they are essentially the same and we can understand each other. I fear that if each group only watches its own channel, this will destroy communication. Each community and tribe will hear its own message, without knowing what the people around us think and feel. This threatens the survival of the idea of respect and accommodation.

When I read a paper or watch TV, I would like to be unable to recognize whether the author is Serb, Croat or Bosnian. It is time for people to recognize each other for their professionalism, their fairness in giving voice to others and their compassion for people irrespective of religion or ethnicity. Of course, we need to respect our own identities. But these will not survive by excluding the other.

Horrific crimes

One measure of our readiness to respect the times we have gone through would have been to mark the anniversary of Srebrnica, a safe haven in Bosnia that was conquered in June 1995 with the loss of 7,414 lives in one week. I desperately sought for the media in the Serb part of Bosnia or in Serbia proper to mark this anniversary by telling the people what actually happened.

When war criminals are indicted in The Hague, the media too easily say it is a violation of their people. But it would be better to report what the war criminals are charged with and convicted of. The crimes were horrific. We cannot live in amnesia and expect reconciliation based on a lack of respect for them.