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 Before the war, the building on the right was a hotel owned by the Famos Company, a factory producing parts for Mercedes-Benz. Now it is a collective center for refugees, mostly from eastern Bosnia. From three to seven people live in each small hotel room, doing all of their cooking, eating, and sleeping together there....(more) |
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 There were two reasons why people risked their lives to deliver humanitarian aid during the war. The first was concern for the victims of genocide. If we couldn't convince our governments to use force to stop the aggression, than at least we could bring limited comfort and support to those who had suffered the most....(more) |
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 The airport was the only link the residents of Sarajevo had with the outside world....(more) |
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 Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords says that all displaced Bosnians have the right to return to their homes. In reality, most will not. "Dayton is a black hole," refugees told us. The Serbs will not allow them to go back because most of their homes are now in Serb-held territory....(more) |
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 At the beginning of the war, Rahima was expelled from her home in the eastern Bosnia town of Foca and made her way to Vitez, in central Bosnia. When the Croat HVO army attacked Vitez, she was raped. She managed to arrive at the Tetovo Collective Center in Zenica in 1995. Her 15-year-old son, who accompanied her, is now sick...(more) |
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"The nicest place to be is your home. But the Serbs expelled me and killed the members of my family. How can I trust them? How can I go back? I am so afraid." "We are human beings and don't deserve to be treated like dogs." ...(more) |
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 It took a pack of Marlboros and a Polaroid camera to get this teenager to warm up to us. He lived in a former student dormitory of the Sarajevo University where 700 refugees, including over 300 children, lived. This was Sarajevo's largest collective center. Nadja Buvic, a refugee hers...(more) |
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 Throughout the war, rape of women was used as a weapon of ethnic cleansing. Tens of thousands of women were raped. Rape in war is an attempt to dominate, humiliate, and control the behavior of a woman, her family, and her community. Rape destroys a woman's sense of self and identity...(more) |
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 Genocide is often assumed to mean the mass destruction of a people. That certainly was happening throughout Bosnia during most of the war, but according to the Genocide Convention, the term also refers to the intentional destruction of culture....(more) |
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 No building in Sarajevo represents the magnitude of destruction more than the twin Unis Towers in Sarajevo. Home to the largest commercial enterprise in Bosnia, it was reduced to a skeleton of twisted steel and broken glass. Adjacent to but much taller than the Holiday Inn in New Sarajevo, the Unis Towers...(more) |
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What most wartime visitors to Sarajevo found so inexplicable was how life and death issues were dealt with in such matter-of-fact ways. One sees "Sniper" signs in Sarajevo like we would see "Beware, Dog" signs in the United States. (There are also many "Beware, Dog" signs in Sarajevo.)...(more) |
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 One wouldn't normally associate Grbavica, a suburb of Sarajevo, with a love story because it was the scene of so much death and destruction. The Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo lost their lives on the bridge between Serb-held Grbavica and Bosnian governmentÐheld territory in Sarajevo...(more) |
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 Built to house athletes for the 1984 Winter Olympics, Dobrinja symbolized the modern, international, and cosmopolitan Sarajevo. Prior to the war it was a neighborhood of colorful high-rise apartments housing young urban professionals. During the war it became the Warsaw Ghetto of Sarajevo...(more) |
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On the first day of spring, in 1996, we walked through Dobrinja. Children were playing, birds were singing, and people were going about their business as if the destruction around them were merely a movie set. Our first assumption was that buildings such as these had to be uninhabitable...(more) |
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 In 10, or 20, or 30 years when Sarajevo is rebuilt, a visitor may not observe any of the direct effects of the war, except for one noticeable exception: the cemeteries. Not only are there new grave markers everywhere, and in the most unlikely places, but what stands out is the similarity of the date of death--1992....(more) |
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 Perhaps no other building was filmed so much during the siege of Sarajevo as the trauma ward at the Kosevo Hospital, the main hospital in Sarajevo and one of the best equipped in the former Yugoslavia. Sustaining more than 1000 direct mortar hits, the hospital was too often a way stop for the seriously...(more) |
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 One of the most flagrant attacks on a medical facility during the war took place in May 1992 when Bosnian Serb forces, at close range, repeatedly shelled the Children's Clinic, Kosevo Hospital, Sarajevo. Dr. Esma Zecevic, chief of pediatrics, moved all of the young patients, including 17 premature ...(more) |
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 Not a Spanish aid organization, La Benevolencia is the Ladino name of the Jewish Community Center in Sarajevo. Many of the Jews of Sarajevo are direct descendants of Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Among themselves they sometimes speak Ladino rather than the more familiar...(more) |
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 People's minds aren't big enough to comprehend this war." Dado told us this after he described unspeakable atrocities that took place in Serb labor camps in Grbavica. He had just finished telling us an account of what it was like for him first as a soldier for the JNA in 1991, and then deserting to...(more) |
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 When we met Mirsad he was counting the days until he would leave Sarajevo and move to New York City to live with his wife, Nada. His youngest daughter, now living in Vienna, would join them. His older daughter, in Munich, would stay in Germany. It was a painful decision to leave...(more) |
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 The delivery of a letter from Kira, one of her daughters currently living in Massachusetts, brought us to the home of Saima in Bascarcija, the old Turkish quarter of Sarajevo. We met Saima a few days before the first anniversary of the death of her 48-year-old daughter. Fadila, a pediatric dentist...(more) |
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 Mostar is truly a testament to the ravages and destruction of war. First bombed by Serbs occupying the surrounding hills in 1992 and 1993, then bombed and driven across the river by their Croat neighbors, the Muslim residents of Mostar experienced some of the worst fighting anywhere in Bosnia. ...(more) |
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 Over six million landmines riddle Bosnia and Croatia. Most are in unmapped fields and paths, others are laid in homes abandoned by Serbs in the suburbs. A woman stepped on a mine in the neighboring town of Grbavica during our stay in Sarajevo. She lost her leg. She was going out to her garden...(more) |
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 Any photographer who has ever walked an unfamiliar neighborhood -- either in their own city or across the globe -- will eventually be assaulted by groups of children insisting that their picture be taken (with or without the advantage of a common language). It serves both well. The photographer gets...(more) |
