From Enemy Territory

About the Book

Set at the outbreak of the war in Bosnia this diary, penned by the award-winning journalist Vuksanović , records the extraordinary unfolding of events.

The author lived in the ski resort of Pale, 15 km above Sarajevo. When Radovan Karadzic launched his savage assault on the city in April 1992, Vuksanović – refusing to collaborate – became a prisoner in his own home, cut off from his children and friends below. He expressed his terror and disgust within these pages.

During the hundred days of Karadzic’s rule in Pale Vuksanović describes, in chilling detail, not only the horrors of war – the looting, ethnic cleansing and betrayal that became commonplace – but also the profound mental strain of conflict on the individual.

He and his wife finally managed to escape in a UN refugee bus via Hungary to Croatia, smuggling with them these notes from enemy territory.

About the Author

Mladen Vuksanović was born in Pale in 1942, to a Bosnian Croat mother and a Bosnian Serb father. An award-winning screenwriter and editor for Sarajevo TV before the war, Vuksanović published From Enemy Territory in Zagreb in 1996. He died in 1999; his novel, Taksi za Jahorinu (Taxi to Jahorina), was published posthumously in 2000.

Reviews

'Mladen Vuksanović writes about the rebirth of fascism in the ‘90s, not the ‘30s. This is what renders his account so deeply shocking, yet at the same time so extremely important.’
Joschka Fischer