Sarajevo Days, Sarajevo Nights

J.L. Granatstein is a professor of history at York University, the
co-author of the Dictionary of Canadian Military History and Empire to
Umpire: Canada and the World to the 1990s, and the author of The Good
Fight.

The appalling civil war that marked the breakup of Yugoslavia has become
the dominating conflict of the 1990s. To Canadians, it was a tragedy, to
be sure, but Bosnia was also the location for yet another Canadian
effort at peacekeeping, initially under the auspices of the United
Nations and then as part of a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization–directed force. But what was it like to live in Sarajevo,
the Bosnian capital, during the fighting? How did the locals, struggling
to survive, react to the UN force’s presence?

This extraordinary volume gives one answer to these queries. Elma
Softic, a half-Jew, half-Muslim woman in her 30s, kept a diary and wrote
long letters telling of her daily life, letters that circulated widely
in Canada and Europe and that have been translated here by a Canadian of
Serbian and Slovenian origin. The effect is stunning. We see the daily
horror of bombardment, the small struggles to find enough to eat. We
also (thanks to Softic’s getting married) watch a wedding cake being
made and baked in a woodstove that was fired with paper and cardboard.
Regrettably, we are not told how the cake tasted, but presumably that
was immaterial for a joyous occasion in the midst of war.

As for the United Nations force, UNPROFOR, to Softic it was a joke, a
“scam” designed to salve the world’s conscience while doing
nothing for the people of Sarajevo and scrambling to curry favor with
the encircling Serbs. Raised on the heroics of General Lewis MacKenzie,
who was aware of the difficulties involved in opening the Sarajevo
airport, Canadians might find such a viewpoint hard to take. But it is
difficult to argue with the sense of compelling immediacy Softic’s
book conveys; at the very least, this combination of diaries and letters
cries out to be read as a warning of the horrors of civil war.