AThe Los Angeles Times Los Angeles, California Tuesday, August 04, 1992 - Page 93
Pawns In A Game
At a distance from events in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one might possibly view the horrific campaigns of “ethnic cleansing,” which aim to leave only one set of players still standing, as unfolding with deadly deliberation in accord with grand strategy. It could all be likened to a crazed game of chess. So maybe it should come as no surprise that U.S. chess whiz Bobby Fischer has agreed to a rematch, 20 years later, with Russian Boris Spassky on a Montenegrin island and in Belgrade, Serbia's and shrunken Yugoslavia's capital, where the two old foes are to play for a $5-million purse. The famously capricious Fischer, asked in Belgrade whether playing the match in a country under sanctions will be a political event, answered: “I don't know much about that. I came here to play chess, and that's what interests me.” As reports emerged of Serb-organized concentration camps where more than 1,000 Muslim Slav and Croat prisoners may have been killed, and as daily life brought such touches as the machine-gunning of a bus carrying orphans, it was clear that for thousands of suffering Bosnians the political element was something it could be worth their lives to be ignorant of.
Pawns in a Game 04 Aug 1992, Tue The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles, California) Newspapers.com
