From the Belly of the Balkan Beast : SARAJEVO: A War Journal, <i> By Zlatko Dizdarevic (Fromm International: $19.95; 208 pp.)</i>

The plan began when one Sarajevan climbed to the roof of a building from which a sniper was shooting people who dared to venture outside for food.

Just past the sniper’s window, the Sarajevan lowered a plastic bag with a loaf of black bread to the next floor. There, a co-conspirator attached a rock to the end of a line and tossed it to a starving neighbor across the way.

Once the line was taut, the bread bag was sent sliding down the rope. Just as it neared the open window, the bag became entangled on a tree branch. But only for a moment: A long pole appeared from another window, and sent the bag on its way.

The sniper, realizing he’d been outfoxed, started shooting. Too late. Cheers rose from the surrounding buildings, as they, too, feasted on the sniper’s defeat.

Like other stories in Zlatko Dizdarevic’s “Sarajevo: A War Journal,” the bread-bag tale illuminates an unseen aspect of the conflict in the Balkans: the little struggles people face while the world press focuses on military movements and political dramas. Dizdarevic, editor of the Sarajevo daily, Oslobodenje, instead tells his readers about war by going to his office: “It has taken me all morning to understand why I can suddenly see from my window certain parts of the city I’ve never been able to see before. The answer is simple and stunning: buildings, walls, branches that always were part of my surrounding landscape have simply vanished. Thus my universe expands from hour to hour.”

Dizdarevic’s account is one of the few from inside Sarajevo, an insight into the feelings of people examined under a microscope by outsiders since their city was besieged in the spring of 1992.

The bitterness at having been abandoned by the international community palpably appears in the collection of journal entries that begins in April, 1992. Chiding United Nations forces as accomplices to Bosnia’s enemies, Dizdarevic defends his nation against attacks by those intent on folding the former cosmopolitan capital and one-time site of the Winter Olympics into a “Greater Serbia.”

Dizdarevic’s descriptions unfortunately prevent readers from reaching their own conclusions. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is alternatively called, “felon Karadzic,” a “Fascist to whom any former SS man is an epic hero from a children’s story,” and “Karadzic the psychopath.” The result is often to obscure moments of insight with heavy-handed, invective prose: “Before the war, no one in Sarajevo made much of ethnic or religious allegiances. That is why the aggressors wish to destroy this city: It reveals the Fascist nature of the claim that there is no longer a place for mixed communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

Dizdarevic knows well the impact of this destruction. He is a Muslim married to a Serb; and mixed families such as his, which were the essence of the united Yugoslavia, are why Bosnia-Herzegovina was targeted for destruction. But Dizdarevic barely mentions his family’s personal experiences, missing an opportunity to further reveal the shattering quality of the war.

Equally puzzling is how quickly Dizdarevic broad-brushes the heroism of his colleagues at Oslobodenje, the Sarajevo daily which continues to publish despite the destruction of the newspaper’s offices, paper shortages and incessant danger to the staff. Though the newspaper is often mentioned in passing, only one chapter discusses it in detail, and even there Dizdarevic decides to explain the production of the newspaper by using the point of view of a foreign reporter visiting the operation.

He writes with such detachment at times that one often wonders whether this is Dizdarevic’s own self-defense mechanism. Perhaps the emotional distance he exhibits is what has allowed him to survive in a city where graveyards are the only public places that are full; where having a single meal every other day is considered the norm; and where as of June of last year 744 people had lost arms and legs.

Dizdarevic has drawn together a collection of pieces aimed at scolding the international community for allowing Bosnia-Herzegovina to twist in agony while leaders hid behind political imperatives and hollow U.N. resolutions. He argues that this international vacillation has made Sarajevo “a concentration camp,” and he compares the experiences of the Bosnians to those of the Jews. Using this parallel, he scolds outsiders for standing by in the face of misery:

“You may remember a time half a century ago when others like them arrived at midnight to round up and take away thousands of people who never returned. Those who remained consoled themselves with the thought that it could not happen to them, since they weren’t Jews. The next night they came again, looking for Communists, and on the third night those who remained had nothing left to console themselves with, because now it was their turn.”