Murder in the Neighborhood

...There, in retrospect, was a foolish, complacent thought...

...No Kosovar, apart, perhaps, from a few upper middle-class intellectuals in Pristina, was surprised...

...WHAT DISTINGUISHED the Bosnians was that they kept asking why it had happened to them...

...For them, pro-Bosnian journalists like me had simply been unwilling to hear the bad news that there was no right side to the conflict, only degrees of wickedness on the part of the political leadership of the Serbs, the Croats, and the Bosnian government and civilian victims who needed aid...

...The fact that the Serbs were usually on top throughout the course of Yugoslav history, and that the "ethnic cleansing" of Albanians from the province has had an imaginative and emotional hold on Serb intellectuals dating back at least to the nineteenth century and probably much earlier, does little, alas, to alter this...

...To talk autobiographically, I took a great many risks in Bosnia that I would not have been willing to take in a conflict where I was indifferent to the outcome...

...but not surprised...

...And that justification—not a journalistic one, but a moral one—both accounts for what we did in the Bosnian War and may excuse what we did not do...

...Of course, it was a great story as well...

...As an old man in high boots and a ragged coat passed by me, dragging a bundle of roped-together staves behind him, and then, a few meters along, as I passed an old woman begging, I thought that I had somehow landed in a Roman Vishniak photograph of one of the Jewish ghettoes in Poland in the 1920s...

...Today, all revolutionary utopias having been closed indefinitely for repairs, such people tend to content themselves with saying 40 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 how uncomfortable they feel except in a few cosmopolitan Western cities and university towns and trying to live as best they can in a kind of internal exile within their own societies...

...Having not yet learned to appreciate the literally life-giving gift that no sniper fire represented, I moved about a bit like a tourist...

...Journalists were not permitted into the Warsaw Ghetto, but one would hope that had a reporter managed to get in, he or she would not have written a piece that tried to present the German and the Jewish points of view as if they were morally of equal weight...

...FOR ME THAT lack of objectivity is a badge of honor...

...Because of course a journalism that was always partial, that gave up all pretense to objectivity, would soon deteriorate into polemic and advocacy...

...Angry, yes...

...Like our predecessors, who sided with the Republic in 1936, we thought our obligations went far beyond telling stories or reporting the news...

...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...

...I will not defend these analogies, at least if their validity depends on body counts...

...This is a siege," I kept thinking, "a siege in Europe in 1992...

...By definition, what my colleagues and I practiced in Bosnia has to be the exception rather than the rule...

...Remember, this was in the early 1990s, before most people in the West became almost accustomed once more to thinking about the Balkans as their great-grandparents had done—that is, as a war zone...

...That feeling is one that is both shared and frequently expressed by any victim of any war or humanitarian disaster, from East Timor to Angola and Afghanistan to Burundi...

...Unlike in Bosnia, there will be little confusion of roles, no worries about whether one is behaving too much like an activist and not enough like a journalist, and no need to wear one's heart on one's sleeve...

...Even those most heartbroken by what they saw knew that in their bones...

...If I am making an inventory of what we should have written about, I would add that while we wrote about the way the Serbs used rape as a weapon of war, we did not write about the ubiquity of "nonpolitical" rape on all sides of the line...

...bereft, yes...

...But a year earlier meant before the war had begun and the siege ring had tightened around the city, like a noose around a throat...

...It would be the worst kind of vulgar utopian solecism to imagine that, as their children's heads were being blown off by snipers and all the future seemed to hold was want, fear, indifference, and pain, people in Sarajevo should have said, "Well, you know, people in Kuito in Angola or in Kabul are actually having a far rougher time than we are, and, now that I think about it, the world is really paying a disproportionate amount of attention to us and not nearly enough to them...

...I do not want to exaggerate the quality of our conduct, let alone the effect we had, because although we did manage to keep the story alive, we did not manage to provoke the intervention most of us yearned for...

...EDITORS 48 n DISSENT / Winter 2002...

...In this, Kosovo, though it was so close to Bosnia geographically, was more like a war in the poor world...

...Unsurprisingly, these same fools are peddling a remarkably similar line about Osama bin Laden...

...But what the Bosnians often had in mind when they talked about their situation was that it should not be happening to them...

...Luckily, because that meant it was relatively safe to move around...

...Sarajevo had been rich, pampered even, at least by Yugoslav standards...

...To say this is not to let the reverse racists—those who care far more for the places that feel least like home to them—off the hook...

...And it didn't...

...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...

...The famous story about Jean-Paul Sartre at the end of his life telling an interviewer that he had known about the Gulag all along but that he had said nothing because he did not want to demoralize the DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 47 YUGOSLAVIA French working class should be a cautionary tale to anyone who believes that the truth may be sacrificed for a good cause...

...Absolutely...

...there were...

...There was Kuito in Angola, and Kabul, Afghanistan, which seemed as if it had been under murderous bombardment for decades...

...Before the collapse of Yugoslavia, the Bosnians had had no reason to think otherwise...

...Even in the protected environs of Marshal Tito Street, far from the front line, there were no cars, only the sounds of talk and footfalls and, in the distance, the whistle, screech, thump, and thud, and the light flashes on the horizon that are the son et lumiere of war at a safe distance...

...And yet part of this cognitive dissonance that was such an essential part of going to Sarajevo for the journalists and the aid workers was this blurring of the familiar with the unfamiliar, this sense that one was going to a place where everything one expected to happen was not happening and everything one imagined could never happen again was happening again...

...Certainly, no journalists will go back to Kabul, or Quetta, or Herat because they believe Afghanistan is worth dying for on moral grounds...

...It was almost as if they thought they had a contract with the zeitgeist that said otherwise...

...It was not that there were no familiar reference points...

...No, if anyone deserves to be judged on this score—or interrogated about their motives and their moral bona fides—it is not the Bosnians...

...This siege was taking place an hour's plane ride from Vienna, which was another way of saying that this was a siege that was not supposed to be happening...

...Outside the former Soviet Union and a few impoverished pockets of Slovakia and Romania, Europe was not supposed to look like this anymore...

...Most journalists aspire to be both professional insiders and professional outsiders at the same time...

...Those of us who were convinced of the rightness of the Bosnian cause tended to underplay the corruption of Bosnian political elites, who, throughout the war, even in Sarajevo, were making fortunes off the conflict, doing private deals with the Serbs, and placing family members, friends, and mistresses in cushy jobs abroad...

...Before Bosnia, journalists, most of whom are at least somewhat left wing, imagined that whatever horrors the future held in store, fascism was not one of them...

...Did Ernest Hemingway write enough about the murder of priests by the militia of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM...

...If they complain at all, they do so in the same terms that the great Renaissance historian and politician Guicciardini did more than half a millennium ago, when he enjoined his readers not to bemoan the fact that their city had fallen, because all cities fall, but rather to bemoan the fact that they had had the bad fortune to live at the precise time when their city fell...

...television references aside, in the Balkans the irreducibly heartbreaking was heralded, for most of us, by the irreducibly odd...

...I am thinking here of journalists, but more commonly of activists for whom the European or North American identity he or she was born with is a burden if not a curse...

...I had not yet learned to be afraid...

...I HAVE WRITTEN about the challenges that Bosnia posed to the journalists' approach, and though I have defended what we did, I will always wonder if we could have done it better...

...They're all a bunch of swine...

...But for now, the model is Afghanistan, not Bosnia...

...In any case, to be a good journalist, as to be a good doctor, one needs that sliver of ice in the heart...

...Nonetheless, I am not prepared to repudiate it...

...And when I think of the risks I took (risks that, at their most extreme, pale into insignificance compared with what others did), I think, without any hyperbole, that it was the least I should have done...

...They constantly talked about how what was happening to them should not be happening...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...They had assumed that the Second World War—the war of their parents and grandparents—had been the last war, 44 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 the last field of horror that their country would experience...

...And if the work was real, it was because the commitment was absolute...

...But had we who reported on the war been more honest about this to ourselves, we would have had to concede that we, and the audiences we wrote for, mostly shared the Bosnians' sense that being European should have immunized them from the rigors of war that they were undergoing...

...Because, all 1950s U.S...

...Unlike the Bosnians, people in those countries aren't under any illusion that they live in a place where history or, to put it more accurately, tragedy, has come to its end...

...I do not want to tell war stories, and I won't...

...But do these and the many other sins of omission committed by journalists who sided with the Republic change the fact that by, in a certain sense, betraying their canon of impartiality, they did or at least tried to do the right thing...

...I might as well have been alluding to a previous geological era, so little relevance did that past have on this present...

...By this I mean that in Bosnia, despite everything that happened, and despite the hate that eventually grew so strong in people's hearts that even the very loving were at least momentarily consumed by it, the comity that had existed between Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims was real—at least in the cities...

...Far from being subjects of emulation, to a considerable extent the Bosnians seemed like oafish relatives...

...The journalist's credo is one of passionate noninvolvement...

...They, we, will go because the story is important, because someone must give voice to the refugees, because one has a professional obligation, or because that is what one is paid to do...

...Again, I do not want to minimize the hazards of the decisions we took...

...This in a place where the social markers should have been familiar, and would have been, even a year earlier...

...War was supposed to happen "out there," in the poor world, not in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which, before 1992, had been one of the most industrialized corners of the southeastern corner of Europe...

...She died when the last plane out of Sukhumi was shot down by a rebel Triple-A...

...For such people—and during the Balkan wars they were more commonly encountered amid the ranks of humanitarian aid agencies than among journalists—Bosnia was almost too familiar...

...But dozens of foreign correspondents were killed during the Bosnian War, and hundreds hurt, either through wounds or the road accidents that were one of the stranger subplots of the war...

...And that can get you killed in wartime...

...What I remember most is how dark the streets were and how I felt as if I had moved from the world of color to a world of black and white...

...And there was the oddity of reporters in Sarajevo being able to find their level—that is, a milieu not that different from the one they frequented at home—whether it was among fans of Michael Schumacher or Robert Wilson—but at the same time functioning professionally as they would in Africa or Central Asia—that is, in a context of war and privation that was utterly unlike home...

...This simultaneous sense of displacement and familiarity was not restricted to the reporters...

...WE WERE NOT, after all, the Balkan equivalents of those foreign sympathizers who, in the heady days of Nicaraguan Sandinismo, were known as "sandalistas...

...These are the clichés of "multi-cult" Bosnia...

...Someday, doubtless it will be...

...Of course, the fact that history—that Satan with a sense of humor—had something else in store for them was something that, understandably, for the first couple of years of the war they were unable to take in...

...Were there pitfalls to this approach, moral hazards that we navigated with difficulty and, at times, failed to address...

...There was the oddity of being able to leave some comfortable hotel in an attractive, modern European city—usually it was Zagreb, in Croatia, whose charms, albeit mostly of the Hapsburg, kaffee mit schlag variety, are considerable— and, after an hour's plane ride, finding oneself in a place that only a few years before had had many of the same charms but now had nothing...

...I think of Bosnia...

...But it is to concede that most of us have not progressed beyond tribal allegiance or, at the time the Bosnian War started, beyond what turned out to be the mistaken belief that Europe would no longer be a theater of war and atrocity...

...I T WOULD BE silly to deny that an indefensible racism—as well as what I insist was an utterly defensible and appropriate neighborliness—lay behind at least some of the sympathy so many of us felt for the Bosnians...

...For it was this sense that what was going on in Bosnia should not have been happening that gave us our energy— our willingness to expose ourselves to the risks we took, year after dispiriting year...

...Of course, there were some reporters for whom Bosnia was too close to home...

...Instead of being able to see everything and to find cognitive room for it, I could barely see anything and understood still less...

...Many seasoned aid workers—whose professional deformation it is to ally themselves solely with victims in wars, and who tend to view the wars that cause the sufferings they try to address with utter skepticism and disenchantment, if not outright cynicism—were moved by Bosnia in ways that confused them...

...By "coming home" to Europe, Western journalists found their moral center again, however briefly...

...But there were many people, particularly within the United Nations and the European YUGOSLAVIA policy establishment, who took a "plague on all their houses" view of the Bosnian War...

...What is obvious is that what seemed like a moral imperative to those of us who felt this way about Bosnia must have seemed like prejudice to those who did not take the Bosnian side...

...It was rather that enough of what was recognizable had been taken away, and enough of what remained had been so altered that it was easy to become disoriented...

...Rather, what distinguished the Bosnians' experience of what had befallen them and that of Rwandans, say, or Timorese, was their sense that it should not be happening to them...

...a common language...

...THE REASON for this is simple: I believed then, and I believe now, that Bosnia was worth dying for...

...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...

...And what they meant by that—some even came out and said so explicitly—was that they should not be suffering what they were suffering because they were Europeans...

...Like the aid workers, many of us had not simply spent a great deal of our professional lives away from Europe and North America, but had devoted our careers to trying to make those who read our work or looked at our pictures care about non-European, non-North DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 45 YUGOSLAVIA American tragedies...

...I am not referring to the pro-Serb groups in Western Europe and North America...

...The statistics to back this will be familiar to anyone who has ever paid attention to Bosnia: an intermarriage rate of more than 35 percent in Sarajevo in the year before the war...

...In Berlin, or Amsterdam, or Paris, old beggar women were Gypsies or recent immigrants from the nonwhite world, and if an elderly white man passed dragging an incongruous bundle, he was in all likelihood a released mental patient or a drunk...

...But we were certainly Eurocentric in the negative sense that we had imagined that after the Holocaust Europe had learned its lesson...

...And yet, at the same time, they usually pretend to themselves and to others that they belong nowhere, have long ago severed their ties with their origins, whether ethnic, religious, or racial, and, more convincingly, that they have grown accustomed to viewing the world with a certain distance...

...To walk along a street in a European city and have every ingrained assumption about what could reasonably be expected contradicted in almost every particular, to look at the marble of a historic Corso and see fresh mortar splashes that look like bear tracks, to catch glimpses in the dark of people's faces and clothes and not be able to situate them at all...

...DAVID RIEFF is the author of Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West among other works...

...Unlike the humanitarian aid workers, for whom Sarajevo—no matter how tragic—was one tragedy on a long continuum of such horror that they had pledged their lives to alleviating, the journalists' identification with Sarajevo, and with the Bosnian cause generally, was unique...

...Did Martha Gellhorn sufficiently understand the degree to which the Soviet Union was using the Spanish Republic for its own ends...

...the Warsaw Ghetto—rushed into my head...

...But in fairness, people who thought like Annan were right to believe that the press in Bosnia was not objective...

...Because the Bosnian middle classes, for all their Western European attitudes, had not experienced the sea-change of mass immigration from the poor world and the multiculturalist reorientation that it produced, at least among bien-pensant Europeans and North Americans, people in Sarajevo might have been more forthright about expressing such views...

...It was not that the difference between Bosnia and some conflict in the poor world concerned the degree of suffering involved, despite what then-United Nations SecretaryGeneral Boutros Boutros-Ghali claimed when, at the end of 1992, he lectured Sarajevans who had jeered him that he knew of ten places where people were worse off than they were...

...Now that the city has returned to its "normal" size, that is, now that it has been shorn of its symbolic significance and is a somewhat reduced version of what it was before the war—a smallish provincial city in southeastern Europe with a brighter past than future—it may even be impossible for anyone who was not there between 1992 and 1995 to understand what all that fuss, commitment, and passion on the part of outsiders was all about...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...But they also have the singular virtue of being true...

...These are people who, a generation ago, used to say they felt more at home in revolutionary Cuba or revolutionary Vietnam than they did in Dortmund, or Barcelona, or Chicago the people whom Hans Magnus Enzensberger lampooned in his essay "Tourists of the Revolution...

...Again, the comparison to the conduct of the League of Nations and the so-called Sanctions Committee during the Spanish Civil War that, in the name of impartiality, denied the Spanish Republic the means to defend itself while weapons and troops were pouring into the Fascist side from Italy and Germany seems all too appropriate...

...Will it be reproduced...

...That obligation to tell the truth, whether it aids the cause of justice or retards it, is, I believe, the irreducible obligation of the writer, the reporter, and the photographer...

...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is editors@dissentmagazine.org...

...Perhaps, though I have since been to Kuito and have returned to Kabul— which I knew as an adolescent, when it was still intact—they never will...

...We also wrote less than we should have about the relation between war and crime on the front line, where the black market flourished even in the worst moments of fighting, and about the cruelty of combat and the fact that torture was practiced routinely and prisoners taken only when the possibility of ransom existed...

...Has any press corps written or photographed better...

...Beyond that, morally speaking, we're on our own—as we should be...

...I knew a number of them, and think of them often...

...Despite the fact that there have always been individual Serbs and individual Kosovars who felt (and feel) differently, the formula was simple: Albanians on top, Serbs get the chop, and vice-versa...

...I remember thinking, "I don't give a fuck who wins this damn war...

...I suppose it was...

...Or take a chance and send us your article...

...All I want to do is get out of this place in one piece...

...But these cultural affinities, when combined with the sound of the shelling outside, and the realization that the child who wanted to prattle on about Lipizaner horses might get her head blown off by a sniper the next morning, made for a compelling mix...

...Just as every first-year philosophy student learns about limiting cases, why shouldn't there be limiting cases in journalistic practice—that is, events that demand that one no longer even pretend to be objective...

...At their best, journalists make assumptions about the proper stances they should take and the attributes they should embody that are not only humanly over-ambitious, but also largely contradictory...

...or in Liberia, where it was the Krahn people versus the Americo-Liberians...

...But this knowledge did nothing to mitigate my confusion...

...The rebels had Sukhoi jets whose bunker-busting bombs were rumored to be able to penetrate nine stories below ground level...

...Fortunately, I did...

...The Balkan wars, after all, were the ultimate "man bites dog" stories...

...What I felt was intense surprise...

...Even during the war, one sat so often in living rooms under posters— depending on the social milieu and age of the people in question—of David Bowie, an S-Class Mercedes Benz, or of a Wim Wenders movie...

...Then there came Slobodan Milosevic...

...Or, alternatively, they will find themselves seeing the conflict as one in which they are forced to move across frontlines between militarism and fundamentalism...

...Again, the contrast with Kosovo or with Africa or Asia could not have been more stark...

...Of course, he didn't...

...But at least for many of us, Bosnia was our generation's Spanish Civil War...

...But while we were partial, I do not believe that any of us ever lied for Bosnia...

...Before the war, it was they who had imitated us...

...I think it wrong that the Western reporters who covered the war in Bosnia understood themselves to be documenting a slaughter in the neighborhood, and that this sense of connection gave the reporting we did a special urgency and perhaps elicited from many, though certainly not all of us, an especially passionate commitment as well—one that far transcended professional interest...

...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...

...Like journalists, they too had grown accustomed to working far from home in places where the fundamentally impartial nature of their commitment was easier to sustain...

...That I immediately gravitate to this analogy makes it clear how clear I believe the issues were in Bosnia...

...Even the Kosovars took the hatred the Serbs bore for them (and which they repaid in kind) for granted...

...We will be back in the world of old habits, modes of feeling, and complaint...

...I doubt it...

...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...In the breakaway Georgian province of Abkhazia, shortly before the capital, Sukhumi, fell to the rebels, I was briefly trapped in the presidency building...

...In affirming this, I think I am simply stating openly what most of us who covered the war believed, and what drew us back to Sarajevo, or Travnik, or Tuzla, or Mostar, month after month and year after year...

...In this new crisis, the journalists are back on familiar ground...

...I use the equivocal "perhaps" before of course Bosnia affected us as Europeans and Euro-Americans in the sense that it seemed like an affront not just to our values but our expectations...

...But neither will I put up my own identity as collateral and pretend that I did not and do not feel more empathy for the people of Sarajevo than I did, than I do, for the people of Kabul, or that the analogy of the Warsaw Ghetto does not have more historical resonance for me, the comfortably deracinated descendant of Lithuanian and Galician Jews—who, with one exception, either came to America or were murdered by Germans—than that of, say, the Cambodian killing fields...

...I don't believe so...

...All attempts to create hierarchies of suffering in war are both ignorant and morally obscene...

...Snipers are not much of a danger except when it's clear, even when they have infrared night scopes...

...This sickening list, an inventory of human beings behaving at their collective worst, which in the long run drives any journalist of feeling either to alcoholism and the deepest misanthropy or to another beat, seemed to many of us to have a sole redeeming exception: Bosnia...

...As a result, for me, Kofi Annan, Nobel Peace Prize or no Nobel Prize, is and always will be the Pontius Pilate of our age...

...When all is said and done, what I really regret is not that there was a Bosnia to challenge all the received wisdom about impartiality or to pose the problem of Eurocentrism, no matter how reluctant, hut rather that there are so few Bosnias...

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...But it was this tropism toward indignation over their fate (it had dissipated by the third year of the conflict, replaced by a bitter and perhaps all too rational combination of resignation, anger, and despair) that made Bosnia a unique experience among the wars of ethnic cleansing of the first post–cold war decade...

...But in Bosnia, it was hard for relief workers not to choose sides...

...In contrast, relations between Serbs and Kosovars were always a zero-sum game...

...How could they, since their stock-in-trade is storytelling...

...Like all Europeans, they believed they had been manumitted by history from a past that was, unquestionably, as tragic, cruel, and sanguinary as any in the world...

...I was not afraid...

...HERE AGAIN, the Kosovo case is instructive...

...They fancy that they know how to be comfortable in any milieu from an ambassador's dinner table to the communal feeding station in a refugee camp, and from Friday prayers in Cairo to a meeting of Lacanian analysts in Berkeley...

...When my colleague Ed Vulliamy, the first journalist to penetrate the Serb gulag in northern Bosnia, entered the Omarska concentration camp, one of his first reactions was to despair...

...Anyone doubting this has only to look at the quality of the work that was produced during the Bosnian War...

...At best, like me, they will reluctantly support the war, knowing full well how filthily it will be waged and how shabby the political compromises involved will be...

...But those of us who covered the war—above all, those of us for whom Bosnia transcended being a story and became a cause—are in a very different position...

...So perhaps this empathy that the journalists felt for the Bosnians was not just Eurocentric self-love after all...

...More often than not, they did DISSENT / Winter 2002 n 41 YUGOSLAVIA Prisoners of war kept in a cowshed at Manjaca, Bosnia...

...It had a Volkswagen factory and Italian tourists by the busload, local rock and roll, avant-garde theater, and its own Gypsies to do the begging...

...This is not Somalia," was the way more than one Bosnian acquaintance of mine put it...

...Throughout the Bosnian War, they were never to leave me...

...Photograph by Ron Haviv/VII 42 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 YUGOSLAVIA DISSENT / Winter 2002 • 43 YUGOSLAVIA not mean this in the irrefutable sense that what was happening was terrible or should not happen to anyone anywhere in the world...

...I do not think that we had the obligation to be objective about the Bosnian War any more than a journalist in 1940 would have had the obligation to be objective about the Second World War...

...Of course, there were other sieges going on or just ended while I walked the streets of Sarajevo...

...Was this a species of vanity or self-love...

...To Our Contributors A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...

...The electricity was off, as it usually was in those days, but more luckily, the night was foggy...

...They were either Serb nationalists or extreme leftists like Noam Chomsky, whose worldview could be summed up as "There is no wickedness in the world greater than the wickedness of the United States" and whose view about the Bosnian War could be summed up as "Better a Serb victory than a NATO victory...

...a common secular culture that looked toward Western Europe...

...They do not claim to be objective, of course, because they know that real objectivity is impossible, nor do they confuse distance with detachment...

...Alexandra Tuttle, the extraordinary Wall Street Journal correspon46 n DISSENT / Winter 2002 dent, did not...

...This could not be happening again, forty-seven years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau...

...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...

...Note that I say empathy, not sympathy, let alone the palpably false and morally intolerable claim that under any circumstances a Bosnian life could be worth more than a Rwandan or a Kashmiri life...

...The sense that so many of us had that the war in Bosnia was not just monstrous, but shouldn't have been happening at all—an attitude that human rights activists may have entertained about a Rwanda or an Afghanistan but reporters rarely did—was certainly accentuated by the fact that so many Bosnians felt that way as well...

...To point this out is not to condescend to the Bosnians, as so many UN officials—living tax free and (from the point of view of those who came from the poor world) blessedly far YUGOSLAVIA from their own home countries—did with such contemptible and predictable regularity...

...But when I think of Bosnia, I do not think of my dead colleagues...

...But it would be idle to pretend that any of us feel equally engaged in every story...

...I will go to my grave not simply believing that these people were wrong, but that their commitment to this brand of impartiality was a species of appeasement that cost eight thousand men and boys in Srebrenica their lives and led ineluctably to the Kosovo crisis...

...But again, I would insist that an analogous list of subjects could have been made up during the Spanish Civil War...

...Not just hard, but inappropriate— as inappropriate as it would have been had they been working at home, which, after all, at least for the Europeans, was on a certain level precisely what they were doing...

...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...

...Every time I think of Abkhazia, I think of her...

...From my small knowledge of her, even at the end of her life, I doubt she took in that piece of bad news completely...

...The assumptions that lay behind this were not hard to parse...

...If so, all I can say is that on a very basic level, while those of us who kept going back there could have fielded a host of explanations at the time, I'm not sure that we fully understood our own indissoluble connection to the place...

...The American reporters who used to joke, to the slight mystification of their European colleagues, that going to Sarajevo was like taking a trip into the Twilight Zone were not wrong...

...For although many of us sympathized with the Kosovars, we were under no illusion that we were in Sarajevo...

...For the rest of us, whether we felt guilty or had an easy conscience about the matter, the profound empathy we felt for Bosnia made it seem like the center of the world...

...Unbidden, the deadliest of all modDISSENT / Winter 2002 n 39 YUGOSLAVIA em European historical analogies—Leningrad in 1942...

...And what the journalists encountered in Kosovo, they had encountered in Sierra Leone, where the conflict so often seemed to consist of the Krio elite versus the rest...

...Plenty of people in Somalia, or Afghanistan, or East Timor will ask why they lost a child, or a friend, or their property...

...And, of course, it was also long before the destruction of the World Trade Center, which symbolically ushered in the twenty-first century, much as the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 had symbolically ushered in the twentieth...

...But few will ask why bad things happened to Somalia, or Afghanistan, or East Timor...

...It was a combination of family obligation in the broad cultural and historical sense—that was where the empathy came in—and the imperative of solidarity for what were people's very real sufferYUGOSLAVIA ings—that was where the sympathy came in— that made Sarajevo a cause and not just a story for so many of us...

...Attaching the label of selfishness, if one even wants to call it that, is another way of describing their humanness...

...Sarajevo survived, unlike the Warsaw Ghetto, and though it suffered horribly, those sufferings pale next to those of Leningrad...

...For better and for worse, I doubt that it will be repeated again in my lifetime...

...or Pashtun versus Tajik and Uzbek in Afghanistan...