Da Guerra

Nunca consegui perceber a atitude/bravura/show-off jornalistico na cobertura de guerras. Lembro-me de ver o Artur Albarran, com colete à prova de bala, reportar "algures da Arábia Saudita", quando já tinha idade para perceber alguma coisa e de pensar em quanto tinham de pagar a um jornalista para o colocar na linha de fogo. Não valeria mais ficar desempregado? Vieram depois outros conflitos, mas a sensação estranha ficou.

Hoje li um artigo na Economist que me leva a pensar de maneira diferente. Talvez seja apenas uma forma de estar, que não pode ser entendida no clássico modelo económico da compensação pelo sacrifício... talvez.

É entendendo aquele comportamento fora do contexto económico, que surge o paradoxo: não é que aquelas pessoas não sintam as atrocidades da guerra, mas é como se a guerra fosse apenas o cenário, havendo algo maior (que certamente variará de pessoa para pessoa) em causa. Por exemplo, para mim, ver o filme A Ponte sobre rio Kwai é ver um filme de guerra, mas mais do que esperar a guerra, espero a música.
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The Balkans
Jan 26th 2007
From Economist.com

ThursdayMARTHA GELLHORN, the famous war correspondent said, referring to the Spanish civil war, that it was only possible to love one war. The rest were duty. Since the Yugoslav wars I have covered Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur, among others. The late, great Gellhorn was right. They were duty.

Janine di Giovanni, a journalist who covered the Balkan wars courageously, said in a recent book that whenever she went to back to Sarajevo, she could never forget the dead: “They were still there―hanging around the brand-new Benetton shop or the internet café or the Mexican restaurant that served bad margaritas. They followed me around like warm, grey clouds.”

When I read that I felt a shiver down my spine. I have known that feeling. But the Bosnian war ended almost 12 years ago. I go back often. Things have changed. The past does not bother me so much. It does not cling to me, as it seems to cling to many who were here.

When I pass a place where something happened, or where I saw something that stuck in my memory―the dead man slumped over the wheel of his car by the supermarket in Sarajevo, one of the first deaths in 1992, for example―I can still see the image in my mind. But it is as though I am looking back at fading pictures in a book.

EPASarajevo, 1995: No foreigner can feel this pain

What I mean here is that I feel these parts of my past are like finished chapters. I can pick up the book and look at the pictures. I can see them. But now I am writing new chapters, and they are about questions such as European integration, how best to run Bosnia, the future of Kosovo, more privatisation in Serbia, and so on.

Almost every day I have dealings with foreign diplomats and think-tank people and strategists, in Brussels and elsewhere, who are working on this region. All of us are somehow caught up with the future here.

I glaze over when I meet journalists who covered the wars but know nothing of how the region has changed since. They have become “checkpoint bores”, blathering on about what happened at Checkpoint Alpha Sierra in 1993 as if nothing more of note had happened.

The far bigger problem is the number of European politicians and business leaders whose perception of the Balkans is also stuck in the past, who do not understand how enormously the region has changed since the end of the wars.

Only by understanding how far these countries have come, can the rest of Europe help them advance further. Bosnia, says one Bosnian Serb friend of mine, must keep moving towards the EU, not because a new war might break out, but because the European ambition gives it energy and purpose. Without that ambition, as he puts it, Bosnia would “decompose”.

I was talking to a 30-something Bosnian journalist. She is bright, attractive, with a good job. She loves Sarajevo. She has decided to make her life here, rather than go abroad as so many of her compatriots have done.

She told me how, in 1992, her leg was injured by a Serbian shell. Eventually she got to a hospital.
Because she was young, the doctor said, he would not amputate. She had to endure weeks of staggering pain as the raw wound was cleaned every day without anaesthetics.

Suddenly she fell silent, and I realised that the memory had simply become too much for her. In other words, while I see the past in my mind's eye, she, and millions of others across the former Yugoslavia, actually feel it in a way a foreigner cannot.

So, if you are a politician in a western European country, and you think you can score a few extra votes by disparaging EU enlargement into the Western Balkans, please do think again. Enlargement is only part of the process for bringing durable peace and security to the Balkans, but it is an essential part, and the hope of it is doing much good already. Help the Balkans to continue that progress. Don't let history get in the way again.