“For a long time the landscape of Sarajevo was as pitted with dreams as with shellfire.... It is not that the foreigners didn’t tell the story of Sarajevo. They did, but nothing happened.... ‘Another safari?’ an acquaintance asked me when I arrived in the city in the late winter. ‘What do you hope to see this time, more corpses, more destruction? We should charge you admission’.... A lot of dreams died there in the past year – dreams that the world has a conscience, that Europe is a civilized place, that there is justice in human affairs as well as sorrow. It should be no surprise that the old millenarian dream that knowledge and truth should set us free would die there as well. Reality, it turns out, is better apprehended in the Lion cemetery than in the Palais des Nations in Geneva or the United Nations in New York, much as we might wish it otherwise.”

 

 

David Rieff, “On Your Knees with the Dying,” in Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz, eds., Why Bosnia? Writings on the Balkan War (The Pamphleteer’s Press, 1993), 22.