Reporting Bosnia’s War Changed My Life, Turkish Journalist Says

"After a time, I understood that I could not leave the besieged city [of Sarajevo] until I either died - or the war ended."

So recalls Serif Turgut, one of the few Turkish women war reporters, describing her feelings as a journalist in wartime Bosnia in the 1990s.

Turgut, now 54, went to report from Sarajevo for only two weeks at the beginning of the war.

But she then stayed on until the war in Bosnia ended in 1995, covering the three-year conflict for both Turkish and international media houses.

"It was such a huge trauma; whenever I am outside Bosnia I always want to turn back to Bosnia. Since the Bosnian war, I always have been in conflict zones," Turgut says.

Besides the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she has reported on the wars in Croatia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Algeria, Western Sahara and Iraq.

Besides spending her career in conflict zones, she first attended Stanford University in the US on a Knight Fellowship Journalism Scholarship.

She then earned two master's degrees from George Washington University in international politics and from Harvard in public administration.

Yet, as a journalist, she ended up in war zones, and would do again as a UN official for public and media affairs, serving in Liberia, Kenya and Somalia.

"Many of my colleagues had the same [experience]. After the Bosnian war, very few of us [reporters from Bosnia] managed to return to normal lives. We lost many of us in other wars or because of diseases, and some of us are still in the field," Turgut observes.

Shocked into action by the tragedies she saw

The 18th anniversary commemoration of the Srebrenica massacres in July 2013. Photo: EPA-EFE/VALDRIN XHEMAJ.

"Some people just cannot do anything else...