Bernard-Henri Lévy

His commitment to Bosnia is undoubtedly one of the most symbolic of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s life. It is also the one in which he probably took the most risks.

Everything began on June 14th, 1992. He was visiting the Universal Exhibition in Seville when he learned that a humanitarian association of Lyon, Equilibre, was organizing a convoy to Sarajevo, the city that was generating increasingly disturbing images, sent west via television. The Equilibre association had faxed all the mayors of French communes, all the parliamentary deputies, all the senators and a few well-known figures, including Bernard-Henri Lévy. And so BHL found himself at the meeting place fixed by the association in the parking lot of a hotel, with the only three others who had responded to the appeal: Jean-François Deniau, European deputy and former minister; Philippe Douste-Blazy, at that time just Mayor of Lourdes; and Gilles Hertzog.

That was the beginning of a wild epic, accompanied by the humanitarians, that had more in common with the “Children’s Crusade” than an actual humanitarian mission. Crossing Serbia, crawling with paramilitaries bound for the front. Crossing Croatia in flames and in ruins. Lévy and his three companions (Deniau, Douste and Hertzog) sneaked off from the humanitarians during the first leg of the trip and entered Sarajevo alone, under bombs, in a car rented at the airport in Venice.

This first voyage would leave an indelible mark on Lévy. He left Sarajevo in the company of the journalist, Saint-Exupéry. Upon returning to Paris, he tried to alert public opinion, as was his habit. He went to see President François Mitterrand to deliver the oral message Président Itzetbegovic had conferred upon him in which the latter compared the situation in Sarajevo to that of the Warsaw ghetto. François Mitterrand himself attested to the fact (in the interview he granted Lévy, which would be included in Bosna !) that this conversation was at the origin of the voyage he himself made on June 28th, 1992, to the besieged Bosnian capital.

There would follow a series of trips. I counted about a dozen in Lilies and Ashes, which is the war diary of BHL in Bosnia. Short stays, then longer ones. A growing bond with Président Itzetbegovic who then occupied a very important place in Lévy’s life, as he would in his future universe. Thus it is that Lévy’s great project, and then his great work, of those years, his docu-drama on the Bosnian resistance, Bosna!, was born.

It seems the idea came from the Bosnian President himself, one day when Lévy and Hertzog suggest the creation of an international brigade of volunteers to him. Itzetbegovic replied, «An international brigade of volunteers, no. We have enough brave Bosnian fighters not to encumber ourselves with poorly-trained foreigners. But if you can hold a camera, if you have the desire and the power to render homage to our suffering and to our resistance, go ahead.” BHL would take up the challenge. Président Itzetbegovic gave him access to the archives of the Bosnian army. He allowed him access to all the front lines, there where the Bosnians were fighting against the Serbs. The result would be this great war film, this exceptional documentary that is Bosna!

In Bosna!, there are scenes that can be found nowhere else. There is a lyric chant to this resistance of besieged civilians transformed into improvised soldiers. Bosna! remains one of the great moments of Lévy’s life and a model of its kind.
Bosna! Would also set off an intense political campaign. Film tins under his arm, Lévy went to all the European capitals and Washington too, to plead the cause of martyred Bosnia. And it is in this context that the idea of a European list for Sarajevo was born, one which would garner respect and popular approval before breaking up, and before Lévy’s companions, and Lévy himself, decided to withdraw.

Why did BHL become committed to Bosnia in torment to such a degree? Human rights, of course. His own horror before the injustice and the massacres, born at the mass graves of Bangla Desh he never forgot, no doubt. But also the idea, reiterated several times in his articles of the time and recurrent in Lilies and Ashes, that the destiny of Europe is at stake in Sarajevo. That was Lévy’s conviction at the time. The famous democratic Islam so many call for in their wishes, this Islam of the Enlightenment and human rights, it was there in Sarajevos—and Europe, lamentably, allowed it to die. That is also what motivated his commitment. It was also this idea that Bosnia is a miniature of Europe and that one cannot wish to create Europe on the one hand and strangle it on the other, as all the chancelleries did at the time. This idea too, then, was a source of motivation for him.

This episode would also be the occasion for a break with François Mitterrand. Lévy often said that moments of great intensity in world history have the power to create ties of friendship and to break others. Well, with François Mitterrand, a friendship of long date was shattered. And it was broken on the occasion of the presentation of Bosna! at the Cannes Film Festival, with crossed interviews of the Bosniac and French presidents, in which it became clear that the French president had lied in declaring that he had never been aware of the concentration camps in Serbia. This projection at the Cannes Festival would precipitate a communiqué from the Elysée, and the rupture with Lévy.

After the war, Lévy remained faithful to Bosnia. He represented France at the funeral of Président Itzetbegovic on October 22, 2003.

He continues to support “what remains of Bosnia » as much as he can. He has done so in aiding an orphanage created by General Jovan Divjak, heroic Serbian defender of Sarajevo during the war, through the André Lévy Foundation. He still does it today by presiding over and supporting the Kids’ Festival, emceed by his friends Samir Landzo and Suzanne Prahi, who lived through the horrors of war with him and who have remained to this day among his closest friends. And I’m not even mentioning the Centre André Malraux, directed by Francis Bueb, which he also faithfully supports.

A few shadowy zones subsist, and I hope researchers will look into them. For example, the project for an arms transport destined for central Bosnia that Lévy mentions very mysteriously with a few lines in Lilies and Ashes. It appears that it concerned arms purchased in Turkey, shipped by planes disguised in UN colors to airports near Zenica. Had this project begun to have gone into action? Did Lévy give it up? And if so, why?

Mysterious as well, and very strange, this almost father-son relationship that grew between Bernard-Henri Lévy and this old Muslim accused of fundamentalism, Alija Itzetbegovic.

But, whatever happens, it is no exaggeration to say that this war of Bosnia was BHL’s Spanish Civil War.

Liliane Lazar

Liliane Lazar was raised in Paris and began her studies there before moving to the United States where she married and pursued her studies at Columbia University, completing a doctoral thesis on The Idea of « Freedom in the Fiction of Simone de Beauvoir ». General Secretary of the International Simone de Beauvoir Society since 1983, she participates in all the Society’s conferences and has written numerous articles for « Simone de Beauvoir Studies ».

Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean-Francois Deniau, Sarajevo. (c) Sipa.
Photo 2 : June 1993. Sarajevo airport. Bernard-Henri Levy and Gilles Hertzog and President Izetbegovic. (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 3 : Bernard-Henri Levy, Alija Izebegovic and François Mitterrand. (c) Sipa.