The Dayton Accords ended the war, but with what kind of peace?
This is something rare. Knowledge of a rapidly deteriorating situation in Africa and a somewhat timely, actual action by those in the world with the power to intervene. The situation is in the Central African Republic. And that intervening is the first step to stabilizing the slaughter and – hopefully – stopping another genocide from […]
If you thought Washington’s ongoing political dysfunction was unrivaled, think again. There are any number of running political stalemates on the European side of the Atlantic. They don’t get the attention that the impasse in Washington has recently garnered, but one in particular, in Bosnia-Herzogovina, may be just as intractable as the no-holds-barred struggle between […]
Now that the U.S. has been poised to strike Syria militarily, it is helpful to consider the United States’ role in the world. The premise of this documentary is intriguing: what if the United States removed all of its troops and military hardware from the dozens of bases it has all over the world? The […]
Sex trafficking. It happens all over the world but is largely invisible to most. What The Whistleblower (a drama, not a documentary) does is expose it as it occurred in Bosnia in 1999, four years after the Dayton Accord was reached. Rachel Weisz plays Kathryn Bolkovac, a police officer from Nebraska who joins the United […]
During the Bosnia conflict, reporters in Sarajevo kept quiet about at least two great stories. We did so with an unwritten rule of realizing that sometimes silence is more important than scoops. The first was most of U.S. knew ABOUT the existence of a tunnel from Sarajevo to beyond the lines that had the city […]
Anniversaries are dangerous days. There is often a flash of attention, lots of words and supposedly deep thought and meaningful promises. Then the sun goes down, and life goes on as before. The world often notes an anniversary without real thought or determination on how to take the steps needed to make it meaningful. As […]
The idea of arming the Syrian rebels is being chatted up once again. The debate will wander and focus in many theoretical directions. Yet essentially the decision will focus on one key pivot: is the goal a short-term or long-term victory? The safe bet: short-term considerations will win out. The U.N. proclamation that the one […]
This film is not only powerful but also excellent in every way. It centers on a Muslim woman, Ajla, and a Serb soldier, Danijel, during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Ethnic tensions, long suppressed by Tito, come to a head as Yugoslavia disintegrates. The brutal ethnic cleansing of Muslims by Serbs is shown […]
There were many dangers faced by reporters during the four-year Bosnia war. Gunfire. Freezing. Food poisoning. Checkpoints manned by drugged out crazies. Yet one fear stood out, and it was usually away from the fighting. That was going to Zenica, a city in the central part of the area controlled by the Bosnian government. The […]
The world has found a way to strike back at Syrian President Bashar Assad: they have slapped travel sanctions on his London-born wife, Asma, to thwart her addiction to luxury shopping. One year into Assad’s churning assault against various opposition groups, stopping his wife from shoping in Europe is one of the few things the […]
Mourners gathered in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica to honor the victims and mark the anniversary of the bloodiest massacres during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. War crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic led his troops in July 1995 into the U.N. safe-haven of Srebrenica and “stripped all the male Muslim prisoners, military and civilian, elderly and […]