During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
the independent Sarajevo newspaper
Oslobodjenje
(Liberation) was
a symbol of peaceful coexistence and the struggle against intolerance and
“ethnic cleansing.” Despite snipers’ bullets, constant shelling,
and newsprint shortages, the paper’s multi-ethnic staff of Bosnians,
Serbs and Croats — guided by their dynamic editor Kemal Kurspahic —
worked day and night in a nuclear bomb shelter to put out a daily issue
of the paper, conveying hope to the inhabitants of the besieged city and
providing them with one of their only sources of information.
Born in Mrkonjic Grad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, on December 1, 1946, Kurspahic
began his career in journalism in 1962, while still in high school, when
he became a local correspondent for Oslobodjenje in the town of Sanski Most.
After studying law at Belgrade University, he returned to the daily in 1969,
working as a correspondent in Belgrade and later in Jajce. He moved to Sarajevo
in 1974 and worked as an editor in various departments. He was the paper’s
New York correspondent from 1981 to 1985.
In December 1988, Kurspahic was named editor in chief of
Oslobodjenje
,
the first to be freely elected by the paper’s staff. Until then, the
Communist Party had controlled all editorial appointments. But even after
the ruling League of Communists was ousted and Bosnia’s first democratic
elections held, one of Kurspahic’s first battles was to maintain his
paper’s newly acquired editorial independence against a coalition of
the three main parties, all nationalist, through a constitutional court
case in 1991.
In March 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia.
War erupted shortly thereafter, with the Bosnian Serbs battling Muslim and
Croat forces for territory. Several cities, including the Bosnian capital,
Sarajevo, were besieged. Revelations concerning abuses of human rights,
including reports of the mass rape of Muslim women by Serbian nationalist
forces in the name of ethnic cleansing, shocked the world, but international
efforts at mediation proved unsuccessful until November 1995, when the Dayton
peace accord was signed.
Between 1992 and 1995, more than 10,500 people were killed in the Sarajevo
area alone. During the siege, Serb forces destroyed Oslobodjenje's modern
high-rise building with artillery fire, forcing the paper’s staff underground.
Five employees were killed and more than 20 wounded. Kurspahic himself was
injured in a car crash in 1992 while eluding sniper fire. Throughout this
period, Kurspahic and his brave staff never missed a day of publication,
despite shortages of electricity, fuel, paper and ink.
When newsprint ran short,
Oslobodjenje
was forced to cut back its
press runs and circulation fell as low as 3,500, down from a pre-war level
of 70,000. However, the paper continued to publish a weekly edition with
a press run of 25,000. With the support of the international press, special
editions of
Oslobodjenje
appeared in numerous languages in countries
around the world. “Not only were we not silenced, but we became stronger,”
Kurspahic said. “That is something I am proud of.”
In March 1994, Kurspahic handed over the position of editor in chief to
Mehmed Halilovic, a former senior columnist, and became the paper’s
Washington correspondent. Today, he is a Senior Fellow at the United States
Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., managing editor of The Connection
Newspapers in Maclean, Virginia, and a frequent writer on current events
in the Balkans. He is the author of several books, including “Letters
from the War,” published in 1992 while Sarajevo was under siege, and
“As Long As Sarajevo Exists,” a book chronicling the struggle
of
Oslobodjenje
's staff to keep their paper going under horrific
conditions, while at the same time maintaining its journalistic integrity
and independence.
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