War Quote by John Pomfret

A line like this isn’t trying to dazzle; it’s trying to certify. “On numerous occasions” is the key phrase: not one dramatic incident, not an anecdote polished for a panel talk, but a pattern. The intent is credibility-by-risk, the old war-correspondent receipt that says: I wasn’t watching this from a safe hotel balcony. I was close enough to be targeted.

Pomfret’s wording also keeps the spotlight where he wants it. “I had my life threatened” is passive construction that implies danger without narrating bravado. He’s not claiming heroism, he’s claiming proximity. That matters culturally because conflict reporting lives under a permanent suspicion of voyeurism and careerism; invoking repeated threats functions as a preemptive rebuttal to anyone tempted to dismiss his account as armchair moralizing.

The subtext is darker. Naming “Bosnian Serbs” is not neutral description; it’s an assignment of agency in a war where responsibility was contested in real time and litigated afterward. In the Bosnian conflict, language was propaganda, casualty counts were disputed, and “both sides” rhetoric often served as a refuge for outsiders who didn’t want to take a stance. This sentence quietly refuses that refuge: it identifies a source of intimidation and implies a particular terrain of power.

Contextually, it gestures toward the 1990s media environment: reporters becoming part of the story, targeted precisely because witnessing and documenting threatened armed actors’ control over narrative. The line works because it’s simultaneously personal and procedural: a reminder that facts in war aren’t just discovered; they’re defended under pressure.