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The Bosnia war of 1992-1995 changed European journalism. After the relatively comfortable and predictable years of the Cold War, being a mainstream news correspondent in Europe suddenly became a very dangerous and often traumatic business.
On a daily basis, journalists covering Bosnia out of the besieged city of Sarajevo heard and told stories of violence of the most extreme and obscene nature: rape camps; massacres; sniper killings of ordinary civilians; the slow strangulation of a major European city.
Journalists were suddenly hurt and killed in larger numbers than in any previous modern war.
Janine di Giovanni of the London Times was one of the most eloquent and perceptive observers of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s – a member of a very particular generation of international correspondents that chronicled the conflicts of the 20 th century’s last decade from Chechnya and Liberia to East Timor, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Israel, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq…
Her account now in Madness Visible of the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia, from its political beginnings in the late 1980s to the fall of Milosevic in 2000, is one of the very best of the many books written on the subject by her generation.
It is personal, poignant, immediate and saddening, as well as deeply literate about how violence comes about, and how trauma impacts those who experience and perpetrate it.
It’s only possible, di Giovanni quotes the legendary Spanish Civil War correspondent Martha Gellhorn as saying, to love one war. The rest is responsibility.
“I did try,” di Giovanni writes – echoing the seductive power of war described by her New York Times colleague Chris Hedges in his book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.
“But I did not feel the same things in Afghanistan or Liberia as when I sat cross-legged on the floor in Sarajevo, freezing cold with my friends Klea and Zoran and my baby godson Deni in their wartime home, seeing the night sky turn red from tracer shells or bullets.”
Di Giovanni goes deep and fearlessly into the experience of women who survived the rape camps in Bosnia and the intimate assaults of Serbian paramilitaries in Kosovo – Albanian women whose shame at violation was so great that they could never speak of being raped but only of being touched.
The reader comes to know, to empathise with, and also to understand the experience of ordinary Bosnians and Kosovars whose personal stories di Giovanni uses to knit a compelling narrative of trauma.
The young Kosovo Albanian who is raped by Serbian forces after being wounded in an attack on a café which killed her best friend; the Sarajevo writer who cannot believe what her former Serbian intellectual friends are doing to their city; the Muslim survivor of the Srebrenica massacre whose experience has left him not physically but psychologically dead.
Di Giovanni does not attempt formally to analyse the psychological roots of the violence that destroyed Yugoslavia. But when she writes of the motivations of the men – and also one particular woman, former Bosnian Serb President Biljana Plavsic – who as leaders of the Serbs in Bosnia and Belgrade unleashed the madness which became so visible in Bosnia, she does so with insight, understanding, and respect.
Madness Visible is not a book explicitly about trauma. But for any journalist or mental health professional looking to understand and to feel the trauma of the Balkan wars of the 1990s as experienced by their victims and perpetrators, and as witnessed by those who covered them, then there are few accounts more powerful than di Giovanni’s.
(Note: Madness Visible is being issued shortly in paperback by Bloomsbury.)
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