Sarajevo

A Sarajevo street will be named in honor of American writer and activist Susan Sontag, who helped the city's residents during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. "The city of Sarajevo [and] its citizens express their sincere thanks to an author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo," a statement from Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic said. Sontag, who died Tuesday at 71, visited Sarajevo many times and lobbied for international intervention to end the war. In '93, she helped stage a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theater.

Mortar shells fired by Serb fighters landed in a crowd lined up for bread in Sarajevo today, killing at least 20 people and wounding up to 160, medical officials said. The attack occurred about 10 a.m. as more than 100 people stood in line near an open market in the center of the Bosnia-Herzegovina capital, Sarajevo radio editor Ivan Kristic said by telephone. It shattered a Russian-mediated truce that had taken effect four hours earlier. The Serb fighters, who have cut the city of 500,000 off from the world, made no immediate comment.

A woman walks her Dalmatian. She approaches a man with a dachshund on a leash. The Dalmatian wags its tail, but the dachshund is busy sniffing at some hole in the sidewalk, so the Dalmatian shows interest in a spaniel down the road. There is nothing striking about this doggie scene. Or is there? Only that it happened one evening not long ago on a street in Sarajevo known as Sniper Alley, and the dachshund was exploring a giant pockmark left by the impact of a mortar shell.

After listening to Azim Ramic describe his recent ill-fated shopping expedition, it is easy to understand why the United Nations is talking about using its new 10,000-strong rapid-deployment force to secure at least one road between the besieged Bosnian capital and the outside world. Ramic, 38, was on his way home from a Sarajevo suburb Sunday morning with a knapsack full of flour, sugar, ketchup and chocolates, when a mortar shell exploded barely three feet away. Groceries and blood splattered the road.

The International Olympic Committee said yesterday it will match any money donated by Olympic athletes to ease the suffering in war-blasted Sarajevo, where death stalks venues built for the 1984 Winter Games. "The eyes of the world are on Sarajevo," said Francois Carrard, the IOC's director general, on his return with committee president Juan Antonio Samaranch from an unprecedented three-day trip to the Bosnian city. The visit marked the 10-year anniversary of the Sarajevo Games.

The man they call Dzimi Karter arrived at sunset yesterday to a chorus of skepticism from diplomats and the increasingly frustrated citizens of this besieged city. The former U.S. president met for several hours last night with Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic before journeying to the nearby ski resort of Pale, which the rebel Bosnian Serbs have proclaimed the capital of their own republic. Jimmy Carter said he hoped to persuade the Bosnian Serbs to accept a partition plan, drawn up by mediators from the five-nation "contact group," that would stop the deadliest fighting in Europe since World War II. "My role here is to learn what I can. . . . and what I might do that might bring about peace," Carter told reporters at a brief news conference in the shell-pocked Bosnian presidency building.

To Zijo Dzino, the siege will be over when he can get in his Volkswagen Jetta and drive his wife to see her sisters on the Adriatic Coast. To Kasema Telalagic, it will be over when she can take her wedding crystal and paintings out of the boxes in the basement, where she packed them away 3 1/2 years ago for safekeeping during the war. Lejla Hadziomerovic, principal of the Razija Omanovic Elementary School on Logavina Street, will consider the...

Zetra Olympic Hall in Sarajevo, destroyed by Serb gunners during the Bosnian war, was reopened yesterday. Fewer than 100 people attended a small, closed ceremony that featured a few dozen teenagers, dressed all in white, dancing briefly to broadcast music. A big ball symbolizing the Earth was placed in the middle of the hall. The hall was rebuilt with the help of money from the International Olympic Committee, whose president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, turned over the key to Mayor Rasim Gacanovic.

As Jimmy Carter was negotiating a cease-fire with the Bosnian Serbs yesterday, and as talk of peace hung on everyone's lips, a mortar shell landed in the front courtyard of Ismet and Rabija Topalbecirevic. The explosion smashed every window in the house, sent the thermal underwear from the clothesline sailing over the gas lines, and twisted a racing bicycle in the courtyard as easily as if it were a paper clip. Most likely, the shell would have maimed Ismet and Rabija as well had the telephone not rung a minute before to tell them they could pick up humanitarian rations from the bakery up the street.

Instead of meeting tomorrow in Geneva to strategize about Bosnia, the foreign ministers of the United States, Russia, France, Great Britain and Germany ought to go to Sarajevo. Of course, the Bosnian Serbs might not let them in. Ignoring the United Nations and NATO, Serb gunners closed Sarajevo's airport for several days last week and shut down the main road to the city. But a little humiliation by the Serbs might do the poohbahs of big power some good. If for one weekend they had to live through what Sarajevans suffered for two years, and are in danger of suffering again, these foreign ministers might conclude that appeasing Serb bullies only encourages them to inflict more pain.

In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, a nationalist revival swept Eastern Europe. The singular tragedy was that it found its most pernicious expressions in the places that were most ethnically diverse. The beautiful city of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, with its intermingling of cultures, cuisines, and architecture, its mosques, Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and its synagogues was just such a place.   When Yugoslavia broke apart, Serb nationalists who had dominated the military decided they wanted Bosnia for their own. For three — and-half years, from 1992 to 1995, they held the beautiful capital city of Sarajevo under siege, closing off food supplies, electricity, water, and telephone, keeping up a steady onslaught of mortar and sniper fire against the city's civilian population.

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Bosnia's government declared a state of emergency in its capital on Saturday after Sarajevo was paralyzed by snow, while in Rome residents dug out from the city's biggest snowfall in 26 years, which shut down the Colosseum. The weeklong cold snap - the worst in decades in Eastern Europe - has killed at least 176 people, many of them homeless, especially in countries such as Ukraine. In Rome, unusually heavy snow capped the dome of St. Peter's Basilica and the Roman Forum's ancient arches.

THE POSTWAR Bosnia drama "The Whistleblower" earns high marks for its humanitarian intentions and for Rachel Weisz's steely performance as an American cop-turned-peacekeeper who exposes a sex-trafficking ring. It's a movie that sanctifies rather than satisfies, though. The feature-film debut from director Larysa Kondracki is an oppressive sermon whose players are almost all wicked beyond contempt and whose hero is so saintly that an endorsement for canonization would not be out of place among the preachy text codas that conclude the movie.

"True generosity toward the future," Albert Camus wrote in The Rebel, "consists in giving everything to the present. " Writer, philosopher, activist, filmmaker and intellectual extraordinaire Bernard-Henri L?vy, celebrated enough in France to be widely known as BHL, has been doing that all his life. Born to affluence, and blessed with good looks and a privileged education, L?vy, now 57, might easily have taken a predictable path into elite cultural life. He could have bowed to the dogmas of his era, pontificated in paradoxical rambles, exhibited the reportorial laziness outside the library that marks too many French thinkers.

At 73, legendary New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard has become cinema's equivalent of an Internet blogger. He's a film essayist following no guidelines other than his own, using whatever vocabulary suits him to communicate to whomever is inclined to try to break the code. That does not include me. I find his later work to be tediously self-important and politically obvious. "Notre Musique" is a cry against war and man's inherent needs for tribalism and violence, a position that wouldn't start a good argument in a college cafeteria.

A Sarajevo street will be named in honor of American writer and activist Susan Sontag, who helped the city's residents during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. "The city of Sarajevo [and] its citizens express their sincere thanks to an author and a humanist who actively participated in the creation of the history of Sarajevo," a statement from Mayor Muhidin Hamamdzic said. Sontag, who died Tuesday at 71, visited Sarajevo many times and lobbied for international intervention to end the war. In '93, she helped stage a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theater.

Before war broke out here a decade ago, this handsome city was a small wonder behind the Iron Curtain: modern, ethnically mixed, and filled with an energy hard to find elsewhere in the plodding communist bloc countries. The Bosnian war changed all that. For more than three years, Sarajevans were forced to live in a frantic state of siege, dodging Serbian sniper bullets, mortar shells, and grenades from the surrounding hillsides. Homes and offices were reduced to rubble. About 12,000 people were killed and 60,000 wounded - a substantial toll for a city whose population then was 500,000.

A friend's offer of free passage to Italy seemed too good to refuse for the young Moldovan woman, hoping to visit her older sister in Rome. So two years ago, while only 16, the girl who refers to herself as "Tanya" set off from her mother's home in a small rural town for the capital of Chisinau. There a woman took Tanya by train to the Romanian city of Timisoara, near the Yugoslav border She was turned over to two young men, and passed to another two men who smuggled her to Belgrade, where she was sold in an apartment for $1,000 to a Sarajevo bar owner.

WHEN YOU'VE grown up hiding in your basement while artillery shells turn parts of Sarajevo to rubble, being tied 5-5, third set of an NCAA Regional tennis match is a piece of cake. Well, maybe not a piece of cake, when you're a Penn freshman facing a nationally ranked senior from Pepperdine, and you're dehydrated from the brutal Texas heat, cramping so badly you can't grip the racket. "The stuff I went through, the hard times," Sanela Kunovac recalled. "This can't be worse.

It's not often that a playwright can find inspiration in her next-door neighbors. But when Tammy Ryan was commissioned by Pittsburgh's Prime Stage to write a play about a historical subject for middle-school audiences, her developing friendship with the pair of immigrant Bosnian musicians she'd met at a neighborhood Christmas party was the spark that ignited The Music Lesson, the current attraction of the Family Discovery Series at Malvern's People's...