Appointment in Sarajevo

In July 2001, a few days after Slobodan Milosevic was flown to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, Janine di Giovanni went to Sarajevo to see how it felt for those who had suffered so brutally from his rule. But she found no one celebrating.

Some of the ‘big fish’ were getting caught, but the ones who really did it — ‘the executioners’ as people call them — are still living peacefully, walking the streets. They are the men who raped and killed and burned and now sit in cafés in Foca and Srebrenica, confident that The Hague will never find them.

In fact, there isn’t a lot of celebrating in this deeply disturbing book. Subtitled ‘A Memoir of War’, Janine di Giovanni has written much more than reports of battles waged, won or lost. It’s an account of life lived in extremis. The setting is the former Yugoslavia, where di Giovanni was based as a reporter, mostly for the Times, on and off for ten years.