Introduction

In a collection of writings produced during the Siege of Sarajevo and the subsequent years then collected under the title Sarajevo Blues, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the status of the civilian as a target of both a killing machine and a representational machine that often induce circumstantial profiteering and the erasure of individual suffering. In this context, the pain and shame of the victims of the Sarajevo siege are filtered through the lens of the sniper and the photojournalist, as well as, self-referentially, through the writer's text and its metaphors. These agents have different potentials to frame, freeze, and neutralize the individual subject that they select. In this context, Mehmedinovic's oft-quoted line states that: he is not sure whom to hate more, ‘the Chetnik sniper or these monkeys with Nikons.’ ¹ A collection of essays, poems, and prose, Sarajevo Blues captures and combines the fragments of a reality that was under brutal military and representational siege. What emerges is a moving panorama of the helplessness of victims regarding if/how they are killed and the ways in which that event is reported, narrated, photographed, filmed, painted, or recreated in any other form. Mehmedinovic describes the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy in an iconic position at the heart of the ideological, military, and representational Sarajevo crisis: while trying to evade bullets, he talks to a reporter. Lévy witnessed but also interpreted the siege through his two documentaries Bosna! and a Day in the Death of Sarajevo that have complex political and ethical implications. If Lévy, or BHL as he is commonly known, was a particularly conspicuous mediator of the Sarajevo siege for a Western audience, he was not the only figure in the representational field of that devastating war.