War and Recovery in Bosnia

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Chris’s Billboard

Srebrenica stands — on this tenth anniversary — for the worst massacre in Europe since World War II, the shocking round-up, slaughter and mass burial of more than 7000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Serbian forces. But Srebrenica is a dateline with many meanings, some still developing: it stands for the construction of ethnic hatred and identity warfare, and also for NATO’s fecklessness at peacemaking. Srebrenica was the trigger of the Dayton, Ohio peace talks, a call to action for Bill Clinton. Yet Srebrenica stands also for the determined denial of Serbian crimes, and the immunity so far of the ringleaders of the genocide, still at large. Srebrenica stands for other questions, too; where were the women? Why were family ties trumped by hatred? How do some survivors recover? On Open Source: a reconstruction of Balkan.

David Rohde

First journalist to expose the massacre at Srebrenica

Pulitzer Prize Winner, International Reporting, 1996

Author, Endgame: Endgame: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre Since World War II

Swanee Hunt

Author of This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace.

Mary on Swanee Hunt

Swanee Hunt is an activist, a diplomat and a power broker in Washington, DC and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Austria in the early 90’s and made a nuisance of herself with the tough guys in the State Department and the foreign policy establishment in Washington with her pleas for intervention in Bosnia. Swanee Hunt’s contacts and sources in the region were the women of the Balkans. Sophisticated, educated, talented women, she says, who might have made a substantial difference in that war’s outcome had they been invited to the table with the warriors.

Irma Saje

From Swanee Hunt’s This Was Not Our War

Her adolescence was surviving the war in Sarajevo. She shakes her head over small details of war life she’s almost forgotten. After three years of shelling and siege, she escaped to distant relatives in Austria, but a year and a half later returned to pick up the pieces of her life. … There’s a philosophical bent in her reflections on the intimacy among those who endured the terrors of war together, and the regrettable return to normal emotional distance that accompanied the peace.