Bernard-Henri Lévy

War is never pretty, but the war in Bosnia was uglier than most. Moreover, it would never be the stuff of literature or the occasion for any sort of romanticism.

Upon seeing the return to the heart of Europe of the worst history has to offer, Bernard-Henri Lévy turned himself into an impassioned but cool-headed strategist, a self-made political man, an amateur diplomat who unmasked would-be appeasers and ceaselessly prodded self-important, self-interested careerists. As a mapper of the trenches and a comrade of the Bosnian fighters, armed with pen and camera, Lévy was the opposite of Fabrice at Waterloo, who, caught up in the heat of battle, the fog of war, punch drunk from the din, dirty with smoke, no longer knew from what direction the bullets were flying, what was at stake, or why he was fighting.

Lévy was a clear-headed warrior who fought with everything he had, without stopping to take a breath.

Yet, when the bloody dawn broke over what had been Yugoslavia, he, like the rest of us, had been only dimly aware of the outlines of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a land whose fate would haunt us for three long years. First sickened at what he came to learn, then invaded by the spirit of resistance and eventually by a determination to break the siege of Sarajevo and stop the killers of “Greater Serbia,” he was an unrelenting engine of indignation and a mobilizer of public opinion. He was a fighter in the mold of those who, during the wars in Spain, Algeria, and Vietnam, by their acts and by their writings, by the images they created on canvas and on film, from meetings to delegations, from petitions to demonstrations, from Guernica to Hope, from the A Diary of My Times to The Silence of the Sea, from the Manifesto of the 121 to BOSNA!, salvaged the honor of blind or timid democracies by delivering to freedom fighters, in the political arena as on the battlefield, the support of millions of citizens of the world, unleashing again and again the great winds of justice and human solidarity.

To all those who, like Lévy, have sustained this movement of a thousand courageous deeds, a great collective debt is owed—in Sarajevo, in Paris, and around the world.

Gilles Hertzog

He is the Michel Cachin’s gran son, who was the co-creator of the communist party in France. Graduated in Science-Po, he has been a publisher during twenty-years at Plon. He is, now, co-director “La Règle du Jeu”, created by Bernard-Henri Lévy, from whom he is very close.

Translation by Steven Kennedy

Photo 1 : With Gilles Hertzog. On the hills of Sarajevo, at the entrance of the famous “tunnel” of Mount Igman. (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 2 : Surrounded by Gilles Hertzog, Francoise Giroud, Jacques Julliard, Bernard-Henri Levy has, for the umpteenth time, advocate, at  Elysee , the cause of Bosnia. (c) Alexis Duclos.