‘I Hate War’: Children’s Letters to America from Besieged Sarajevo

"Although our living conditions are totally different from yours, we are just like you, interested in the same things. We love music, sports, films, Coca-Cola, love… Just like you!"

This was a letter that 15-year-old Arma Tanovic-Brankovic sent to a schoolchild in the United States during the wartime siege of her home city, Sarajevo, in the 1990s.

She also wrote that, in spite of all that was happening, the children of Sarajevo continued to go to school; she also listed her favourite writers and stated her ambition to study at an arts school.

"I don't like math. I hate war and death. Before the war I corresponded with young people from many countries. I would like to get your response," she said in the letter, enclosing a black and white photograph of her smiling and a drawing of a flower.

Arma Tanovic-Brankovic at the War Childhood museum in Sarajevo. Photo: BIRN.

'They only wanted to be normal children'

Earlier this year, the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest handed over more than 100 letters to the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo which children in the besieged city wrote to their peers in the US in 1993 as part of a project called Pen Pals for Peace, run by the Open Society Foundation.

Csaba Szilagyi, head of the human rights programme with the Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest and acting chief archivist, explained that after BIRN's conference on transitional justice in Sarajevo last year, he visited the War Childhood Museum and got the idea of digging out the letters from the archives and sending them back to the city in which they were written.

Szilagyi told BIRN that around 400 letters were written and sent from Sarajevo to schoolchildren in the US. They...