Sarajevo became a story of people on January 9th, at packed #CafeEuropa meeting. Thanks to Teun Voeten, Serge Van Duijnhoven, Zsófia ZedSofie Bakonyi and everybody else who took part!
"Oh, we're talking about Sarajevo?" asked Isabella, who had lived in the besieged city. "Don't you think you're 20 years late?"
She was responding to an email from Zsofia Bakonyi, a Hungarian woman who had proposed a Café Europa discussion on Sarajevo.
For Bakonyi, the war in Sarajevo had haunted her during her childhood. "We saw it on television every day," she said. "We grew up with that war in the background."
Freelance war photographer Teun Voeten made several trips to Sarajevo to report on the siege. He worked for the Belgian daily newspaper De Morgen, for the Dutch newspapers NRC and De Volkskrant, for Medicins Without Frontiers, various refugee organisations, UNHCR Kanakan TV, Impact Visuals etc. He looks beaten and tired, as if the reporting has taken its toll.
Serge van Duijnhoven, a Dutch writer and historian who reported from Bosnia during the 1992-95 war, presented the film Planet Sarajevo by the Bosnian director Sahin Sisic in which Sarajevo is a city of grey ruins populated by old people and stray cats. It is a long way from the television news reports that were, Van Duijnhoven said, a manipulated version of reality.
Below you'll find some photographs of Café Europa - Sarajevo
