THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 16, 1995 TAG: 9504130609
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines
SARAJEVO DAILY
A City and Its Newspaper Under Siege
TOM GJELTEN
HarperCollins. 270 pp. $24.
IN MANY OF the ancient tales of Europe, there are accounts of a small but important territory designated on maps as Debatable Land. This is a No Man's Land, claimed by and fought over by several kingdoms. Modern Bosnia-Herzegovina, a section of the confederacy once called Yugoslavia, is just such a Debatable Land. And if you are like so many observers of events in that war-torn place - confused as to just who has been fighting whom and for what reasons - Sarajevo Daily will clarify matters.
Gjelten, a correspondent for National Public Radio, has written what is ostensibly a story of bravery under fire: an account of how staff members of Sarajevo's leading newspaper, Oslobodjenje, risked their lives to publish their paper almost daily throughout the war.
The book is this and more. It is also a short, clear history of the Balkan peninsula, tracing the ethnic tensions that have caused that land to be described in world-history books as ``the powder-keg of Europe.'' In addition, it is an episodic wartime chronicle of daily hardships, tragedy, cowardice and heroism among Sarajevo's civilians.
Indeed, what is it all about? Briefly, Bosnia contains three major ethnic groups, divided by regional background and religion: The Muslims, who adhere to (of course) Islam; the Serbs, who are basically Eastern Orthodox; and the Croats, who are predominantly Roman Catholic. They are separated by several hundred years of mutual distrust and hatred. All are fully Bosnian, but extremists among each group claim that they are the true inheritors of Bosnia. Also, a sizable number of people, mainly in Sarajevo, care little for ethnic differences and wish only to be left alone to live their lives and practice their faiths in peace.
The influence of this last group has been, for the most part, washed away during the war. By Gjelten's observations, with all too few exceptions Bosnia has become a place where, in poet William Butler Yeats' words, ``The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.'' In Sarajevo Daily, the peace-lovers and peacemakers come across as hand-wringers, indecisive shufflers and compromisers, people who believed that Bosnia's wartime troubles would vanish through diplomatic gestures based upon wishful thinking. At the book's end, with the 1994 cease-fire and the creation of a Muslim-Croat zone in Bosnia, ethnic partisanship had deeply intensified, and the civilized centrists were effectively routed.
During the wartime chronicled here, the multiethnic staff of Oslobodjenje fought a rear-guard action on behalf of a nonpartisan Sarajevo in which the inhabitants could live in peace. In taking such a stand, staff members had to strive for objective reporting while inevitably opposing one of the sides that they identified as primarily responsible for interethnic unrest: the Bosnian Serb nationalists. Throughout his book, Gjelten depicts the Serb fighters as little better than a swinish multitude, while the other participants in the war - Bosnian Muslims and Croats - hardly lift a weapon.
But in the Bosnia of the 1990s there is fanaticism on all three sides, not just among the Serbs. To declare otherwise is to spoil an otherwise fine book and to make for some puzzling reporting. In one instance, Gjelten writes soberly of how Serb tanks and artillery targeted and destroyed the Oslobodjenje newspaper building. But he only briefly mentions, with no elaboration, that a small band of Bosnian sharpshooters had earlier entered the building and, without a word of protest from the newspaper staff, used its upper stories for a snipers' nest, targeting Serb positions. Not exactly the sort of behavior that makes for noncombatant status.
In the name of fairness, you need not take the attitude of ``a plague on both your houses,'' which is a common enough dodge today and which Gjelten condemns. It is plain that much of the targeting of civilians in Bosnia and Sarajevo has been orchestrated by the Serb nationalists, and not by fringe elements alone.
Centuries of nurturing interethnic hatred are bearing fruit today - a lesson for those in the United States who place ethnic bloodlines above all other considerations of human worth. As Gjelten's book implies, the hatred continues; this thing isn't over yet, and the peacemakers of Bosnia face a task that will practically require divine intervention for success.
- MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a Virginia native who lives in Michigan, is the
editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor of Russell
Kirk.'' by CNB