Dateline the 1990s: In Sarajevo, Scant Rations but Abundant Black Humor

To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013

 


 

To cover the siege of Sarajevo was to live, at least in some measure, what its residents endured between 1992 and 1995: afraid of shells and snipers, surviving off scant rations, with limited water, light and heat, but abundant helpings of black humor.

The frontline ran along the river, through cemeteries and around tall apartment buildings, behind hills and across the airport. Bosnian Serb forces controlled the mountains all around, entrenched near the ski slopes used in the 1984 Winter Olympic Games, firing down onto the city’s Olympic venues now converted into barracks. Tram cars, disused buses, containers, even blankets, were set up at intersections around the city to shield pedestrians from snipers. But the guns were just so close.

Above, were tanks, artillery pieces, weapons and troops from the Yugoslav National Army and Bosnian Serb paramilitaries determined to take full control of Bosnia and, it seemed, kill or cleanse anyone who didn’t belong. Below, an evolving force made up of ex-military, volunteers, gangsters, artists, foreign fighters and conscripts, trying to protect (or create) their vision of Bosnia: a multiethnic, secular democracy at one end, a pious Muslim state at the other.

Serb forces cut water, power, and gas to the city, along with all commercial life except that negotiated by the black marketeers on both sides of the line. The United Nations Protection Force patrolled in white armored vehicles, but did little more to protect civilians than fly the blue UN flag. The UN refugee agency and the International Committee of the Red Cross ran aid convoys that were routinely blocked or harassed by Serb forces.

As journalists we lived the siege but were, of course, far better off than normal residents. We had flak jackets and some had armored cars. The UN peacekeepers would sell us alcohol or cartons of cigarettes (even the non-smokers used them as ice-breakers or for barter), we could afford black-market prices, we had access to water and electricity some of the time, we had fuel to fire generators and power cars—above all we had UN press badges that allowed us (mostly) to move in and out of the city.

But sharing this fearful, restricted space also built a genuine sense of community within the press corps. We became a dysfunctional family — it didn’t mean you had to like everyone else or want to hang out with them, but we were forced together, connected.

We depended on the talents and courage of the Sarajevan fixers and translators, for most of us spoke only basic Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. They negotiated language barriers and checkpoints, guided us around the city and the history, and they told us jokes. You have to laugh, they’d say, if not, you would never stop crying. Because they were mostly young, educated and cosmopolitan, they gave us a vision of what might be.

And in the midst of despair, such generosity and spirit, from the people who cared for their elderly neighbors, even if they were from the “wrong” ethnic group. Who insisted on coffee for their visitors, when it probably cost more than gold, or who stood in line for water at dawn and carried it up who knows how many flights of stairs to ensure everyone appeared with clean hair and clothes.

Many of us stayed in Sarajevo for weeks or months. And we lived the story we were covering. Journalists were killed—some because they were in a dangerous place at a dangerous time, like the Catalan photographer Jordi Pujol or Ivo Standeker, a Slovenian reporter. Other were picked off because of their work—the sniper’s bullet that killed David Kaplan of ABC News in 1992 entered between the letters “T” and “V” marking his car as press.

Bosnia changed me. I think it changed a generation of journalists raised on “objective” reporting (as if such a thing ever existed). We realized that we were seeing only a part of the war, and many of us traveled as widely as we could in the former Yugoslavia, though the Bosnian Serbs did their best to keep journalists out. How could we bear witness to war crimes, day in and day out, over not months, but years, without wanting something to change? Especially when anyone could fairly easily see how decisive UN action could make for such a change.

At the time, the most we could do was to shatter plausible deniability for Western politicians at least they could never say, “We didn’t know.” But our means of disseminating that informa tion was so limited most of the time we didn’t even have phone lines, let alone Twitter, YouTube or Facebook. There was no citizen journalism we only saw Arkan’s Tigers executing Muslims on the streets of Bjeljina because they made the mistake of allowing the photojournalist Ron Haviv to tag along and then, when they searched for his film, missed one precious roll. Imagine how many stories we missed.

Of course, there were advantages to this lack of technology. The desk couldn’t reach you unless you wanted them to call. For most of us, phone lines were available only from the wires and the BBC, who made their table-sized satellite phones available for fees ranging from $40 to $100 per minute. We’d hook up laptops and file direct to the paper’s modem if everything worked properly. In the countryside we borrowed field comms from UN peacekeepers, if you were lucky, you’d get to dictate to copytakers.

I remember Allan Little‘s tone of contemptuous disbelief when telling us that a BBC producer in London had just asked him to do a live interview “by mobile” from the frontline Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity in Sarajevo, sometime in 1994. Back then, cellphones were a new and mysterious luxury enjoyed only by the well-heeled in major capitals, Sarajevo didn’t even have landlines for much of the siege.

And of course, no Internet! So the only reports that made it back to Bosnia on a regular basis were on CNN, at that point the only source of international TV news. The BBC’s Serbo-Croatian services would summarize newspaper stories, and sometimes we’d see print copies of the International Herald Tribune , which carried The New York Times and Washington Post stories. But that was it, no Google to prove your identity, for good or ill, to secret police, immigration officials, or warlords. We navigated usinbig, paper maps with frontlines drawn in and roads identified by symbols. But this inability to communicate from anywhere, at any time, probably kept us safe. There was no point in journalists staying in a trench for very long, because there was no way to get the work out. We had to drive somewhere, to the TV station downtown, to the Holiday Inn, to the AP offices in order to file (and to develop photos and edit video).

In fact, security trumped competition in a way rarely seen in our circles, with the creation of the Sarajevo Agency Pool, a system suggested by the BBC’s Martin Bell in which the television news agencies and the networks shared news assignments and footage to minimize risks. Of course that agreement didn’t apply to enterprise reporting, and it broke down when APTN was created, but there’s a general consensus that the pool saved lives over the years. Without the Internet, our outlets were only in competition at home, but even then we handed round information pretty freely. We passed on notes from UN briefings and quotes from witnesses, shared cars and translators and interviews—even images. The AP, Reuters, AFP and the BBC had bureaus in Sarajevo, as you would expect, but so did major papers, including U.S. regionals like the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Baltimore Sun. And shocking as it might seem now, Time and Newsweek had photojournalists on semi-permanent assignment, while the US networks kept crews on the ground for months on end, long before an American soldier set foot in the place.

We partied hard and fell in love: Malcolm Brabant of the BBC even wrote about seducing his future wife in the weeds along Sniper Alley.

When we meet, we remember those who perished in Bosnia and those who survived but are no longer with us: Kurt Schork, who anchored the Reuters office for the entire war, and Miguel Gil Moreno, a Spanish lawyer turned AP cameraman who discovered a dirt road over Mount Igman and gave us all a way in and out when the airport was closed, were killed together in an ambush in Sierra Leone. Julio Fuentes, a veteran Spanish reporter executed by the side of a road in Afghanistan as the US invaded. Alexandra Boulat, the fabulous French photojournalist who succumbed to an aneurism in 2007. Paul Douglas, the CBS cameraman killed by an IED in Baghdad and Elizabeth Neuffer, the Boston Globe correspondent who died on an Iraqi road. Margaret Moth, a CNN camerawoman shot in the face by a sniper, who returned to wartime work in Sarajevo after many operations and died of cancer in 2009. Marie Colvin, intrepid and stylish, killed by a shell in Homs, as she tried to sound the alarm about the horrifying plight of civilians in the besieged Syrian city. Xavier Gautier and Paul Marchand, who took their own lives.

And I know that we’re all desperately hoping for the swift return of Didier Francois and Javier Espinosa, kidnapped in Syria with so many other journalists.

Between us, we saw the worst that people can inflict upon one another, but also the resilience of the human spirit.