War reporters say that you fall in love with your first war, and certainly that was true for me. I arrived in Bosnia in 1992, during the early days of the war, a young journalist discovering a land of forests, mountains, tumbling streams, and the blackened remains of minarets felled amongst the rubble of their mosques.
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, which began on April 5, 1992, when Serb snipers firing from the Holiday Inn killed two women participating in a peace march in front of the hotel.
Yugoslavia had broken up. Bosnia and Herzegovina had declared independence. But Serb forces, unwilling to abandon the dream of a greater Serbia, surrounded the city, posting thousands of troops in the fields above. For more than three years, they blasted Sarajevo with artillery, mortars and rockets. The snipers, though, came to define life—and death—in the city.
By the time the war ended in 1995, I'd spent the better part of three years living in Sarajevo, chronicling how a medieval siege laid waste to a modern city, and I had fallen deeply, passionately in love: not with a person—although there was the odd war-driven affair—but with the city itself.
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