Miss of besieged Sarajevo speaks 33 years later about life's challenges

(Patria) - Shells, snipers, hunger, the fight for survival – that's what life in Sarajevo was like in the 90s. On the other hand, in a Sarajevo basement at the time, a surreal scene was unfolding, namely the election for Miss Sarajevo.

The title of Miss Sarajevo in 1993 was won by then 17-year-old Inela Nogić, who 33 years later recalled that event. For her, she says, it was an escape from reality.

"We had such nice company, there was singing, there was support. If someone was nervous, you'd have an hour, however long it all lasted, we were in some kind of normalcy. We returned to normalcy. The war was far away," said Inela, later dubbed "Miss of besieged Sarajevo".

She says she didn't apply for the competition herself, but her mother did. She didn't have a swimsuit or heels, and she hadn't used makeup before. It was this event that inspired the world-famous song "Miss Sarajevo", sung by U2 and Luciano Pavarotti. When the war started, Inela was 15 years old, and she described the events she experienced two years later in her autobiography "Miss of besieged Sarajevo".

"That's why I decided to write that book. To give that 17-year-old girl her voice back, to say what it was like and what it was. She became a symbol of that war period, and no one asked her how she was or what she was going through, how she felt," said Inela.

After winning the Miss competition, she received an invitation to participate in the prestigious Elite Model Look of the Year competition in New York. Then she was supposed to go to Paris, but she couldn't leave besieged Sarajevo. At that time, she also met her husband Marco, a photojournalist from the Netherlands, and moved with him to Amsterdam.

As a teenager in wartime Sarajevo, she also went through traumatic experiences, including sexual harassment, which she speaks openly about. She says that such wounds remain for a lifetime and that everyone has to learn to deal with them alone. In her autobiography, she writes that while she was becoming a symbol of resistance in public with a sash and a smile, she lived a completely different reality behind the scenes. A daily life marked by fear and war.

Today she lives in Amsterdam, is a mother of two children, and remembers her Sarajevo as a city that laughed even during the war.

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