A war at home

By: Selma Milovanović

When he set off from Paris to Sarajevo in the summer of 1992, Remy Ourdan did not give much thought to the fact he was entering a besieged city, nor did he say much to most people.

A few weeks later he decided he would stay in Sarajevo until the end of the siege.

As a 22-year-old, eager to try his hand as a reporter – a job he had never done thus far – he drove into the center of one of the biggest European news stories of the past century and instantly became a reporter.

Chain-smoking in a Sarajevo café, the now seasoned war reporter, who has been in almost all the world’s warzones in the past 20 years, says that curiosity brought him to Sarajevo.

“I wanted to see for myself what was happening, but also to see whether I could become a reporter,” Ourdan recalls.

He started off  as a freelancer, later becoming a correspondent for Paris-based Le Monde, for which he continued to report over the following two decades. While many of his colleagues left Bosnia and Herzegovina after the first winds of war, looking for the next big story in Rwanda or Chechnya, Ourdan decided that the tragedy of a city like Sarajevo under siege was too great to neglect.

A close bond

“I came to like the people and the city…and the story was bigger than me … bigger than all of us,” he says.

“During the siege, a completely unusual situation occurred. Civilians usually flee, and that is their right, and the fighters stay alone, while we as journalists go after them.

Here, everyone was under siege together – soldiers, civilians and us, reporters who had decided to stay. It was a special kind of situation. In a way, that was our common war.”

This connection led to a close bond between the young reporter and the inhabitants of a city he had grown to love. Years later, he would write about other besieged cities and make friends with many of their citizens. Yet, besides the possibility of writing “big stories” in Sarajevo, Ourdan says he knew soon after arriving that he would be attached to this city for the rest of his life.

The deciding factor for Ourdan feeling and remembering the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina like no other, even after so many years, was that it was happening in Europe.

He had grown up like all Europeans of his generation, believing that war was in the distant past, “with the idea that genocide, like the one committed against the Jews would never happen again … and suddenly, you are 20 years old and it is all happening again”.

“When the war in Bosnia started, I didn’t think ‘the distant Balkans’. It was a war at home in a way, even though it was your home, your family or your story. It was unique for us Europeans.”

In Sarajevo, he felt at home. In later years, he would spend several months in some warzones, like Afghanistan, or several years, like in Iraq, but Sarajevo was the only place where he felt such a strong cultural and personal bond.

While his colleagues from the world’s media networks mostly followed the lives and suffering of civilians, Ourdan went to the front line even when he was not allowed to.

“It was difficult working with the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We had access when it was extreme, when they were fighting, when it was the most violent, but then they would forget about us. So I spent a lot of time with soldiers returning from the front line. I paid them a lot of attention. I think soldiers must never be forgotten. They fight in every country in the world. When you can’t go to the front line, you have to tell their story. I interviewed a lot of soldiers and I also worked with the Serb forces.

“Sometimes people fight in order to reach a goal, sometimes they fight because someone forced them to and sometimes they don’t even know why they are fighting.

I think it is very important to ask people ‘why are you fighting, why are you shooting, what do you believe in?’ Those are very simple questions and that soldier could be anyone, from any side.”

Old colleagues reunited

There are Sarajevo war stories, “a thousand of them” and numerous Sarajevans who have made an impression on Ourdan. But he doesn’t speak of them. A question about his reports from Sarajevo which have stayed in his mind is met with a seemingly prepared response:

“There are too many to mention,” he says and quickly changes the subject.

Only at the very end of a long conversation, the seasoned reporter stubs out the last of many cigarettes and, unprompted, reveals that he remembers “almost every detail about the war”.

“I don’t remember that many details even from my own childhood!” he says, visibly surprised by his admission. “I remember many events from wars in general, but especially from this war. I remember everything bad and horrible from the war.”

Many war reporters remember Sarajevo, Ourdan says. Although most have not visited the city since 1996, when they would meet in Kabul, Baghdad, Tripoli or Kairo, many would ask him about Sarajevo, whose people they had grown to love, and the possibility of visiting the city together on the twentieth anniversary of the start of the siege.

Last September, Ourdan went to the International Photojournalism Festival of Perpignan and told photojournalist colleagues that they should fund the publication of a photojournalism book, as a gift to Sarajevo if they were to visit the city together in April, 2012.

The idea of gathering foreign journalists who have reported from wartime Sarajevo this week at their “base”, the Holiday Inn hotel, began with a few e-mails and a Facebook group. Soon, dozens of journalists made contact with Ourdan and the gathering of old colleagues became a public event with screenings, conferences, workshops and exhibitions lasting several days.

“I may have initiated it, but I didn’t organize anything,” Ourdan says. “That was the whole idea, for me not to organize anything, because it is your memory, your war, your country. Most of my friends here said – we’ve had enough of the war story. And that’s legitimate – life goes on and they have a lot of worries. Honestly, I didn’t know what would happen. But after a few months various Sarajevans began organizing different events. I found that touching and interesting.”

‘My little Sarajevo’

Ourdan admits that the Sarajevo which will once more greet the people who had reported on its most trying days is now a different city, but in his eyes, it has not changed much.

It is a city in which he lived at the end of the past decade in breaks from reporting on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic and the war in Kosovo, as well as the city to which he has often returned since, although he does not write about it anymore.

 “Actually, my Sarajevo has not changed a lot, because when you come here for a few days to see your friends and you’re not working, i’s a privilege,” he says.

“You always create your little world. It’s the same in Paris. ‘My little Paris’ is a very cool city. But there are also people in Paris who are hardly making ends meet and who would tell you a totally different story.

My friends in Sarajevo tell me about their problems and I know that life here is hard. But ‘my little Sarajevo’ is still very Sarajevan, charming, clever … it’s easy to love.”

Source: Al Jazeera