Zlatko Dizdarević

WAR DIARY IS PUBLISHED

On the 9th of March I met - I remember as if it were yesterday - a French journalist in front of the Cathedral in Sarajevo. I know that he was a TV journalist and that they treated him like a big star. He stopped me on the street and gave me my book that had been published in France, which was called War Diary. I had no idea that the book had been published in France. Somehow they had gotten their hands on texts that I had read during the first 150 days of the war, and sent daily from Sarajevo to Slobodna Dalmacija. They collected and translated them, and made a book out of them. They told me that it was the first published book about Sarajevo that was written by someone in Sarajevo. That book was received very well throughout the world. This was the result of a huge effort by the people working at Oslobodjenje. To publish a newspaper that would reach Bosnians throughout the world. We couldn’t print this paper in Sarajevo, of course. So a small team was sent to Ljubljana for this purpose. And in Ljubljana we started publishing the European edition of Oslobodjenje, which came out weekly. It consisted of the most important and the best pieces from my articles, published by Oslobodjenje.