Mr. Sullivan, you were able to see Sarajevo before the war in 1991 and then during the war in 1992/1993. Can you make a comparison?
The things I remember from Sarajevo in the autumn of 1991 are the sound of trams and very loud pop music, the taste of Bosnian coffee and the fact that most people expressed the fairly confident hope that what was happening in Croatia wouldn’t happen in Bosnia and Herzegovina. When I returned in 1992 the physical destruction was, of course, vast, but there was a widespread conviction that the conflict boiled down to a contest between chauvinism and inclusiveness, and that inclusiveness would prevail. By 1995 that assessment had largely disappeared. Along with all of the human tragedies, I think the loss of confidence in the ultimate triumph of decency and justice was a terrible loss for Bosnia and Herzegovina and for the rest of the world.
In 1992 and 1993, you covered the war in BiH. Can you say enumerate two specific events that stayed in your mind?
Yes, I met my wife, the day I arrived! On her birthday! Among the other things, I would single out the national children’s song contest, held in the building where the State Court is now. That event seemed to me to encapsulate the extraordinary capacity of human beings to rise above conflict with dignity and resilience. It was freezing in the hall; electricity was produced by a noisy generator, there were sandbags covering all the windows, the TV signal was limited so that few people outside Sarajevo would ever be able to watch the kids singing, yet the atmosphere was upbeat, almost joyful. It was as if everyone in that hall had consciously chosen not to be victims of history.
You are known as Bosnian son-in-law. Can you tell us the story behind meeting one special person on your first day in Sarajevo?
I arrived at the PTT Building directly from the airport in October 1992 to get a briefing from a UN official. Marija and her colleague from Oslobodjenje were waiting to speak to the same official. We struck up a conversation, and we are still enjoying that conversation 23 years later! Attending the morning UN press briefings became very significant for me, not so much because of what the spokespeople said but because Marija was attending the same briefings. There followed a process with which many people in Bosnia and Herzegovina will be familiar: how to conduct a wartime romance. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, of course. When I was wounded and taken to the UK for surgery, Marija came and rescued me from humdrum Britain and brought me back to Sarajevo to recover. I wrote the first draft of “Sleeping with Heroes” in Alipasino Polje in the spring of 1993 – but I’m ashamed to say that despite the enthusiastic encouragement of family and neighbours, then and long afterwards, my capacity to speak BCS remains painfully limited.
Our interlocutor today was Kevin Sullivan. He is from Glasgow in the United Kingdom and has been living in Sarajevo with his wife Marija and daughter Katarina. Since October 2014 he has been a Senior Communications Manager at the International Commission for Missing Persons. He worked for many years as a foreign correspondent in different parts of Asia before coming to the Western Balkans in 1991 to cover events in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. After spending time in Singapore and Spain in the 1990s, he began working for the Office of High Representative (OHR) in 2001 as a speechwriter and spokesperson. In 2007 he left OHR in order to concentrate on writing fiction. His first novel, “Out of the West” set in Greece during and immediately after the Second World War, was published in 2013; and his next novel, “Sleeping with Heroes”, about the siege of Sarajevo, will be published this year.
Interview by Zejna S.Y/ photo by Sulejman Omerbasic
