Jew World Order

But unfortunately for her, the life she relates in her diary is more often
compared to that of Anne Frank, trapped in Amsterdam during the Nazi
occupation.

The Serb siege of Sarajevo went on longer than the Second World War siege of
Leningrad, now St Petersburg. Its 380,000 people were left without food,
electricity, water or heating for 46 months, hiding from the 330 shells a
day that smashed into the city.

Bosnians and Croats – who started off as allies – then turned against each
other, so the Serbs, Bosnians and Croats all ended up fighting a war that
took more than 100,000 lives, made half of the population homeless and left
the once ethnically mixed country devastated and divided into mono-ethnic
enclaves.

And while the horrors of war raged on, Miss Filipovic continued her diary. The
handwritten notebook detailed her ordinary life, her reaction to the war,
and her hopes and fears for the future. She dreamed of going to the park,
playing with her friends as she used to. She wrote about hiding with her
parents in the basement of their house, near the National Theatre in the
centre of Sarajevo, and how her canary Cico died because they couldn’t get
enough food for him.

Some UNICEF workers in the city heard about Miss Filipovic’s book, and Zlata’s
Diary was initially published as a pamphlet in Serbo-Croat. But it was when
a group of French journalists discovered it that the family’s fortunes
dramatically changed.

“I remember when BBC’s
Newsround came to Sarajevo to film my story,” she said. “I
remember it all so distinctly – they spent a lot of time with us.”

The manuscript was bought by a French publisher, who pulled all possible
strings to evacuate the family to France. And so, in December 1993, the
family found themselves living in Paris.

“It was bizarre. If you were wounded, or an orphan, or sick, you could
never have got out of Sarajevo. But we did.”

Driven out of the besieged city in a UN truck, she remembers staring out of
the tiny windows at the post office, the school, the city she was born in as
they sped away.

For a while she became a media sensation. Television crews followed her round
London, as she visited Britain for the first time. Still aged only 13, she
was asked to talk in detail about the war and the violent political
landscape of her home country, having tea with the prime minister, John
Major, and a French defence minister. The book sold 80,000 copies.

After three years in Paris the family moved to Dublin, where Miss Filipovic
studied at Trinity College before Oxford University. She is still living in
Dublin, working as a film producer and documentary maker.

“Would I go back to Sarajevo? I do go back – all the time, for months at
a time. I love it. But there is no real future for me there,” she said.

“I could sooner see myself in New York or Kuala Lumpur or somewhere. And
my Sarajevo is changing. My grandparents have died, I have fewer and fewer
family and friends left there.”

The exodus of young, talented Bosnians is of serious concern to the
government, who realise that they are losing much of the next generation.
But it is not an easy tide to turn.

“When the war ended in 1995, at first we were very suspicious of the
peace accords. But then when we saw it was lasting, there was this
tremendous sense of ‘Wow, we’re alive! Let’s go back and do things!’

“But disappointment soon set in.”

She tells the story of a friend of hers, who left Sarajevo to study in the
United States, eventually receiving a degree from Harvard University. “He
came back to Sarajevo full of ideas and projects, but no one recognised his
qualifications. He couldn’t get anything done. In the end he was so
demoralised he went back to the US and got a job on Wall Street.”

And she says that the job market and entrepreneurial spirit is further stifled
by the political system.

A 1995 peace agreement brokered by the US ended the shooting, but its
compromises left the nation ethnically divided into two ministates – one for
Serbs, the other shared by Bosniaks and Croats – linked by a central
government.

Ethnic mistrust is keeping the groups in Bosnia separated. Children in school
are learning three different versions of history, calling their common
language by three different names – Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian – and are
growing isolated from each other in monoethnic enclaves.

Bosnia’s leaders are still arguing about the future of the country: should it
be unified or should it remain divided?

“There has been so little progress – it is still a group of very strong
minded individuals all pulling in different directions, and there is
overwhelming corruption.

“We need an overhaul of the entire state, because nationalistic
sentiments have seeped into every facet of life. General society is so
divided; it is all about whether you are a Bosnian or a Croat or whatever,”
she said.

Bosnia has some 120 ministers and multiple layers of government. Public
administration is the biggest single employer swallowing half the meagre
state budget. Posts are given out as patronage, guaranteeing votes for the
ruling parties.

Nationalist rivalry has stifled development, deterred investors and left
Bosnia without a central government for the whole of 2011 before an impasse
was resolved in February.

And while the neighbouring countries of Croatia and Serbia plough ahead with
plans for entry into the EU, for Bosnia it is still a very distant dream.

“It is really sad that I feel so negative about all this. But I just
don’t think the lessons have been learnt.

“All of the region is progressing. But Bosnia will once again be left as
a big black hole, right in the centre of Europe.”