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This is how war starts.

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One day you're living your ordinary life,

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you're planning to go to a party,

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you're taking your children to school,

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you're making a dentist appointment.

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The next thing, the telephones go out,

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the TVs go out, there's armed men on the street,

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there's roadblocks.

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Your life as you know it goes into suspended animation.

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It stops.

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I'm going to steal a story from a friend of mine,

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a Bosnian friend, about what happened to her,

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because I think it will illustrate for you exactly what it feels like.

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She was walking to work one day in April, 1992,

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in a miniskirt and high heels. She worked in a bank.

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She was a young mother. She was someone who liked to party.

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Great person.

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And suddenly she sees a tank

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ambling down the main road of Sarajevo

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knocking everything out of its path.

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She thinks she's dreaming, but she's not.

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And she runs as any of us would have done

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and takes cover, and she hides behind a trash bin,

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in her high heels and her miniskirt.

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And as she's hiding there, she's feeling ridiculous,

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but she's seeing this tank go by with soldiers

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and people all over the place and chaos

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and she thinks, "I feel like Alice in Wonderland

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going down the rabbit hole,

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down, down, down into chaos,

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and my life will never be the same again."

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A few weeks later, my friend was in a crowd of people

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pushing with her infant son in her arms

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to give him to a stranger on a bus,

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which was one of the last buses leaving Sarajevo

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to take children out so they could be safe.

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And she remembers struggling with her mother to the front,

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crowds and crowds of people, "Take my child! Take my child!"

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and passing her son to someone through a window.

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And she didn't see him for years.

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The siege went on for three and a half years,

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and it was a siege without water,

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without power, without electricity, without heat, without food,

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in the middle of Europe, in the middle of the 20th century.

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I had the honor of being one of those reporters

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that lived through that siege,

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and I say I have the honor and the privilege of being there

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because it's taught me everything,

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not just about being a reporter, but about being a human being.

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I learned about compassion.

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I learned about ordinary people who could be heroes.

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I learned about sharing. I learned about camaraderie.

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Most of all, I learned about love.

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Even in the midst of terrible destruction and death and chaos,

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I learned how ordinary people could help their neighbors,

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share food, raise their children,

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drag someone who's being sniped at from the middle of the road

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even though you yourself were endangering your life,

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helping people get into taxis who were injured

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to try to take them to hospitals.

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I learned so much about myself.

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Martha Gellhorn, who's one of my heroes, once said,

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"You can only love one war. The rest is responsibility."

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I went on to cover many, many, many wars after that,

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so many that I lost count,

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but there was nothing like Sarajevo.

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Last April, I went back to a very strange --

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what I called a deranged high school reunion.

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What it was, was the 20th anniversary of the siege,

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the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo,

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and I don't like the word "anniversary," because it sounds like a party,

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and this was not a party.

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It was a very somber gathering of the reporters

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that worked there during the war, humanitarian aid workers,

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and of course the brave and courageous people of Sarajevo themselves.

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And the thing that struck me the most,

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that broke my heart,

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was walking down the main street of Sarajevo,

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where my friend Aida saw the tank coming 20 years ago,

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and in that road were more than 12,000 red chairs,

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empty,

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and every single one of them symbolized

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a person who had died during the siege,

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just in Sarajevo, not in all of Bosnia,

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and it stretched from one end of the city

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to a large part of it,

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and the saddest for me were the tiny little chairs

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for the children.

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I now cover Syria,

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and I started reporting it because I believed that

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it needs to be done.

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I believe a story there has to be told.

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I see, again, a template of the war in Bosnia.

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And when I first arrived in Damascus,

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I saw this strange moment where people

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didn't seem to believe that war was going to descend,

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and it was exactly the same in Bosnia

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and nearly every other country I've seen where war comes.

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People don't want to believe it's coming,

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so they don't leave, they don't leave before they can.

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They don't get their money out.

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They stay because you want to stay in your home.

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And then war and chaos descend.

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Rwanda is a place that haunts me a lot.

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In 1994, I briefly left Sarajevo to go report the genocide in Rwanda.

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Between April and August, 1994,

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one million people were slaughtered.

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Now if those 12,000 chairs freaked me out

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with the sheer number,

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I want you just for a second to think of a million people.

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And to give you some example, I remember

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standing and looking down a road as far as I could see,

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at least a mile, and there were bodies piled twice my height

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of the dead.

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And that was just a small percentage of the dead.

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And there were mothers holding their children

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who had been caught in their last death throes.

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So we learn a lot from war,

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and I mention Rwanda

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because it is one place, like South Africa,

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where nearly 20 years on, there is healing.

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Fifty-six percent of the parliamentarians are women,

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which is fantastic,

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and there's also within the national constitution now,

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you're actually not allowed to say Hutu or Tutsi.

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You're not allowed to identify anyone by ethnicity,

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which is, of course, what started the slaughter in the first place.

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And an aid worker friend of mine told me the most beautiful story,

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or I find it beautiful.

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There was a group of children, mixed Hutus and Tutsis,

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and a group of women who were adopting them,

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and they lined up and one was just given to the next.

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There was no kind of compensation for, you're a Tutsi,

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you're a Hutu, you might have killed my mother,

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you might have killed my father.

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They were just brought together in this kind of reconciliation,

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and I find this remarkable.

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So when people ask me how I continue to cover war,

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and why I continue to do it,

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this is why.

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When I go back to Syria, next week in fact,

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what I see is incredibly heroic people,

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some of them fighting for democracy,

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for things we take for granted every single day.

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And that's pretty much why I do it.

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In 2004, I had a little baby boy,

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and I call him my miracle child,

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because after seeing so much death

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and destruction and chaos and darkness in my life,

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this ray of hope was born.

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And I called him Luca, which means "The bringer of light,"

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because he does bring light to my life.

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But I'm talking about him because when he was four months old,

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my foreign editor forced me to go back to Baghdad

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where I had been reporting all throughout the Saddam regime

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and during the fall of Baghdad and afterwards,

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and I remember getting on the plane in tears,

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crying to be separated from my son,

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and while I was there,

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a quite famous Iraqi politician who was a friend of mine

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said to me, "What are you doing here?

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Why aren't you home with Luca?"

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And I said, "Well, I have to see." It was 2004

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which was the beginning of the incredibly bloody time in Iraq,

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"I have to see, I have to see what is happening here.

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I have to report it."

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And he said, "Go home,

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because if you miss his first tooth,

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if you miss his first step, you'll never forgive yourself.

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But there will always be another war."

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And there, sadly, will always be wars.

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And I am deluding myself if I think, as a journalist,

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as a reporter, as a writer,

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what I do can stop them. I can't.

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I'm not Kofi Annan. He can't stop a war.

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He tried to negotiate Syria and couldn't do it.

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I'm not a U.N. conflict resolution person.

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I'm not even a humanitarian aid doctor,

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and I can't tell you the times of how helpless I've felt

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to have people dying in front of me, and I couldn't save them.

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All I am is a witness.

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My role is to bring a voice to people who are voiceless.

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A colleague of mine described it as to shine a light

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in the darkest corners of the world.

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And that's what I try to do.

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I'm not always successful,

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and sometimes it's incredibly frustrating,

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because you feel like you're writing into a void,

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or you feel like no one cares.

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Who cares about Syria? Who cares about Bosnia?

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Who cares about the Congo,

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the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone,

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all of these strings of places that

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I will remember for the rest of my life?

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But my métier is to bear witness

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and that is the crux, the heart of the matter,

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for us reporters who do this.

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And all I can really do is hope,

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not to policymakers or politicians,

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because as much as I'd like to have faith

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that they read my words and do something,

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I don't delude myself.

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But what I do hope is that if you remember anything I said

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or any of my stories tomorrow morning over breakfast,

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if you can remember the story of Sarajevo,

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or the story of Rwanda,

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then I've done my job.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)