Bosnia and Herzegovina | Bosnian | Nonfiction
May, 2020Dragan Bursać and I share a last name, though we are not, so far as I know, related. The first time I ran into his reporting was while I was working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and saw a piece he'd written about the tragic events that happened around the city of Prijedor, something I knew far too much about from my work at the Tribunal. His was the first article I'd seen, by a journalist from that part of Bosnia, which spoke frankly about what had happened there. I was moved to tears that someone, moreover someone with whom I shared a name, had the courage to speak of such things. Since then I have followed his writing, and he has not disappointed. In 2018, he published a collection of what he refers to as “scraps” in PTSP Spomenar (PTSD Scrapbook): brief sketches about his family, his childhood, the time he spent serving in the Republika Srpska armed forces, his grief at the current state of affairs in Bosnia. He hasn't buried his book away in the dusty corner of a library, indeed he has held some 40 well-attended book launches and readings all across Bosnia and Herzegovina--and beyond, in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Copenhagen. At his Sarajevo launch he said: “I realized that the fate of someone such as myself who suffers from PTSD is not just mine, but is the fate of an entire generation, not just within Bosnia and Herzegovina, but across the Balkans. This book is for all of us.”
- Ellen Elias-Bursać
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