As Long As Sarajevo Exists
Contributors: Colleen London (Translator)
Publisher: Pamphleteer's Press
Published: January 1997
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9780963058775
Subjects: Media studies; Press & journalism; Sarajevo; Journalism and the war; Eastern Europe - Balkan Republics; Yugoslav War, 1991-; Press And Society; Politics / Current Events; Journalism; Politics/International Relations; History; Eastern Europe - Yugoslavia; General; Politics - Current Events; 20th century; Bosnia and Hercegovina; Bosnian newspapers
Description: "No journalist would argue with the claim of Bosnia's principal morning paper, Oslobodjenje to be Newspaper of the Year," commented The Guardian of London after the BBC and Granada Television announced the prestigious award. "This morning's issue is the 319th to emerge from the nuclear shelter beneath the rubble of its Sarajevo press center.".

This is the memoir of Oslobodjene's Editor-in-Chief, Kemal Kurspahic. It is an account of his "three years in Sarajevo." First, it is the story of an editor, elected by his staff, successfully battling with his colleagues to take control of their own newspaper during the final years of Yugoslavia. It is also the story of how the paper survived and triumphed against a crude coalition of nationalist parties in their attempt to destroy its editorial independence following Bosnia's first democratic elections.

Finally, Kurspahic's memoir enters the years of genocide in Bosnia and chronicles the resistance of a people and a newspaper to the rebirth of modern European fascism. By its own example of maintaining a multiethnic staff of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims who insist that as Bosnians they will never accept the ideology of apartheid in their country, the paper has stood as a poignant counterforce to nationalist bigotry and external efforts to partition the country along ethnic lines.