"The Spanish Civil War of Our Time"

I beg your pardon if my postings have taken on a genocidal tinge lately, but it is an important subject. So allow me to recapitulate one of the worst failures of nerve of the nineties: the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by ethnic Serbs either led or encouraged by Slobodan Milosevic; and one of the great heroes of that era: Susan Sontag, whose hazardous sojourns in that terrorized city were her attempt to bear witness and raise awareness. While there she also helped out in her own way, directing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which has since been lionized (Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman) and lambasted (Roger Kimball, Jean Beaudrillard). In a 2000 interview she said:

Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city. When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to make films and direct plays. "Oh," they said, "do a play. There are so many actors here with nothing to do." And the choice of doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community in Sarajevo. ...

My visit wasn't intended to be a political intervention. If anything my impulse was moral, rather than political. I'd have been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head.... There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month.

John Burns, who recently finished up as The New York Times chief Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Sontag in 1993:

"Sarajevo is the Spanish Civil War of our time, but the difference in response is amazing," she said. "In 1937, people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux and George Orwell and Simone Weil rushed to Spain, although it was incredibly dangerous. Simone Weil got terrible burns and George Orwell got shot, but they didn't see the danger as a reason not to go. They went as an act of solidarity, and from that act grew some of the finest literature of their time.

After her first trip here, Ms. Sontag said, she talked with other well-known writers and producers in Europe and the United States who expressed surprise that she had been willing to risk her life.

"But I don't think the fact that Sarajevo is dangerous is really the reason," she said. "I think there is an underlying reason that is deeper and more disturbing, and it is the difference between 1937 and 1993. I think there has been a failure of conscience on the part of writers and intellectuals in the Western world.

"It's not Godot I am waiting for," she said. "Like most of the people in Sarajevo, I am waiting for Clinton."

Ms. Sontag discussed the vacuity and tepidity of the response to the crisis by Western intellectuals in a 1993 interview with a Bosnian magazine:

It is certainly a duty to bear witness in writing and in other forms, to what is going on here. But I don’t fool myself about what most writers are. Most writers are conformists; most writers are servants of the state or some dominant ideology. And some writers are vicious propagandists for evil ideas, like Mr. [Edouard] Limonov, who was up on the hills, shooting down at you, as we know from this film footage. So, one mustn’t idealize writers; I mean, there are, as they say in French, "Il ya les uns et les autres." There are some people like that and there are other people. And even if I think to myself, suppose I could pick up the phone and call Günther Grass, or call Milan Kundera, or Umberto Eco, or any of these world-famous writers like I am, and I know these people—we’re not close friends, but I know these people socially and I have their telephone numbers. If I were to pick up the phone and say, “Come to Sarajevo,” I don’t know if they would come. And—even if they came—I do not know that they would not disappoint you. ...

I’m so old that I know everybody. No, to take an example, Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t come. When I told my writer friends in New York about my intent—that I was coming—everyone said that I was crazy, it’s very dangerous. Well, of course it’s dangerous, but I said, that’s like telling me the North Pole is cold! Of course I know it’s dangerous. That’s not a reason not to go. ... There is an enormous depoliticization of the Western intelligentsia, the Western writers, the writers of Western Europe and North America. ...[A]ll of these people are just sitting in their huge, rich apartments and going out to the country on the weekends and living their private lives. I mean, that is the truth. I’m sorry to disillusion you, but they don’t involve themselves in any political action in the United States; much less do they think to go abroad and do something serious. These people have nothing to do with anything serious. It’s very, very disillusioning, and I’m sorry to say it. But they don’t care; they don’t have a conscience; they don’t think of the writer as a witness of conscience.

If only Ms. Sontag were alive today to use her eloquence and celebrity on behalf of people who find themselves isolated and abandoned, like the Bosnians fifteen years ago.