The Bosnian War enters the narrative as both a conflict over territory and a struggle over how the conflict should be understood. Through the siege of Sarajevo, the testimony of journalists, and a documentary scene in which Eduard Limonov fires toward the city, Emmanuel Carrère follows the pull between moral commitment and political doubt. His account resists the comfort of a simple story, but it also resists using complexity to erase the difference between besieged people and those besieging them.

The war and its competing explanations

In the spring of 1992, fighting between Serbs and Croats gave way to war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the circles Carrère describes, the moral map initially seemed clear: Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić stood on the Serbian side of the aggression, while Alija Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslims appeared as its victims. Sarajevo became a symbol of a harmonious, multiethnic Europe under attack. Its inhabitants were often represented in France through an idealized image: educated, cosmopolitan, and surrounded by books and classical music. The city’s symbolic status helped mobilize concern, but it also made it easier for observers to turn a complicated war into a story that confirmed their own hopes about Europe.

That interpretation brought some of Carrère’s acquaintances to the besieged city. They made repeated journeys to Sarajevo, slept in bombarded buildings without the possibility of bathing, crossed shattered streets under sniper fire, and lived with the possibility that any day might be their last. The danger itself could heighten the experience: visitors drank with the knowledge that they might not return and sometimes fell in love amid the destruction. Their involvement was not merely an abstract expression of solidarity; it placed them physically inside a city under attack.

Carrère did not go. Fear played a part: when he was invited, he learned that Jean Hatzfeld had lost a leg after being hit by Kalashnikov fire. But he also distrusted sacred political missions, particularly those that attracted people in his own social circle. He wondered whether values regarded as eternal and universal by his own class might later appear grotesque or wrong. That suspicion made him receptive to arguments that the conflict was less morally legible than it seemed. Serbs, those arguments held, had their own history of Ottoman rule; Izetbegović was said to be a fundamentalist surrounded by mujahideen; and some photographs of Serbian victims, it was claimed, were misidentified as victims of the Serbs. Carrère acknowledges how readily he listened and nodded along to these explanations.

Sarajevo, the front lines, and the choice of witness

The warning that things were more complicated than they seemed could challenge a self-satisfied account of the war, but it could also serve as an excuse for delay and diplomatic evasion. Carrère sets this danger against the counterargument made by a prominent defender of the besieged city: the facts, in this view, were not made less grave by adding qualifications. The distinction matters in the account. To notice complexity is not necessarily to conclude that every side is equally responsible; to hesitate over judgment can itself become a way of avoiding a choice.

That choice was also geographical. After the first days of the siege, when a person could still drive from one side to the other at the risk of being shot, observers had to decide whether to follow events from inside Sarajevo or from the positions surrounding it. Jean Hatzfeld and Jean Rolin, despite their reluctance to gather followers around a noble cause, naturally took the side of the weaker party. Their principle was to go where shells were falling, not where they were fired from. It did not require treating the besieged as faultless or the besiegers as uniformly monstrous. It did require recognizing the unequal positions from which each group acted.

Hatzfeld’s later investigation made that commitment harder, not simpler. He had initially believed Serbian snipers had ambushed him because he was a journalist. Returning to Sarajevo after a year in hospital, he investigated how he had been wounded and concluded that the shots that cost him his leg had in fact been fired by Bosnian militiamen. The discovery overturned his first account of his own injury, but did not make him retreat to the claim that one side was simply as bad as the other. Carrère treats the willingness to foreground evidence against one’s initial belief as a form of honesty distinct from indiscriminate equivalence.

The positions could also shift. Rolin later felt an undeniable satisfaction when Serbs, for once, were on the receiving end of violence. That response did not last; the wheel turned again, and observers could find themselves criticizing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for prosecuting Serbian war criminals while Croatian and Bosnian counterparts faced leniency from their own courts. Carrère connects this instability to the recurring reversal of victim and perpetrator: the person or group that suffers at one moment may inflict suffering at another. Remaining attentive to victims therefore requires vigilance, not a permanent identification with whichever side once occupied that role.

Filming the Bosnian Serb side

In 1992, Pawel Pawlikowski was disturbed by the prevailing rhetoric in London and Paris that cast the Serbs as heirs to the Nazis. He knew journalists, writers, and filmmakers who had made their base in besieged Sarajevo, and decided to travel to the other side to learn what people there thought. His documentary, Serbian Epics, records material that the familiar account risked leaving out without requiring the viewer to mistake Serbian nationalist self-presentation for neutral truth.

Pawlikowski filmed musicians playing hurdy-gurdies outside soldiers’ tents and singing old-sounding chants about defeat on earth, victory in heaven, and burning Turkish houses. He followed the songs into weddings and children’s ditties, including songs sung by children carrying Kalashnikovs. The heroes invoked in these performances were not only figures from the distant past: their names were replaced by those of contemporary leaders, including Radovan Karadžić and the Serbian military leader Ratko Mladić. The documentary also shows a council of war in which the two men bend over maps, mark borders, and consider which populations and territories might be conceded. Their small meeting at Pale near Sarajevo echoes the diplomatic negotiations taking place elsewhere, but makes the directness of their decisions visible.

Pawlikowski also filmed Pale, a ski resort built for the 1980 Sarajevo Olympics that served as the capital of the Bosnian Serb Republic. The contrast between its winter-sports infrastructure and its wartime political role gives the place a disquieting double character. At the officers’ mess, Pawlikowski noticed Limonov: a large pair of glasses, a crew cut, a People’s Army overcoat over a leather jacket, and a pistol that seemed more like part of a disguise than a natural accessory. Limonov appeared friendly with a group of Chetniks without belonging to them. When he introduced himself to French television workers as a writer interested in the world’s hot spots, he also identified himself as a soldier rather than a journalist. His appearance and self-description placed him at the unstable boundary between observer, partisan, and combatant.

Limonov at the siege

The documentary’s most consequential scene takes place on the heights above Sarajevo, where Serb batteries bombard a city situated in a basin. Mortar fire continues in the background as Limonov and Karadžić speak among soldiers. Karadžić presents the Serbian position as an effort to recover territory that had belonged to Serbs since time immemorial, not as an act of aggression. Limonov listens respectfully, then declares admiration for the Serbs’ resistance to fifteen countries acting together against them. Their exchange is shaped by the camera’s presence, but the scene also shows Limonov publicly aligning himself with the Bosnian Serb cause.

The conversation turns from military claims to poetry. Karadžić recites an ode he had written twenty years earlier, describing Sarajevo engulfed in flames. The moment gives the later destruction a disturbing literary prehistory: the city appears not just as a battlefield but as an image already present in a poem. When Karadžić leaves to take a telephone call, Limonov watches a soldier grease a machine gun. The soldier offers him a chance to try it. Limonov takes his position behind the weapon, follows the soldier’s instructions, and empties a magazine toward the besieged city. The documentary’s sequence moves from political admiration to physical participation; the gunfire makes the distance between Limonov’s public language and the besieged population unmistakably concrete.

Aftermath and the problem of moral balance

The war’s later recollection cannot be reduced to a single reversal in which the former victim becomes the aggressor, or the reverse. Carrère’s examples instead show why the roles must be reconsidered as circumstances change. Hatzfeld’s injury, the positions from which observers watched the siege, and the later suffering of defeated Serbs in enclaves in Kosovo all complicate the history of victimhood. They do not cancel the asymmetry of a besieged city under bombardment, nor do they make every account equally reliable. The ethical task is to remain open to facts that unsettle one’s side while still judging who is stronger, who is weaker, and where the violence is being inflicted.

The Bosnian War also became a political reference beyond Bosnia. At a later National Bolshevik Party convention, Limonov compared Russians left outside Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse to Serbs in the former Yugoslavia: peoples who, in his account, had once exercised power and were now victimized or excluded. That analogy carried the conflict’s language of dispossession into his own political project. Across these scenes, the war is therefore not only a past military struggle but a test of how political movements use suffering, how witnesses revise their judgments, and whether acknowledging complexity can coexist with taking a side.