Sarajevo’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Enduring Symbols of Wartime Tragedy

American photojournalist Mark H. Milstein spent May 19, 1993 cruising around Sarajevo with a Japanese freelance TV cameraman and an American journalist. It was more than a year after the siege of the city by Serb forces had begun, and they decided to check out the front line around the Vrbanja Bridge.

"Suddenly, a Serb tank appeared 200 metres in front of us and fired over our heads. We scrambled to the next apartment house and found ourselves holed up with a group of Bosnian soldiers," Milstein recalled.

"One of the soldiers yelled at me to look out the window, pointing at a young girl and boy running on the far side of the bridge. I grabbed my camera, but it was too late. The boy and girl were shot."

The photograph that Milstein took of their dead bodies lying on the bridge would become famous, particularly after Kurt Schork, an American correspondent for Reuters, published a dispatch four days later that was headlined "Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo".

"Two lovers lie dead on the banks of Sarajevo's Miljacka River, locked in a final embrace. Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic, both 25, were shot dead on Wednesday trying to escape the besieged Bosnian capital for Serbia," Schork wrote.

"Sweethearts since high school, he was a Serb, and she was a Muslim. The government side says Serb soldiers shot the couple, but Serb forces insist Bosnian Muslim-led government troops were responsible."

Media around the world immediately picked up the story of the couple from different ethnic backgrounds whose deaths seemed to be a symbol of the tragedy of the Bosnian war, which saw a multi-ethnic society collapse into violence.

'They were together in life and death'

Radmira Brkic at the funeral of her son...

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