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Exactly one year after the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, Colum Murphy gave what has now become a famous speech on the tragedy. Addressing a large assembly of journalists at the NATO Information Centre in Sarajevo, Murphy placed the horror of the massacre in historical context. He calls here for the arrest of persons indicted for war crimes, including especially General Ratko Mladic and Bosnian Serb leader Dr. Radovan Karadzic. Murphy’s speech, broadcast around the world, showed a disdain for bureaucratic fear of hunting down those responsible for Srebrenica. The speech was widely hailed for both its courage and its eloquence.
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The War-Time “CandleLight” speech |
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This tape shows one of the real faces of war. Made with an amateur video camera during the shelling of Sarajevo, the tape is a powerful “view by candlelight” of the real-time horror of wartime living. Sarajevo was under siege and being shelled as the tape was made. Murphy was inside Sarajevo during that siege and lived through Bosnia’s war as UN Deputy Head of Political Affairs. On behalf of the United Nations he negotiated the Bosnian Winter Ceasefire of 1994 and the subsequent Cessation of Hostilities Agreement. The tape is narrated by Murphy who actually indicates on tape, by dim candlelight, the furniture around him that had been designated to be burned next for warmth and fuel. Sarajevo endured three and a half years of shelling and those trapped inside the city lived without heat, fuel, water or electricity. Murphy’s wartime courage was, and is, well-known in Sarajevo. He spent a total of four years in Bosnia, returning after the war to help re-build the country. In Foreign Affairs (Jan/Feb 2005) Harvard’s Professor Stanley Hoffmann described Murphy in Sarajevo - with “his sense of right and wrong” - as “as deeply moral man in an awful situation” |
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Launch of Colum Murphy’s novel“Sarajevo: Snapshot By Candlelight” in Sarajevo |
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Colum Murphy’s novel “Sarajevo: Snapshot By Candlelight” is launched, in English and in Bosnian, at the Writer’s Club in Sarajevo in the years immediately after the war. The very large turnout is a measure of the esteem in which Murphy is held by the people of Sarajevo.
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Video coverages