Publishing a Newspaper Under Siege   

As Long as Sarajevo Exists, This Newspaper Will Be Published
By Kemal Kurspahic
Pamphleteer Press

As Long as Sarajevo Exists, This Newspaper Will Be Published
By Kemal Kurspahic
Pamphleteer Press
248 pages; $25

 

When Serbian forces began attacking Sarajevo, Kemal Kurspahic gathered the staff of the city's most influential newspaper, Oslobodenje, and made a grim vow to those who were willing to remain and work under fire: "I cannot promise that you will be alive when the siege is over," the 46-year-old editor said. "But I can promise you this. As long as Sarajevo exists, this newspaper will publish every day."

The date: April 1992.

Three years earlier, Oslobodenje — the name means liberation — was voted newspaper of the year in what was then Yugoslavia. It was the first daily to open its pages to diverse opinions and political commentary outside of Communist Party lines. No wonder that the newspaper, housed in a modern, 10-story high-rise, was among the first targets hit by Serb nationalists during the onslaught (see "Under the Gun," July/August 1994).

Now, in great detail and with a consuming passion, Kurspahic chronicles the spread of the Balkan War to his backyard — his beloved Sarajevo, a multicultural, multiethnic city that defied the term "nationalism." Kurspahic describes with loving care the key roles journalists played in keeping the fires of press freedom burning throughout the deadly four-year war.

That became the mantra that kept the battle-scarred staff motivated during the bloodiest of times. At the end of the siege, secured in November 1995 by a peace agreement brokered in Dayton, Ohio, the toll among Oslobodenje's cadre of employees was heavy: five had been killed, 25 wounded and 10 correspondents were listed as missing in action in Serb-held territory.

Among the dead were a reporter shot at close range while filing a story on the destruction of the Bosnian city of Zvornik; a photojournalist hit by shrapnel while photographing a crowd lined up for water during a mortar attack; a secretary felled by a sniper's bullet as she left the office one afternoon.

Depending on the reader's interest in the Balkan War, the minute details in Kurspahic's book are a blessing or among its most obvious faults. There is a tendency for the journalistic gems to become lost in a tangled web of names, dates and places that mean little to most outsiders.

But it is chapter three that rises to the task of explaining how a small band of journalists under constant fire and threat of death managed against great odds to publish a newspaper every single day of the siege, even without such basic supplies as water, electricity, ink or newsprint. The ingenious methods of survival make this an extraordinarily good read.

For instance, when Serbian snipers attempted to penetrate the newsroom, which had been moved to an atomic bomb shelter in the basement, reporters improvised a warning system: They lined all the halls with rows of empty beer bottles. Newsprint had to be smuggled in past the Serbian barricades that surrounded the city.

Kurspahic, who, according to the Sarajevo police chief, was high on the Serbs' hit list, guides the reader through the anguished decisions that he and other editors had to make along the way. Which photographer should they send to the most dangerous assignment that day? Which staffers should be sent on a run along Sniper's Alley to deliver bundles of newspapers to makeshift distribution points? Which journalists should be encouraged to carry guns on assignments?

"These were ethical decisions that we had to make many times on any given day," recalls Kurspahic, now 50. "But it was not just a matter of ethics. It was a matter of life and death."

Always, there was constant harassment from the Serbian forces who were entrenched with tanks and artillery just a few hundred yards from the Oslobodenje offices. At night, the staff could hear Serbian soldiers singing nationalistic songs as they fired randomly into the building. Once, a telephone caller, his voice thick with alcohol, asked, "Did you order 32 mortar shells?" Suddenly the place lit up like the Fourth of July.

Kurspahic's book is a tribute to these brave journalists and to the pursuit of freedom of information anywhere journalists operate under fire. The daily appearance of this newspaper was the ultimate act of defiance and eventually came to be known as "the daily miracle of Sarajevo." By keeping the paper alive, Kurspahic and his colleagues provided a beacon of hope for a besieged and desperate population. In reality, the newspaper became a most potent weapon, reaching far beyond merely reporting the news.

"In trying to destroy freedom of expression, they [the Serbs] made us more important, more popular, more powerful," Kurspahic, now Oslobodenje's Washington-based columnist and correspondent, said in an interview with AJR in 1994. "We are the proof. You cannot silence freedom of the press with guns."