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History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo Holiday Inn — Karadžić's own hotel was the sniper platform, then the press base for 1,425 days

The Ivan Štraus building opened in 1983 as the flagship of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Ten years later some of the first shots of the siege were fired from its upper floors, from a hotel Radovan Karadžić's SDS had briefly used as its headquarters. Kenneth Morrison's 2016 study of the building traces how the yellow cube on Zmaja od Bosne then became the base for every major news operation covering the war.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Kenneth Morrison’s book on the hotel (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) is the first serious academic study of the building, and it puts the paradox squarely on the first page. The Holiday Inn on Zmaja od Bosne, the yellow cube every foreign correspondent lived in during the siege, was, briefly and consecutively, the birthplace of the two political parties that would fight each other, then Radovan Karadžić’s own SDS headquarters, then the sniper platform from which some of the first shots of the war were fired into a crowd of peace demonstrators. All of that happened before the hotel reopened, three months later, as the press base it is remembered as.

The Olympic hotel, 1983

Ivan Štraus designed the Holiday Inn for the 1984 Winter Olympics as a working conference hotel that would host senior members of the International Olympic Committee. It opened in 1983 at Marijin Dvor, at the point where Habsburg-era Sarajevo merges into the modern Zmaja od Bosne axis.

The building is a stepped modernist block with a distinctive yellow-ochre-brown façade cladding, a Sarajevan answer to the anonymous concrete slab the American Holiday Inn chain normally preferred. Its most-loved interior feature was a vast central atrium, the big top, in Štraus’s own working vocabulary, which the hotel’s residents used as a shared living room for the six years between opening and the beginning of the crisis.

In the first six years of its existence the Holiday Inn hosted Sarajevo’s political and cultural elite. It was the finest hotel in the city and a physical expression of what Morrison calls the “upward trajectory” of pre-war Sarajevo. That period lasted until December 1989.

Two opposing parties, one hotel

Between 1989 and 1991 the disintegration of Yugoslavia found its expression in Sarajevo, and much of it in the same building. Alija Izetbegović launched the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), the party that would lead Bosnia’s push for independence, at an event held at the Holiday Inn in the spring of 1990. Within months, Radovan Karadžić’s Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) was operating from the same hotel, and for a period in late 1991 and early 1992 used it as its de facto headquarters.

Morrison’s account is measured on this: he does not claim the two parties were founded on the same day or in the same room. They were not. But the Holiday Inn was where both of them, in that specific eighteen-month window, held their major working sessions, met their donors, briefed the press, and organised. The building’s political identity flipped inside eighteen months from Olympic conference hotel to headquarters for both sides of the war that was about to begin.

The referendum weekend, and the shots of 6 April

The turning point was the referendum weekend of February/March 1992, when Bosnians voted on independence from Yugoslavia. Karadžić’s SDS opposed the referendum. In the days after the vote, senior members of the SDS launched what has since been called the war of the barricades from the Holiday Inn, a set of coordinated actions across Sarajevo that brought the city to a standstill for two days.

On 6 April 1992, the day the European Community formally recognised Bosnia’s independence, a large crowd of peace demonstrators from all three of Sarajevo’s communities assembled in front of the Bosnian parliament building on Trg BiH, directly across Zmaja od Bosne from the Holiday Inn. What happened next is one of the specific documented moments Morrison’s book anchors: gunmen fired down from the upper floors of the Holiday Inn into the crowd of demonstrators. They killed at least six people. The gunmen were subsequently identified as SDS operatives.

The 6 April shooting is a specific, sourced, verifiable event. Morrison cites it as “some of the first shots of the war in Sarajevo were fired into a crowd of peace demonstrators assembled in front of the Bosnian parliament building” (Morrison 2016, p. 5). The peculiar cruelty of the moment is architectural as much as political: the gunmen fired from the building that had, six years earlier, hosted the IOC delegation for the Olympics, and that had, two years earlier, hosted the founding of the SDA, the party they now considered their enemy.

The hotel closed on 6 April.

The press hotel, 1,425 days

It reopened, in a different guise, weeks later. From May 1992 until well after Dayton in December 1995, the Holiday Inn was the base for essentially every foreign news operation covering the siege of Sarajevo. Reuters, the Associated Press, CNN, the BBC, ITN, Radio Télévision Luxembourg, the French, German, Italian and Nordic networks, all worked from rooms in the hotel’s western tower. The tenth floor was largely occupied by CNN. Several floors held satellite dishes on their balconies, plastic sheeting on the windows in place of shelled-out glass, sleeping bags on the beds, and functioning phone lines run in from generators.

The daily reality was extraordinary. The hotel was hit repeatedly by Serb artillery from the surrounding hills. Morrison’s chapter “The Hazards of Living on the Frontline” documents the specific pattern of damage. The southern side of the building was uninhabitable for most of the siege because Bosnian Serb Army snipers, positioned in the Grbavica apartment blocks a few hundred metres away, had a clear line of fire into the rooms. Staff continued to serve meals, run the front desk, and prepare New Year’s Eve buffets through the entire siege; the buffet of December 1992 is documented in one of the book’s photographs.

The world’s picture of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995 came, physically, from this one building. When you saw Christiane Amanpour or Martin Bell reporting from Sarajevo on the evening news, they were reporting from the Holiday Inn.

Still standing on Zmaja od Bosne

The building did not fall. Štraus’s stepped modernist block absorbed hit after hit for 1,425 days, and the structural frame was intact when the siege ended. The hotel reopened commercially in March 1996, three months after Dayton, and was fully renovated by 2007. It has traded continuously since, first as the Holiday Inn and, since the chain agreement lapsed, as Hotel Holiday. You can book a room there this weekend. The atrium is still open. The staff will still serve you breakfast in it.

The more important part is what the building did while it was standing. The Holiday Inn is one of the reasons the siege of Sarajevo was, unlike many other sieges in modern history, documented in real time by an international press corps that could not be pushed out. Reporters filed from its rooms even when the rooms had holes in them. The reason the world knows Aida Buturović’s name, the reason the world knows what happened at Markale on 5 February 1994 and 28 August 1995, the reason the world knows what the burning of the National Library looked like, is that a group of foreign journalists kept working from a hotel that was itself being shelled. Christiane Amanpour, Martin Bell, Kurt Schork, Roy Gutner: they all filed from those rooms. Kurt Schork’s Reuters despatches from the Holiday Inn are still assigned in journalism schools.

That is the specific, non-obvious point Morrison’s book anchors. The building that fired the first shots became the building that made sure the world could not look away. And by getting the story out in real time, the press corps of Zmaja od Bosne is one of the reasons the siege ended when it did.

Walk down Zmaja od Bosne. It is still the yellow cube. Look up at the tenth floor. The lights are on.

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