Caught up in a 21st-century stew of ethnonationalism and fake history, the country’s Serbs are now endangering its fragile peace.
June 14, 2022
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The Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids, near the medieval town Visoko, features three hills that Sam Osmanagich, a Sarajevo-educated anthropologist who “discovered” them in 2005, claims were built by humans 29,000 years ago. During the so-called Little Ice Age, he says, a highly developed civilization chose this spot to erect, block by block, three symmetrical structures ranging in height from 290 to 1,100 feet: the Pyramid of the Dragon, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Pyramid of the Sun. In his telling, the three structures possibly functioned as an advanced communication system, emitting “energy beams” that followed the path of the sun. “Russian scientists say that the speed of scalar waves is one hundred million times faster than the speed of light,” he says, “so that information moves instantly from one end of the galaxy to the other.”
Beneath the Valley of the Pyramids lie the Ravne tunnels, an ancient man-made labyrinth that Osmanagich began clearing in 2006. In the 1.8-mile-long section open to the public, he says, high concentrations of electrified molecules known as negative ions deliver healing energy. “I can tell you this, I have never had Covid, and being in this place is one thousand times more powerful than any vaccine,” he told me earlier this year, as we stood by the entrance, watching visitors strap on helmets before plunging into the gloom. Though scientists have dismissed the pyramids as a hoax, the complex has become Bosnia’s most popular tourist attraction. Around 136,000 people visited last year, many seeking to boost their immune systems, treat various illnesses or protect themselves from the coronavirus.
The pyramids’ most famous champion is the tennis star Novak Djokovic, an ethnic Serb from Belgrade — and seeker of “energy hubs” and “concentric circles” — who has called the site “paradise on earth.” Djokovic, who was banned from the Australian Open in January after failing to provide proof of vaccination against the coronavirus, first came to the pyramids in early 2020 and has returned four times. During a September visit, Osmanagich led Djokovic through chest-high water in a section sealed off from the public. “You feel that energy go through your body, and it is very hard to express in words,” Osmanagich told me. “You are like in your mother’s womb. You are protected.”
I put on a helmet, ducked my head and, accompanied by a young, English-speaking guide, followed Djokovic’s route through the tunnel. As we descended through dimly lit passageways, she unspooled her practiced patter about Bovis-scale energy measurements, levitating cells, scalar waves and ancient “proto-runic” symbols etched on a sandstone slab. At a rest area, I fell into conversation with Amir, a frail, gaunt man who appeared to be in his 70s who was sitting on a bench beside his wife. Diagnosed with cancer and going through his seventh round of chemotherapy, he had been coming to the tunnels for 10 straight days, for several hours each time. A lab analysis, he told me, had shown a significant improvement in his white-blood-cell count. “I can’t say, ‘I feel this, I feel that,’ but at least this made me eager to continue,” he said.
Most people regard Osmanagich’s tourist attraction as a harmless fantasy — or they did, anyway, until the pandemic hit and some Bosnians sought to treat themselves here instead of getting vaccinated. (Bosnia has one of the lowest coronavirus vaccination rates in Europe, about 26 percent, according to the World Bank.) For years Bosniaks — Bosnian Muslims, like Amir — have been flocking to the site, located in a predominantly Muslim part of the country. Some embrace Osmanagich’s claims as proof that they are the descendants of a great civilization.
Bosnian Serbs, too, regard the pyramids as a symbol of national transcendence. It is a belief consistent with the assertion by the late Serbian pseudohistorian Jovan Deretíć that the Serbs are “the oldest European people,” who dominated the continent for millenniums. For the Bosnian Serbs, however, this self-deception is part of a larger remaking of reality, a surge of grievance and denialism that now threatens to break the country apart.
One generation after the Bosnian War, which was responsible for the deaths of close to 100,000 soldiers and civilians from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serbs have largely embraced the fiction that they were the conflict’s primary victims. Notorious wartime leaders such as Radovan Karadžić, convicted of war crimes for his role in the siege of Sarajevo, and Ratko Mladić, the commander of the forces who massacred more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, are seen as misunderstood heroes who fought to save the Serbian people. Last year, the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, issued a report stating that Bosnian Serb officials have stirred up nationalist fervor by downplaying war crimes and by arguing that foreign powers are forcing Serbs to “feel ashamed.”
These kinds of emotional rewritings of history fill the playbooks of populist leaders throughout Europe. In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vučić has supported the claim that the Serbs have been unfairly maligned as aggressors in the Bosnian war, praised Slobodan Milošević — convicted at The Hague of crimes against humanity — as a “great Serbian leader” and expressed regret that Serbia didn’t expand farther across the Balkans. Vučić, who was elected to a second term as president in April, is one of the few European leaders maintaining close ties to Vladimir Putin, a relationship strengthened by their common Christian Orthodox faith and their nationalistic outlook.
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They share a reliance on the narrative of victimhood as well. Putin, who has called the breakup of the Soviet Union “a major geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” has invoked a rash of existential threats — Nazis, NATO, corrupt Western values — to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And, like Vučić, he has pursued a strategy of denialism, blaming the Ukrainian government, for example, for Russian atrocities in Ukraine or claiming they were staged by anti-Russian figures. Putin and Vučić both rely on a conviction that they rule over great peoples who have been robbed of their natural borders and their heroic destinies, whether by “Nazified” Ukrainians, Bosniaks or American and European-led cabals.
In Bosnia, such recrudescence reached a peak last July, when the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, in response to a new law that prohibits denying the genocide in Bosnia, severely limited Serbian participation in the Bosnian government for six months. Dodik is a staunch ally of Vučić and Putin, and his interests have increasingly come to be aligned with those of Russia, which seeks to block Bosnia from moving toward membership in the European Union and NATO and wants to strengthen a Serbian-Russian alliance. There is fear that the Ukraine war could create a spillover effect, with Putin working alongside Dodik to split up the fragile country. Last fall, Christian Schmidt, the international administrator responsible for overseeing the Dayton accords, which ended the Bosnian War in 1995, submitted a report to the United Nations Security Council in which he warned, “The prospects of further division and conflict are very real.”
The Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia came into being in 1945 under Josip Broz Tito, the World War II partisan and Communist leader. In the decade after his death in 1980, the federation, which consisted of six republics, began to unravel. In 1991, Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia declared independence. Bosnia and Herzegovina — a multiethnic state mostly made up of Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs — pulled out of the rump Yugoslavia, leaving behind only Serbia and Montenegro, in 1992. Bosniaks, who made up almost 50 percent of Bosnia’s population, sought to maintain the state’s 1945 borders. Bosnian Serb representatives demanded independence for all areas with significant numbers of Serbs. A new Bosnian Serb Army was formed out of 80,000 discharged Yugoslav troops who had been garrisoned inside Bosnia. Backed by Milošević and remnants of the Yugoslav Army under his control, including special-forces commandos, the new force began to combine separate enclaves by ousting and massacring Croats and Bosniaks. Soon after that, Croats and Bosniaks also started to battle for territory inside the country, and in some cases, Bosniak military units even turned against one another.
In April 1992, Serbian forces organized by Mladić and Karadžić massed in the hills that surround Sarajevo and began a siege of the Bosnian capital that lasted 46 months. Shelling and sniper fire killed about 10,000 civilians. In Banja Luka, an ethnically mixed city of about 200,000 in northwestern Bosnia, Bosnian Serbs expelled Bosniaks and Croats and destroyed most traces of Muslim culture, including the Ferhadija Mosque, a 16th-century landmark considered one of the finest examples of Ottoman-era architecture in the Balkans.
Three years later, the Bosniak and Croat armies of Bosnia and Herzegovina joined forces, and together — along with air support from NATO — they compelled the Bosnian Serb leaders to negotiate an end to the fighting. The resulting Dayton peace agreement established two ethnically based “entities,” the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. They were united by a weak federal government in Sarajevo that has a three-member presidency (a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb) and a unified Bosnian military, tax authority and judiciary. The agreement granted the Serbs, who now make up a little more than a third of Bosnia’s population, a little less than half of the country’s territory, freezing into place the gains they made during the war. A 1994 report by the Central Intelligence Agency blamed Bosnian Serb troops and paramilitary forces for “90 percent” of the conflict’s war crimes, including the forcible eviction and systematic killing of members of other ethnic groups. Yet according to Leila Bičakčić, the director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serbs came away with a different message from the country’s partition: “It was a civil war, they were defending their territory and therefore no crimes were committed.”
Dodik was born in 1959, in Banja Luka, and raised in nearby Laktashi, where his parents grew potatoes on a 17-acre farm. Although he trained at an early age for a career as a butcher, Dodik got involved in Communist Party politics as a teenager and studied political science at the University of Belgrade. When the war began in 1992, he kept his distance from the fighting. Siniša Vukelić, the director of Capital, an independent news service in Banja Luka, told me that during the conflict, Dodik transported contraband cigarettes between Croatia and Banja Luka, protected by Serbian politicians and commanders. His nickname was Mile Ronhill, after a popular Croatian brand. “Because of Dodik’s good connections to Belgrade, they got the word, ‘Leave this guy alone, he’s one of us,’” Vukelić says. When the war ended in 1995, Dodik positioned himself as a reformer and founded a moderate alternative to Karadžić’s extremist party.
Wolfgang Petritsch — an Austrian diplomat who from 1999 to 2002 served as high representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which made him responsible for overseeing the Dayton accords — identified Dodik as a politician who could support the fragile agreement. “He was one of the few who had not participated actively in the war,” Petritsch told me. The men talked politics while driving around in Dodik’s black Mercedes. “I thought, How can he afford such a car?” Petritsch says. “We knew there was corruption going on, but we had to choose between calling it out and dealing with those who were less bad.” Petritsch secured agreements from Dodik to safeguard the rights of the small Croat and Bosniak minorities living in the Republika Srpska and to support the building of a memorial at Srebrenica. Richard Holbrooke, the United States envoy who brokered the Dayton accords, praised Dodik’s conciliatory attitude in his 1998 book “To End a War.” If more leaders like Dodik appeared and held on, “Bosnia would survive as a single state,” he wrote. According to Petritsch, “this was the most intense nation-building period in Bosnian history, and Dodik was fully on board with it.”
Though Dodik serves as the Serbian member of the three-man presidency in Sarajevo, he has spent the last year — since his dramatic stunt in the summer of 2021, restricting the Serbians’ role in the Bosnian government — ensconced in the Republika Srpska, preparing for national elections this fall and occasionally fraternizing with Serbian celebrities. In September, he was recorded crooning Serbian folk songs with Djokovic at the wedding of an Olympic gold medalist in judo. The resulting social media attention highlighted the relationship between the populist politician and a world-famous athlete who has sometimes embraced troubling symbols of Serbian nationalism. In 2008, for instance, during protests in Belgrade following Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia — about a decade after the Kosovo war, in which Serbian troops and militiamen killed thousands of Muslim civilians — Djokovic made a video in which he declared, “We are prepared to defend that which is ours,” then added, “Kosovo is Serbia.” (Djokovic’s father was born in Kosovo when it was an autonomous province within Serbia.) In 2020, he posed for a photo holding a bottle of brandy adorned with an image of Draža Mihailović, a controversial leader of the Serbian Chetnik movement, who was convicted of war crimes and executed by Tito’s government after World War II. (In 2015, Serbia’s government overturned the conviction.)
Dodik has twice awarded Djokovic the Order of the Republika Srpska. In 2020, the two men made a joint visit to the Jahorina ski resort outside Sarajevo, which had been a symbol of Bosnia’s multiethnic identity at the 1984 Winter Olympics. But the Dayton accords designated the area part of the Republika Srpska, and today the country’s other ethnic groups largely shun the place. Djokovic has been a target of virulent online attacks by Bosniak activists, though his defenders, who include Croats and Muslims, say that he has walked into some controversies unwittingly and has largely been a force for reconciliation in the Balkans. He has spoken about his friendships with Croatian athletes, and in 2014 he led an international campaign to raise money and media awareness following floods in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia that killed dozens and left thousands homeless.
In February, I met Dodik, who is 63, at the headquarters of his ruling party in Banja Luka, now the capital of the Republika Srpska. He was sitting in a gold-trimmed, cushioned armchair in a salon decorated with matching cream-colored carpets, drapes and sofas. After he stood up and gripped my hand, I told him that I had written about him in 2000, when the Clinton administration considered him a moderate in a country dominated by Serbian extremists. In recent years, his rhetoric has turned vile, however, scorning Bosniaks as “second-rate people” and “treacherous converts” who sold their original Orthodox Christian religion “for dinner.” (One tenet of Serbian nationalism is that Bosniaks were originally Orthodox Serbs who converted to Islam and facilitated five centuries of Ottoman rule.) He has called the Srebrenica massacre “a fabricated myth” and “something that does not exist.”
What, I asked, explained his transformation? He leaned forward in his chair and shifted the subject to what he called the betrayal of Bosnia’s Serbs. The Dayton accords were “a failure,” he said, one whose unraveling the United States and its European allies had done nothing to prevent. “It’s the Americans’ fault, not my fault,” he said. “Muslims think they’re the war’s biggest victims, and they want the whole of Bosnia for themselves. The Serbs are victims of years of demonization.” Dodik lashed out at the new genocide-denial law, imposed by Christian Schmidt’s predecessor as high representative. “A foreigner cannot come here and impose laws, regardless of what the substance is,” Dodik said. In fact, the 1997 agreement by the Peace Implementation Council, consisting of 55 countries and agencies that oversee the Dayton accords, granted the high representative the power to make laws and fire Bosnian officials.
I asked Dodik which side he supported in the looming conflict in Ukraine. (The Russians invaded three days later.) He has met with Putin several times in Moscow and Belgrade, and Russia has backed Dodik’s claim that the high commissioner is overreaching and threatens the rights of Bosnian Serbs. “I’m for the side of peace,” Dodik said. Putin, he added, “is a real good guy.”
Since gaining power in the Republika Srpska, Dodik, according to his critics, has turned the entity into a personal fief. “He now controls everything.” Leila Bičakčić told me. “Public tendering, public contracts, infrastructural work, it all leads back to him.” Drasko Stanivuković, the mayor of Banja Luka, has claimed on social media that Dodik and his immediate family have amassed hidden stakes in 70 companies — many owned by relatives, friends and business associates. Dodik laughed off the allegations of corruption. “Maybe in America people will vote for criminals, but not here,” he said. He admitted to owning one successful business: a slivovitz distillery on his farm in Laktashi. He produces 100,000 bottles a year, many exported to Serbia, Slovenia and Germany. “It’s as smooth as cognac,” he said, offering me a glass.
Dodik has maintained popular support through crude emotional appeals to Serbian identity. On Jan. 9 this year, the 30th anniversary of Srpska Day — the anniversary of Karadžić’s declaration of a breakaway Serbian state within Bosnia and Herzegovina — Dodik defied a Bosnian state constitutional court order and staged a bellicose celebration of Serbian power. Hundreds of red-bereted policemen, brandishing automatic weapons, marched behind combat vehicles, joined by off-duty Serbian officers from the unified army. Representatives from Russia, China, Serbia and France’s far-right National Rally Party watched from a reviewing stand. After the rally, Dodik’s supporters sang Serbian nationalist songs, waved the Republika Srpska tricolor flag and displayed banners dedicated to Mladić. Dodik “was playing with fire,” a Western diplomat told me.
Bosniaks and Croats have also been susceptible to their own politics of division and self-delusion. Bosniak veterans clad in green berets, brandishing green Islamic flags and shouting “Allahu akbar,” marched in Bužim, near Bihać, in western Bosnia, in a counterprotest following the Jan. 9 Srpska Day parade. The Croatian Democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nationalist party, has railed against the conciliatory language of Željko Komšić, the Croat member of the presidency, who served with the multiethnic Bosnian Army during the war; the union is pushing to rewrite the country’s election laws so that ethnic Croats alone would choose the Croat presidential constituent. (The union denies this characterization and says it is considering several proposals.) Currently, according to the Dayton accords, all citizens in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina can vote for either a Croat or Bosniak candidate.
But Dodik’s politics have been the most divisive. On the streets of Banja Luka, the blue-and-yellow flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina is nowhere to be seen; only the Republika Srpska tricolor hangs from government office buildings, police stations and public monuments. In a neighborhood of shabby postwar apartment blocks, I saw crude portraits of Mladić, known by many as “the butcher of Bosnia,” stenciled onto walls. The portraits appeared after the New Year, local journalists told me, put up by youthful members of soccer clubs and paid for by local politicians. “These youngsters are trying to form an identity,” Semir Mujkić, the managing editor of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which tracks genocide denial in the country, told me. “They see that Serbs are being attacked, so they think, I can do something for my people, I can defend them.” At one major intersection, a large mural shows Mladić posed before the Republika Srpska flag, along with a legend in Cyrillic letters: “Unification has begun, and it can no longer be stopped.” The line refers to an increasingly popular sentiment in Srpska supporting the entity’s annexation by Serbia, which it borders, a move that Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, has said he opposes.
One of the few places in the Republika Srpska where the Bosnian flag flies openly is at Srebrenica, the site of the war’s worst atrocity. As fighting tore through eastern Bosnia, the United Nations Security Council declared the municipality a “safe area” in April 1993, and it became a gathering point for displaced Bosniaks. Bosnian Serb forces pressed a military assault two years later; 30,000 people streamed into the grounds of a defunct Yugoslav car-battery factory in a village called Potočari, which Dutch peacekeepers from the United Nations had turned into their headquarters. Before the troops withdrew under threat from Mladić’s forces in July 1995, the Serbs drove men and boys away in buses, shot them to death in forests and warehouses, then dumped their bodies in mass graves. Though thousands of survivors fled into the mountains and tried to reach another safe area, Tuzla, 60 miles away, almost all of them were tracked down and killed.
For years, Bosnian Serbs prevented efforts by Bosniaks to erect a shrine at the site. In 2001, the Office of the High Representative, under Petritsch, established the Srebrenica Memorial Center at the old base for the Dutch peacekeepers. The remains of more than 6,600 victims, recovered from mass graves and mountainsides, have been interred in its vast cemetery across the road. Since then, the site has become a battleground between Bosnians committed to remembering the killings and Serbian ethnic nationalists who deny they happened.
‘Certain people think that the things they failed to accomplish during the war, by using weapons, violence and ethnic cleansing, they can do in political ways.’
I visited the Memorial Center on a frigid afternoon in February. An exhibition of belongings retrieved from mass graves or donated by victims’ families — a cigarette case, a pocket watch, a pair of jeans — was opening that day, and the hundreds of attendees included European ambassadors and Bosnian dignitaries. Not a single official from the Republika Srpska, I was told, had shown up. “You are seen as a kind of a traitor if you come here,” Semir Mujkić, whose Balkan Investigative Reporting Network was one of the exhibition’s organizers, told me. A small contingent of police officers stood guard in the parking lot.
Mujkić blames Dodik for fostering a culture of denialism. Serbs have accused Bosniaks of exaggerating the number of dead; maintain that the cemetery is filled with Bosniak soldiers or even empty coffins; and claim that the atrocities their people suffered were as bad as or worse than what the Bosniaks experienced. “It wouldn’t have been like this without Dodik,” Mujkić said. “I won’t say the entire Serbian population cheered for this idea, but if we had had a different narrative for the last 10 years, it could have been changed.” When I had asked Dodik earlier if he considered Karadžić, Mladić and other convicted Serbian war criminals to be guilty of genocide, he hedged. “I cannot overturn the decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal,” he replied. But, he went on, “If Mladić is guilty of atrocities against Muslims, then Muslim generals have to be held responsible for atrocities against Serbs.” (In fact, three high-ranking Bosniak officers are on trial in local courts for war crimes, including Gen. Sakib Mahmuljin, who is accused of commanding a detachment that killed 50 Bosnian Serb prisoners of war and civilians in 1995.)
Emir Suljagić, the director of the Memorial Center, who had family members who were killed at Srebrenica, told me that the center is often targeted by militant denialists. A few days earlier, he said, the leader of a small right-wing party in Serbia stood on the road that runs between the cemetery and the center and filmed himself proclaiming, “I am in Potočari, and there was no genocide.” Serbs have fallen back on lies and self-delusion, Suljagić said, to avoid confronting the horrors of the war and their own complicity. “On the one hand, you have DNA technology, and on the other hand, you have oral tradition, epic songs and bullshit,” he said. He praised the new genocide law for having significantly tamped down the false claims that once dominated social media and public discourse in the Republika Srpska.
I met Jasmila Žbanić, Bosnia’s most celebrated film director, one morning at Kawa, a cafe on a hill overlooking downtown Sarajevo. Visible through the window, as we sipped cappuccinos, were some of the spots from which Serbian batteries rained deadly mortars into the city. Žbanić received an Academy Award nomination for international feature film for her 2020 movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?” about a United Nations translator’s desperate attempts to evacuate her husband and sons from Srebrenica as the Dutch peacekeepers stood by. But shooting the movie was an ordeal, she said. Srebrenica’s mayor, a Dodik loyalist, did not grant them permits to film on location; Dodik and other top politicians would not allow them to secure a Bosnian military tank for a key scene. (After months of pleading, they received permission to use two tanks for a single day, but one of them immediately broke down.) Despite the film’s success, it still hasn’t been screened publicly in the Republika Srpska. Bosnian Serb leaders are “too smart,” Žbanić said, to ban the film outright. Her previous war film, “Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams,” also never played in theaters in the Republika Srpska. According to Žbanić, the cinema owners said: “We are afraid. They will smash the theater. They will send the financial police.”
As Željko Komšić, the Croat member of the tripartite presidency, told me: “We are losing tremendous amounts of time and energy, and creating a feeling of helplessness in the people. Certain people think that the things they failed to accomplish during the war, by using weapons, violence and ethnic cleansing, they can do in political ways.”
Today the Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids is part of a wider phenomenon: a realm of dreams and misinformation in which growing numbers of people around the world seem to dwell. The fantastical claims that its energy can cure cancer and Covid, that it serves as a beacon for intergalactic civilizations, have seduced tens of thousands of willing believers looking for antidotes to a broken society. The pyramids, according to Sam Osmanagich, were the first manifestation of a sophisticated Balkan culture that surpassed all of those in Western Europe. “You have to know that the first cultural oasis after the Ice Age was in Serbia,” he told me. “The first European civilization was along the Danube River, around today’s Belgrade.”
Archaeologists generally agree that settlements did arise between 5300 and 5000 B.C. in the Danube Valley — a 1,770-mile stretch along the river that includes parts of Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine — but scholars disagree about whether the first of these was in modern-day Serbia. “Our history was written by Berlin, Paris and London, but I say that as a people we should be proud of this,” Osmanagich said. A common interest in this Neolithic flowering had helped him bond with Novak Djokovic, he said: “Novak is a man with many interests, including the real history of the Balkan region, and so am I.”
Osmanagich and I walked past souvenir stalls selling postcards, natural soaps, herbal teas, powdered Chaga mushrooms and vials of Bosnian Pyramid Water taken from the underground ponds in the Ravne tunnels. This water, my tunnel guide had told me, has “emotions,” according to a Japanese scientist. It responds favorably to the “positive energy” inside the labyrinth, she said, and develops hexagonal crystals that makes drinking it particularly therapeutic.
A group of children and their teachers on a school outing cheered as Osmanagich strolled by: The anthropologist has emerged in recent years as one of Bosnia’s most recognizable figures. Over the last couple of years, he has used some of his savings to buy a trash-filled swamp next to the tunnels and turn it into “Park Ravne 2,” with a concert venue, forested walking trail and other attractions. The rapid expansion had already proven enormously popular.
“This is big stuff — history, science, spirituality, the beauty of life, all together,” he said, surveying the landscaped grounds. “In three or four years, we’re going to have 500,000 people. In 10 years, a million people. We don’t even know how far this is going to go.”
Joshua Hammer, the Berlin-based author of the nonfiction thrillers “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu” and “The Falcon Thief,” has been a foreign correspondent for three decades. He has previously written about the Philippine American journalist Maria Ressa and the “Hotel Rwanda” hero Paul Rusesabagina, now serving 25 years in prison on terrorism-related charges.
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