Miljenko Jergovic, author of Sarajevo Marlboro, has written a powerful and moving meditation comparing and contrasting the international reaction to the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and the current and ongoing siege of Aleppo in Syria.  You can read the full article here.

“In the summer of 1992, three or four months after the beginning of the siege…Sarajevo’s inhabitants believed that the president of the United States was lying awake in bed at night, thinking of our city.

Is this what the citizens of Aleppo are thinking today? Perhaps not so much. At the beginning of the 1990s, the United States was thought of in the eastern parts of Europe as an empire of freedom and justice. Today, people experience America differently…maybe, the citizens of Aleppo no longer even see America as the land of freedom. If that is so, then America is dying alongside them, because it cannot help.”