Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, translator, and filmmaker from Belgrade. Here's a link to one of her books, and here are a couple of urls with more about her work. Here was her proto-blog penned during the war, "A Diary from Belgrade."
Below, snip from a recent essay she wrote on the massacre in Srebenica, which took place exactly ten years ago today.
In June 1995, I was finishing off my book on refugees from former Yugoslavia, The Suitcase, interviewing women and men of different nationalities, wherever they came from and wherever they had been displaced.
One of them was a young man from Srebrenica: displaced in Vienna. He was a Muslim, very polite and kind to me, a Serb writing for the Americans; he invited me to his flat, offered me dinner and told me how he fled the troubled country through the Red Cross in Belgrade. He considered himself a Yugoslav and loathed the wars, according to him made by politicians, not people.
At the end, he said something I will never forget, a sentence that at the time sounded creepy and muddy: If something happens to my family back there in Srebrenica which is a Muslim enclave protected by UN troops, I swear to God that I will kill with my own hands the first Serb I come across here, my co-worker in Vienna, and I don't care that he is not guilty, I don't care if I go to prison forever…
Link to the complete textfile of "Srebenica 2005."
Ms. Tesanovic can be reached via e-mail: [politicalidiot] at [yahoo.com].
