Aida Čerkez: The likely remedy for helplessness 
is action

Tell us about the beginning of the Bosnian war – did you feel it coming? Did you prepare for it?

It was a Thursday when Russian troops crossed the Ukrainian border. Two days earlier, we were holding editorial meetings, and I told my colleagues that the Russians were going to invade, that they were going to attack Ukraine. And they replied, “No, no, they wouldn’t dare. This is the 21st century.” I realized that in 1992, I thought the same thing. It seemed so far-fetched. But what were they doing at the border? They said, “Military exercises.” At the border?
My colleagues didn’t want to accept it. “No, no, no. This can’t be true.” I had the advantage of having gone through a similar situation — I recognized the movement patterns.
I wasn’t even angry with my colleagues. I didn’t think they were stupid, because I remembered what I was thinking when heavy artillery was deployed around Sarajevo and aimed at the city. The army told us, “This is a military exercise. They are training to defend the city in case of war.” Training with weapons pointed at the city? But it was very hard to believe at the time that an attack was looming.
If you had told Americans a year ago that Trump would win again and do what he is doing now, they wouldn’t have believed you either.

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People always think that such things can happen to others, but definitely not to them. I call it the smoker’s syndrome.

Every smoker in the world knows that smoking will likely cause lung cancer — it’s not guaranteed, but you become a candidate. Yet people still smoke because they think, “Yes, it’s true, but cancer will happen to someone else, not me.”
So in 1992, I was one of the people who, even as I listened to the sounds of bullets being shot, did not believe that it was really happening to us. It took me months to realize that it was actually happening and that it wasn’t just some isolated incident. Then you think, “Okay, but someone will sort this out soon, and it will all be over in a few days.” And so it went on for months. Now I realize how stupid that was. The writing was on the wall.
You either have to be completely short-sighted or refuse to see reality when you convince yourself that war is impossible. And even then, you are paralyzed — for example, you know that you should probably stock up on canned food, but you don’t do it because the feeling of “this can’t possibly be happening” prevents you from doing so. I noticed that many Ukrainians felt the same way. Two days before the full-scale invasion, I was advising my colleagues on what to buy, like candles and other items I learned to be useful during the siege of Sarajevo. They still didn’t want to believe me, and I wasn’t even angry with them because I used to be just like them.

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In May 2024, Milano took on a new role as a UNITED24 ambassador. Together with Nobel laureates Paul Nurse and Edvard and May-Britt Moser, actors Ivanna Sakhno and Mark Strong, she will support the Education and Science program.

He has never left or lived anywhere else. However, throughout his life, he ended up living in five different countries. Such was the tumultuous history of Sarajevo and the Balkans.

At the end of the second day, he started asking me questions: “Why are you doing this? Do you have someone? Are you married?” I told him that I was divorced and had a small child, that my three-year-old son was a refugee, living in Germany with my mother, and that I was here covering this war. I told him that I was considering joining them because, at the beginning of all this, I thought that if people on the outside knew what was happening here, they would do something to stop it. It took me two years to realize that people knew everything.
At the time, I thought they didn’t care. But now I know that they did care — they just didn’t know what to do. For example, I care about what is happening in Ukraine. But I don’t know what to do. It is this helplessness that kills us, the outsiders, more than what we observe. You sit and watch everything unfold on the screen, and you can’t do anything as one individual — there is no mechanism. I can send some humanitarian aid, but what will that accomplish? That you at least won’t be hungry when you die? It is this helplessness that discourages people. Someone will decide to change the channel, not because they are not interested, but because they cannot stand to see the injustice and crimes unfolding before their eyes and the inability to do anything about it.

Smart Factories and Robotics

So, I told this old gentleman that I realized that I was not changing anything with my reporting. I had thought that journalism would change something, but I felt like I was screaming into the abyss, and I didn’t want to do it anymore. I will leave, never come back, be a refugee for the rest of my life and just focus on raising my child.
He listened to me complain and then looked at me and said: “I understand that, but look. After World War II, I talked to some people and asked them: “How did you feel and what did you do the night they took away your Jewish neighbours, the ones you never saw again?” And everyone had the same answer: “I didn’t know.” People did not know where those people were being taken and whether they would return in the morning. What if they went somewhere to visit relatives? They did not know about the concentration camps.”
He said that everyone had the same answer. Then he added: “Maybe they didn’t know because no one reported it. We found out about the concentration camps when the Americans and the Russians discovered them. That’s when we realized where all those people were being taken. So we did nothing because we didn’t know.”
He also said: “I think you should continue your work, because one day, when all this is over, no one will be able to say, ‘I didn’t know.’ You will turn what used to be a perfect excuse for inaction into a choice. Yes, you knew, you just didn’t want to do anything or weren’t capable of doing anything. But don’t tell me that you didn’t know.”

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So, I was turning this “I didn’t know” into a lie. I reached the conclusion that I should lower the bar for myself – I started working as a journalist, thinking that I could help stop the war.

I lowered the bar and recognized that now my job was to take lies out of the equation. I was going to shed light on everything that was going on so that no one could ever say, “I didn’t know.”
That was enough to motivate me, and I stayed. It was my biggest moment of crisis, and that man — a railroad worker, not a philosopher — helped me understand how important journalism is, maybe not for the moment I was living in, but for humanity as a whole.

Smart Factories and Robotics

The desire for normalcy keeps you sane. Unlike Ukraine, we had no water or electricity for three years. The water came and went, but for most of the time, we had no amenities. There was no Internet. So you’re blind — you have no clue, maybe the rest of the world doesn’t exist anymore, and you just don’t know it yet.
You try to imitate normalcy to maintain your sanity, a kind of mental hygiene. For example, women who have never worn makeup have started to do so because it is an element of normalcy. Why would you wear makeup in the middle of a war? You don’t even have proper clothes to wear, and you sneak around town looking for firewood. This is not an occasion for makeup. But they wore makeup because it gave them the illusion of some kind of normalcy.

• How AI is transforming the automotive in the U.S. and globally;
• How this will affect drivers and passengers in the near future;
• How to stay ahead in this technological race.

The desire for normalcy keeps you sane. Unlike Ukraine, we had no water or electricity for three years. The water came and went, but for most of the time, we had no amenities. There was no Internet. So you’re blind — you have no clue, maybe the rest of the world doesn’t exist anymore, and you just don’t know it yet.
You try to imitate normalcy to maintain your sanity, a kind of mental hygiene. For example, women who have never worn makeup have started to do so because it is an element of normalcy. Why would you wear makeup in the middle of a war? You don’t even have proper clothes to wear, and you sneak around town looking for firewood. This is not an occasion for makeup. But they wore makeup because it gave them the illusion of some kind of normalcy.