As a physician and aid worker for the World Health Organization (WHO), I spent some months during the winter (1992-1993) in the besieged city of Sarajevo and another month during the spring (1993) in northeastern Bosnia.

Impressions from such an experience, in the middle of a war in Europe, naturally mark one's mind. As one who has seen Sarajevo's people desperately fight to survive the winter, during constant bombardment, and with lack of everything associated with basic needs such as fuel, food, water, and drugs, I will never forget. I could speak a long time about the hardship, as well as the helpfulness, friendship, and even happiness amid grief and misery. There were joyful parties with Bosnian songs and music, dinners with food made of almost nothing at all and held in homes seriously damaged by shelling. Sarajevo, that magic city, became a mysterious attraction to us foreigners. Once we had been there, we had to go back to see how the city was surviving. We all had the “Sarajevo Syndrome.”

Each of us has witnessed news reports and graphic television scenes of the willful targeting of innocent noncombatants by military forces; the displacement of tens of thousands of men, women, and children; and the diabolical genocidal tactics of “ethnic cleansing” of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. An international effort to establish a United Nations war crimes tribunal is being developed, but even this plan is running out of steam for lack of funding. These events are unfolding in “civilized” and “enlightened” Europe. We all know what is happening, yet world leaders have been reluctant to intervene.

The State Hospital of Sarajevo has a tradition that is 127 years old. It is located on the spot where the first Turkish Army hospital—the first hospital on the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina—was established in 1865. Through the ages, military health institutions in the city of Sarajevo always have been located on this spot. In its time, that first hospital was a modern health facility with its own running water and sewage system. It was used for the treatment of Turkish soldiers. Civilians had their facility built in 1866— the so-called Vakuf Hospital, the operation of which was aided occasionally by two military physicians.