Journalist Christiane Amanpour celebrates 40 years of work at CNN. In an interview with her colleague Dana Bash, she recalled one of, as she says, the most significant and memorable moments in her career – reporting from besieged Sarajevo.
“Why, in the absence of a policy, did you allow the United States (U.S.) and the West to be held hostage by those who have a clear policy – the Bosnian Serbs? Don’t you think that your Administration’s constant turmoil regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) sets dangerous precedents and would lead to people like Kim Il-Sung or other strong personalities to take you less seriously than you would like to be taken,” Christiane asked the then U.S. president Bill Clinton from besieged Sarajevo.
“That moment Christiane, where you took what you were seeing – the atrocities, the horrors that you were seeing, in one of the many wars that you were covering, and took it to a leader who should have been doing something about it in a very respectful way, was one of the many many reasons why you are Christiane Amanpour,” Dana Bash stated in the beginning of the interview.
“Was that something that you decided you had to do because of what you saw, was it something that you thought hard about, and just generally talk about that, as it pertains to everything that you have done particularly in war zones,” Dana asked Christiane.
“Well, Dana, I wasn’t an interviewer, I was a reporter in the field. That was in Sarajevo in 1994, the war had been going on for 2 years, and let’s say this right now, the war of Serbian aggression against BiH in the 1990s was the first war in Europe since the Second World War. Ukraine, and wars alike, are not the first but are following very similar principles: a war of aggression by an autocrat who wants to carve out territory, who wants to appropriate territory for himself, who commits war crimes, who commits crimes against humanity and those kinds of things that we saw in BiH,” Christiane said.
“We witnessed this at the end of the 20th century, in full color, on satellite television around the world. And for too many years, the West did absolutely nothing except drop food for those besieged in Sarajevo. It was the longest siege, more than 1400 days, in modern history, and we were there watching it,” she added.
“And to answer your question, I didn’t. I did not plan this question. It was a Town Hall, President Clinton was at CNN headquarters in Atlanta, I can’t exactly remember the occasion. But some of us were asked to present questions to him and mine came from listening to his discourse on BiH.” Christiane answered.
“To this day, I am very proud that I had the courage to do that, that I had the presence of mind to do it. And that is where I’ve learned – “Be truthful, not neutral” because everybody was trying to say that both sides were equally guilty, but they weren’t, and they are not, and now it’s not like that in Russia and Ukraine,” she concluded, N1 reports.
E.Dz.
