Portraits of Sarajevo Quotes

“Who wouldn't go fight when-according to Milosevic-they are killing Serbs here like flies. Here, the Serbian people is fighting for its survival. True, in the struggle to save their own skin, the Serbs have obliterated one Bosnian town after another. Defending their age-old hearths, they have conquered seventy percent of this country's territory. In order to save ourselves from this imaginary danger, we have made a dozen concentration camps for Muslims all over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nothing short of a magic wand will erase the poison that Milosevic poured into the heads of the Orthodox people in the Balkans. And the dose is big enough to take us all down by collective suicide.”
― Zlatko Dizdarević, Portraits of Sarajevo

“No book has ever been able to redress a single historical injustice. Neither will this one. It wasn't meant to in the first place. Nevertheless, it is a small, personal effort so people don't forget [[Sarajevo]] and what it was. It aims to bring the story of Sarajevo to the point where it was conceived and where it will end. To try-without being pretentious-to salvage, from under the often artificially construed and maintained myth about the city, the People of Sarajevo, those that never wanted to be mythologized or immortalized. Those that only wished to remain normal, people going about their business, in their own city, people whose simple wish wasn't granted. Those that never, not even at the end, managed to understand ordinary and simple things and kept asking questions like "Why are they doing this to us?" The last people on this planet to understand that life and death are not controlled by the heart and reason, kindness and happiness, but machinations and greed, force and barbarity”
― Zlatko Dizdarević, Portraits of Sarajevo