Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo

摘要

There is a lot of unbalanced, sensationalist writing about the siege of Sarajevo. The conflict was covered by too many journalists who gave up wrestling with the underlying complexity of the situation and instead formed a personal bond with the victims. This was reflected in their writing, in which subtle shades of grey shifted either to monstrous black or pristine white. This is a shame. We lose a lot of insight into our shared humanity when we recast the Bosnian civil war as a struggle between villains and heroes. It is also a poor record of how the citizens of Sarajevo and the internationals who lived among them during the siege perceived themselves. No matter how strong the personal commitments - or how dramatic the writing - in one-sided accounts, no one with any first-hand experience was under any illusion as to how things worked beneath the surface; everyone knew there was gambling at Rick's Cafe, and plenty of people joined in.