Sarajevo under prolonged siege

Sarajevo under prolonged siege is more than the setting of a military confrontation: it becomes a test of political judgment, a place where the choice of where to stand carries moral weight, and a scene that exposes how readily the roles of victim and perpetrator can turn. The account sets the besieged city against the positions from which it is attacked, but also questions the comforting stories outsiders tell about either side. Its starkest image is Eduard Limonov behind a machine gun, firing toward the city under siege.

The city and its public image

When fighting between Serbs and Croats came to a provisional halt and shifted to Bosnia in the spring of 1992, the narrator describes the prevailing view in the circles he knew. Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić appeared as the villains, while Alija Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslims were seen as victims of aggression, soon described in the language of genocide. Sarajevo, in turn, became a symbol of a harmonious, multiethnic Europe under attack. The account emphasizes how this image was shaped by what outsiders wanted the city to represent: its residents could become evidence in a wider argument about Europe and its values.

The people who traveled to Sarajevo to defend that ideal encountered a less symbolic and more dangerous city. They slept in bombarded buildings where they could not bathe and crossed shattered streets under sniper fire. Some drank with the knowledge that the day might be their last; some fell in love. The contrast matters: the city’s attraction to visiting writers and journalists did not make its dangers unreal, and its symbolic value did not erase the physical conditions endured by those living and working there.

Choosing a position

The narrator considers his own decision not to go. Fear played a part: he learned that Jean Hatzfeld had lost a leg after being hit by Kalashnikov fire. But he also describes a wariness of sacred missions, especially those embraced by his own social circle. His uncertainty extends to the possibility that convictions treated as universal in one era may later seem grotesque or wrong. That doubt makes him receptive to arguments questioning the certainty with which outsiders defend democracy and human rights, though it does not resolve the political choice before him.

Hatzfeld’s experience gives that uncertainty a concrete form. His first instinct was to believe Serbian snipers had ambushed him because he was a journalist. After a year in hospital, he returned to Sarajevo to investigate and concluded that, by misfortune, the shots that cost him his leg had come from Bosnian militiamen. The reversal complicates an initial account of who fired without turning the competing sides into moral equivalents.

For Hatzfeld and Jean Rolin, the practical choice during the siege was between observing events from inside the besieged city and watching from the positions surrounding it. They chose the weaker side: where shells were falling rather than where they were being fired. That choice did not require believing that the besieged were faultless or that the besiegers were uniformly evil. Rolin could feel an undeniable satisfaction when Serbs, for once, were taking the blows; the feeling did not last. The narrative follows how the wheel turns, and how those committed to attending to victims must adjust when the identity of the injured changes.

Evidence, partiality, and reversal

The account does not let complexity become an excuse for refusing judgment. Hatzfeld and Rolin are admired for putting facts that contradict their own views in the foreground, yet their openness does not lead to the conclusion that every side is equally culpable. The decisive distinction is positional as well as moral: during the siege, the besieged city and the encircling positions were not interchangeable places from which to witness the fighting.

The later consequences sharpen the problem. The International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague is described as persistently prosecuting Serbian war criminals while Croatian and Bosnian counterparts are left to the expected leniency of their own courts. The narrative also points to the terrible conditions faced by defeated Serbs in enclaves in Kosovo. These reversals do not cancel the earlier asymmetry of the siege; they show how people who were perpetrators can later become victims, and how victims can occupy the other role. The effort to remain on the side of the victim therefore requires vigilance rather than permanent allegiance to a single national label.

The besieging positions on film

Paweł Pawlikowski approached the war from the other side of the city’s public image. Disturbed by rhetoric in London and Paris that cast Serbs as heirs to the Nazis, he went to see what people there thought. His documentary recorded musicians playing hurdy-gurdies outside soldiers’ tents, singing old chants about defeat on earth, victory in heaven, and burning Turkish houses. Their echoes appeared in country weddings and children’s songs, sung by children carrying Kalashnikovs. The heroic names invoked across generations had shifted to contemporary leaders, including Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.

Pawlikowski also filmed a council of war in which Karadžić and Mladić bent over maps, moving borders and populations and negotiating what could be conceded. The scene placed the decisions of two leaders beside the broader diplomatic efforts underway in Lisbon, Geneva, and Dayton. Pale, a ski resort built for the Sarajevo Olympics, served as the capital of the Bosnian Serb Republic: a wartime political center set among ski chalets and bobsled tracks.

It was at the officers’ mess in Pale that Pawlikowski noticed Limonov, an outsider to the Chetniks around him, wearing a People’s Army overcoat over a leather jacket and carrying a 7.65 pistol. For the film, Limonov was asked to interview Karadžić. The resulting encounter took place on the heights from which Serb batteries bombarded Sarajevo, whose position at the bottom of a basin made it vulnerable to attack. Amid the near-constant rumble of mortar fire and the soldiers around them, Karadžić presented the Serbs as reclaiming territory that had belonged to them from time immemorial. Limonov respectfully affirmed the Serbs’ heroism in standing against fifteen countries allied against them.

After Karadžić recited an ode about Sarajevo in flames and left to take a telephone call from his wife, a soldier tending a machine gun offered Limonov the chance to try it. Limonov took his place behind the weapon, followed the soldier’s instructions, and fired a magazine in the direction of the besieged city. The sequence brings the article’s questions about position and allegiance into a single visible act: Limonov is not observing the siege from within the city but participating, however briefly, from the heights used to bombard it. The account’s description of the scene preserves the uncomfortable contrast between the childlike eagerness of his gestures and the direction of the gunfire.