The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning

  • Date: 9th May 2012
  • Time: 18.30pm-20.00pm
  • Venue: New Theatre, LSE
  • Chair: Dr Denisa Kostovicova
  • Speakers: Ed Vulliamy

Ed Vulliamy, who reported extensively on the mid-1990s war in Bosnia, will discuss his new book The War Is Dead, Long Live The War, examining its legacy 20 years later.

The year 2012 marks the twentieth anniversary of the onset of the worst carnage to blight Europe since the reign of the Third Reich – the Bosnian War. A hurricane of violence was unleashed by Serbian President Slobodan Miloševic and his allies, the Bosnian Serbs, in pursuit of a ‘Greater Serbia’. An infamous campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ demanded the annihilation of all Bosniaks, Croats and other peoples through either death or enforced deportation, with any trace of their existence destroyed. Such brutality was presided over and tolerated by the so-called ‘International Community’ including, perhaps most vividly in the popular memory, concentration and death camps in our lifetime.

It was Ed Vulliamy’s accursed honour to reveal these camps to the world in August 1992, when he penetrated both Omarska and Trnopolje. The War is Dead, Long Live the War charts this discovery, but it is much more than a memoir: Vulliamy passionately bears witness to the Bosnian war’s aftermath, revealing the human consequences as well as the trials and traumas of exile or homecoming. It is only now, through the eyes and memories of the survivors and the bereaved – and, in different ways, the perpetrators – that we can really understand the bloody catastrophe in Bosnia. The world moves on over twenty years, but in Bosnia, there has been no thaw in the hatred; no reckoning. The war may be over, but the war lives on.

The podcast of the event is now online available: The War is Dead, Long Live the War-podcast (opens in new window)

Visit amazon.co.uk for more information on the book