“Thirty years ago, from February 8th to 19th, the fourteenth edition of the Olympic Winter Games was held in Sarajevo. A few years after the Olympic facilities, a symbol of common history and life, were targeted” in the Bosnia War. > full text (c) Osservatorio balcani & caucaso, 2014
Photo (c) flickr
“Early in President Obama’s first term, in May 2009, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. paid a visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Addressing the Parliament, he told Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian members, ‘My country is worried. (…) We have seen a sharp and dangerous rise in nationalist rhetoric.'”
>full text & illustration (c) NYT, 2013
Judge Theodor Meron visits the former concentration camp of 1992.
Former prisoners of the camp expressed their anger that the Hague Tribunal’s
president (who is a Holocaust survivor himself) was not permitted to see all the
former buildings of Omarska during his visit.>full article
(c) Bosnian Genocide 26 Nov. 2013
Nationalistic mud wrestling – or pan-European opportunity? The lobbying
is on for the WWI commemoration of Sarajevo in June 2014.
Continue reading
“From ex-officers and politicians to ordinary Bosnians, over 100 people have given video interviews for a new archive of memories of wartime suffering and imprisonment.” >article & photos (c) Balkan Insight, 2013
Fans in Sarajevo celebrate after Bosnia-Herzegovina qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time in their country’s history. Can soccer unite the still wartorn country, or is divisive as almost everything else here? Two texts for comparison:
one (c) THE GUARDIAN, the other one by THE DIALY MAIL, 2013
Jasmila Zbanic‘s “brave drama commemorates the victims of atrocities in 1990s Bosnia, making a substantial impression despite a short running time. She commemorates the more than 3,000 Bosniaks murdered during ethnic cleansing in the Visegrad area in the 1990s, especially the women tortured in rape encampments.” Thus, her movie van be seen as a direct response to the nationalitic Potemkin Village project of another Bosnian director: Emir Kusturica. See the full review (c) variety.com 2013 Cf. the text on Kusturica in THE GUARDIAN, 2012
“There is a long & important history of memoirs & fictions, and hybrids of the two, that address the aftermath of war (particularly the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s). Shards, the impressive first novel by Ismet Prcic, finds inventive ways to interrogate the anguish of enduring and then escaping Bosnia during the war (1992-95). The novel is constructed of fragments — shards — seemingly written by its main character, Ismet Prcic. Ismet grows up in Tuzla and manages to flee shortly before his induction into the “meat grinder” of the Bosnian infantry. He has survived and made his way to America, but is fractured by what he left behind.” >full review & illustration (c) NYT, 2011; interview with the author (c) Suhrkamp/youtube, 2013
In his recent Book of My Lives (p. 97-101), the Bosnian American author Aleksandar Hemon (see post above) digs out one of the best-hidden skeletons in the closets of the University of Sarajevo: Professor Nikola Nikola Koljević (1936-97), a Professor of English and internationally renowned Shakespeare expert. Continue reading
delirium clemens 