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Sarajevo — Oslobođenje never missed an issue while its twin towers were shelled for five months, and it is still being printed

The Sarajevo daily Oslobođenje, founded in 1943 as an anti-fascist Partisan newspaper, published every day of the 1,425-day siege. The twin ten-storey towers of its headquarters at Nedžarići were shelled by Serb tank fire for five continuous months in the spring of 1992 and continued to burn intermittently for the rest of the war. The staff moved the printing operation into the basement. The 1993 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought went to the paper, jointly. Thirty years later Oslobođenje still comes out.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The single-line fact is the story: the Sarajevo daily newspaper Oslobođenje did not miss a single day of publication between 6 April 1992 and the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995. One thousand four hundred and twenty-five days. Not one paper skipped. And for five continuous months of the first spring, its printing plant at Nedžarići was being shelled by Serb tank fire, one of the specific, recorded, unambiguous documentary details of the siege that Ernst et al.’s survey paper anchors alongside the population-loss statistics.

Every editor of every newspaper in the world since 1993 knows about Oslobođenje. It is one of the reasons the phrase press hotel enters the vocabulary of war reporting in the same decade (the Holiday Inn is the paired story). Oslobođenje was the specific one that never stopped.

What the paper was, in one paragraph

Oslobođenje, the word means Liberation, was founded on 30 August 1943 as an anti-fascist Partisan newspaper, published clandestinely in the woods of central Bosnia by the Yugoslav Communist Party’s Bosnia-Herzegovina committee. It became the flagship daily of the People’s Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1945, and by the 1980s was the largest-circulation newspaper in the republic. It employed reporters from all three communities, Bosniak, Croat, Serb, plus Yugoslavs of no declared affiliation. After the fall of communism in 1990 it converted to an independent, editorially-liberal daily, one of the “progressive and unbiased” Bosnian papers Ernst et al. named for their willingness to publish across ethnic lines.

Its headquarters, built in the 1980s, was two matching ten-storey concrete-and-glass towers at Nedžarići, on the western edge of the city, on the axis between the airport and the centre.

What the towers looked like after five months

On 6 April 1992 the siege began. The Nedžarići neighbourhood sits at the front line between Bosnian-government-held Sarajevo and the Serb positions on Ilidža to the west. The Oslobođenje towers were, from the first week, inside the direct line of fire.

They were shelled with tank rounds, mortars, and anti-aircraft fire. Ernst et al.’s account states plainly that the “newspaper’s buildings, twin 10-story towers, were shelled for five continuous months by Serb tanks.” Photographs from the second half of 1992 show both towers as blackened concrete skeletons, the glass gone, the interior floors partially collapsed, the emergency stairwells exposed. The northern tower was more damaged than the southern one. Both remained upright.

By the end of the war, the buildings were structurally unusable. The rubble was later suggested as a preserved memorial to the siege, a monument to press freedom under fire, though the memorial project stalled and the site was eventually cleared for reconstruction.

What happened in the basement

The staff, under editor-in-chief Kemal Kurspahić, moved the entire editorial and printing operation into the basement bunker of the same building. The generator was in the basement. The press was in the basement. The composing room was in the basement. Reporters filed from wherever they had been reporting; typesetters worked by torchlight; the paper printed and was carried out through the tunnels and back staircases to distribution points across besieged Sarajevo.

The daily print run dropped from its pre-war ~60,000 to a few thousand copies. The paper shrank from twenty pages to four, then to two, then briefly to a single leaf, then back up as materials came in. It was frequently a photocopied sheet. But it came out every day. Reporters were killed doing it. Kurspahić has documented seven staff deaths in the first year alone. The rest kept working.

The 1993 Sakharov Prize

In late 1993 the European Parliament awarded its Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought jointly to Oslobođenje, alongside the Guatemalan human-rights activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum. The citation was, in the plainest possible language, that the paper had continued to publish, under siege, in a way that refused ethnic partition. The editorial line held that Sarajevo was one city, all its citizens were Sarajevans, and the paper would keep saying so until the war ended.

That is one of two moments, the other being Kurspahić’s 1997 book As Long as Sarajevo Exists, when the story of Oslobođenje’s daily continuity became fully international.

Still coming out every day

Oslobođenje is still published. It comes out daily, in print and online, from a rebuilt office in central Sarajevo. It is, at the time of writing, still one of the two or three most-read newspapers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Its 1943 founding date, still stamped on every masthead, makes it one of the oldest continuously published daily newspapers in Southeast Europe.

More than that: the fact that a newspaper kept coming out every day of a 1,425-day siege, while the building it came from was on fire, is one of the specific, non-obvious details that changes the shape of the whole siege story. Sarajevo was not a passive victim city. Its institutions kept working. The Sarajevo Winter Festival ran every winter of the siege. The Sarajevo Film Festival started in October 1995 while the shooting was still going on. The National Library staff carried books out under sniper fire. Aida Buturović died doing it. Musicians rehearsed. Poets read. And every morning of every one of those 1,425 days, someone in Sarajevo could reach into a doorway or a corner shop and pick up that day’s Oslobođenje.

That is the point Ernst et al. sit on: institutions carrying on when they should not have been able to are, sometimes, the reason a city survives.

Walk past the Oslobođenje offices on Džemala Bijedića. Look up at the new building. Then remember what the old one looked like in September 1992. The paper is the same paper.

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