Salko Hondo was born in 1938 in Konjic. He was a photo reporter and the head of the photo department of the Oslobođenje daily newspaper. On July 16, 1992, he lost his life on an assignment when he went to the Ciglane neighborhood in Sarajevo to take pictures of citizens waiting in line for water, armed with water canisters. Salko Hondo moved to Sarajevo in 1960. That same year he married his wife Nura. He got a job at Oslobođenje, where he worked for more than 30 years. In the early 70s, Salko was first a laboratory assistant, and a little later he started working as a photojournalist. In 1976 and 1978, he won the annual Oslobođenje Journalist Award.
“When I started working as a permanent volunteer in the Oslobođenje photo department in the spring of 1970, there were photo reporters Aleksa Štrbo, Miki Đurašević, Hajrudin Čengić and laboratory assistant Salko Hondo. Salko would tell a joke or comment on something he heard in Lutva’s tavern on the same floor where the laboratory was. I quickly realized that Salko’s wish was to finally come out of the darkness of the laboratory and go to events with a camera in his hand. Probably out of that desire, he would sometimes ask us young journalists, to write a few lines for photographs that were never ordered, but which he had taken of various parts of the city and of sudden events in Sarajevo. They were images full of city life. If one of the mentioned reporters was away, Salko would sometimes be given the task to go to a game, usually a football game, and he would always be happy if what he did was published and signed with his name and surname. Every time a photo was published, that page would hang on the wall of a very cramped laboratory space for a few days,” said journalist Hajdar Arifagić, a former work colleague of Salko Honda, recalls for Sniper Alley.
When Hondo, a few years later, got a job as a photojournalist, he went to sessions of the Assembly, the Central Committee, large events, the opening of new factories … and traveled with journalist teams throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, recording important events in the former state. “Of course, he also went to events attended by Tito. But even then, he did not stop bringing photographs of interesting details and situations from the streets of Sarajevo for the city chronicle. Putting them on the editorial desk, he would always say: “I also visited the city, and if you need it, choose whatever is good. And almost everything was good! ”- says Arifagić.
Summer 1992
In 1992, most citizens of Sarajevo and BiH thought that the war would end quickly, including Salko Hondo. He told his daughter Amra to leave the city for only a month. “Seka (that’s what he always called me, he never called me Amra), just go out for a month because of Minela. This will pass quickly … It didn’t pass quickly, and I never saw him again, “Salko Hondo’s daughter, Amra Hondo Subašić, who lives in America today, tells Sniper Alley. Arifagic remembers that Salko was a fearless professional, which he proved at the beginning of the aggression against BiH by filling the editorial table with photos from protests, barricades and shelling. As a professional journalist, he did not back down from the battle line.
In the summer of 1992, Hajdar Arifagić was hospitalized at the Eye Clinic of the Koševo Hospital. On July 16, which was a sunny and warm day, he heard a grenade explode in the Ciglane open market. Before dusk, when the second shift of medical staff arrived at the clinic, the news reached him that the Oslobođenje photo reporter had been killed. “I knew him,” the doctor told me the next morning. “He lives somewhere close, we saw each other when he would rush to work in the morning with a bag of cameras on his shoulder. Always cheerful and eager for work,”remembers Honda’s colleague Arifagić.
In May 1992, Salko’s daughter, together with her four-year-old daughter Minela, left war-torn Sarajevo with the Children’s Embassy. They were held captive in a column for two days in Ilidža. “Dad was very worried about us. When they let us go on the third day, I called him from Travnik. Dad cried. The five of us were in my little car. I lived in Zagreb for two years and returned to Sarajevo in 1994, as soon as the ‘blue road’ opened. My husband was in Sarajevo the whole time. ” Telephone connections with Sarajevo were cut off. For Salko’s daughter Amra, the most unfortunate moment was that fateful July 16, 1992, when she heard the following through a transistor radio listening to news from Radio Sarajevo at 10 o’clock: “Today in Sarajevo, a photo reporter from Oslobođenje, Salko Hondo, was killed by a grenade while photographing a water queue.” Salko’s second daughter Azra was nine months pregnant at the time, giving birth to Alma seven days after her father’s death. Unfortunately, Salko Hondo did not have the opportunity to meet his granddaughter Alma, nor Amra’s younger daughter Hena, who was born in 1997. Today they are successful young women in the United States.
Although, according to his colleagues, Hondo was afraid of grenades, he did not skip work. Unfortunately, on his last assignment in the first months of the aggression against BiH, he lost his life photographing a water queue. They identified him by his work bag which had “Oslobođenje” printed on it. Edina Kamenica, an Oslobođenje journalist, remembers Salko Hondo as a great prankster from before the war, because he was known for that. “We were often on the same assignment. He was one of those people you were glad to meet. He was always ready for a joke. I was a young journalist at the time. I was quiet and withdrawn. He was probably prompted by that, so often when we were on assignment, he would stand next to me and in some way he would support me and keep me company” said Kamenica. Hondo used to take pictures of the journalists he was on assignment with in addition to the photos needed for the job. Back then, photographs were developed in the photo-laboratory.
Edina was also photographed several times by Salko Hondo while on assignments. “Before the war, the photo department and the newsroom were not housed in the same building, Hondo would take the photos with him and when they saw each other, he would pull out the photo and say, ‘This is for you,'” says Edina. Edina Kamenica adds that Salko Hondo was one of those people in love with their job, people that you see less and less of in every profession today, even in journalism. “We have no working hours. He was not one of those people who locked the door and left, he really lived for this profession. He was a man who devoted himself to work. My colleague Arina Šarac told me that Hondo was terribly afraid of grenades. He would often talk about it. No matter how scared he was, he never refused assignments. Unfortunately, fate would have it that a man who was so dedicated to his profession would die. Oslobođenje had a lot of photos taken by him. Salko Hondo, in addition to photos of work assignments, really liked to photograph masses of people, a lot of people. He was looking to stop that atmosphere with his camera” says Kamenica. Oslobođenje photojournalist Didier Torche was one of Hondo’s young colleagues who learned the trade from him. “I learned photography from Hondo. He was not strict. He was a man who was always cheerful and accommodating. He would always bring apples from his property in Konjic and distribute them to us colleagues.”
Today, 28 years later, his daughter Amra remembers her father as a cheerful man, always in a good mood, a man who loved his wife and children. He was caring. He loved people, he loved company. He was very attached to his hometown of Konjic where he often went on weekends. “I remember the day when my mother had an accident, a car had hit her in Konjic. An ambulance brought her to Sarajevo. She was in a coma for 14 days. Dad didn’t want to go home from the hospital. They were so attached” she said. Salko Hondo was a passionate angler. He often went fishing, always to the river Neretva or Boracko Lake. The trout he would catch would be on the table of his family of four, which was usually prepared by his wife Nura, or he would grill it. “Sometimes he would brag about the catch. But it sometimes happened that he fished in vain all day without any fish biting. And he would talk about it. He was honest” Arifagic added.
Salko Hondo and Hajdar Arifagić once found themselves in a laboratory at a time when he was in a great hurry to hand over to the editor photos from the event he was covering. Arifagic had just arrived from a trip. “I was pressed for time, because I needed to write a text, and I had to develop the film and print the photograph. In the darkroom where you couldn’t see anything, he just gave orders: ‘Put the film in the developer! Keep an eye on the time so it doesn’t burn! Transfer it to the fixer. Quickly, quickly, put it under water.’ “He transferred the photo from film to paper and I washed and dried it. It was published on the paper’s front page. He came in the morning and congratulated me: “It turned out well. Next time you will work alone, even with paper. But before that, you will come see me so I can show you in peace what you need to pay attention to.” Arifagic recounts.
“There were always a lot of jokes with Dad. Once they were going somewhere to cover President Tito and one of the drivers had to go to the toilet, so they stopped next to some forest. Dad says, “When the driver came back, we could have ended up in jail.” Namely, they were stopped by the police. And Dad told them: “We are Oslobođenje journalists and we have press cards.” The police officer replied “you do not have cards for the forest.” It was funny when he came back, but Dad said that the police were very serious” says Amra Hondo-Subašić.
SALKO HONDO was born 25 March 1938 in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He was killed on duty on 16 July 1992 in Sarajevo.
Interviews and editorial by Sanela Gojak
Translated by Mustafa Čorbo
Cover photo: Oslobođenja Archive
Music used: ‘Aldona Dvarionaite – Frédéric Chopin: Prelude in E-Minor (op.28 no. 4)’
The song is permitted for non-commercial use under license:
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
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