Breaking the siege

BY ERIN GOLDEN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

An earlier version of this article appeared in The Irish Times on May 30, 2007.

Zlata Filipovic's childhood was ruined by war in her native Sarajevo, but her diary provided an escape and was published to great acclaim. Now living in Ireland, she has become a leading humanitarian voice, writes Erin Golden
Zlata Filipovic doesn't make five-year plans. Perhaps she would have, if life had been different: if there'd been no war, no diary, no MTV appearances, if the ordinary life of a girl in Sarajevo hadn't been interrupted by politics and gunfire. But now, as an adult, the transplanted Dubliner knows there's no use in pretending life unravels in tidy, simple lines.
The petite, dark-haired 26-year-old is perhaps Ireland's most famous resident from the former Yugoslavia, part of an immigrant community that blossomed in size here in the early 1990s as ethnic tensions in the region dissolved into full-scale warfare.
By the time Filipovic fled Bosnia with her parents in 1993, getting out of the country alive was nearly impossible. Snipers lurked on the rooftops of Sarajevo and soldiers with heavy artillery dotted the mountains surrounding the city. But the 13-year-old had done something remarkable: she'd written her ticket out by keeping track of her thoughts in a diary, a small book that would become the international bestseller Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo .



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To the Canary Islands and back: Going nowhere in Senegal...Yet

BY MAKIKO KITAMURA, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

Momar Ba is back where he began, with little more than a harrowing story to share. He is alive but still desperate. He has traveled from his native Senegal to Germany, Switzerland, Tunisia, and most recently, Spain's Canary Islands, each time hungry for work.

The father of eight children, Ba saved up $1,200, selling used refrigerators to pay a smuggler. That allowed him to join about 20 other Senegalese in early September on an eight-day boat trip from Dakar to the Canary Islands.

"I was willing to sacrifice my life to get on that boat to go to Spain," the 34-year-old Ba said in his apartment in the working-class Dakar suburb of Parcelles Assainies.   (More)

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