Kemal Kurspahic, former editor in chief of the Bosnian independent daily Oslobodjenje, which published every day during the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo, returns to Cornell University to deliver a public talk Thursday, April 1.

Kurspahic , who first spoke at Cornell in 1996, will speak on "War Drums and Peace Talks in the Balkans: Media-made Events?" at 4:30 p.m. in 230 Rockefeller Hall. A panel discussion will follow the talk.

Kurspahic is now the Washington-based editor-correspondent for Oslobodjenje and is an editor at The Connection Newspapers in McLean, Va. He was named International Editor of the Year in 1993 by the World Press Review in New York, for keeping his paper alive through the siege of Sarajevo. The Oslobodjenje building was destroyed by shelling and sniper fire, but the staff published every day out of an atomic bomb shelter below the facility. The siege lasted from April 1992 to November 1995.

Kurspahic, 59, was awarded the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1994 and, among other honors, received the Courage in Journalism Award in 1992 from the International Women's Media Foundation in Washington, D.C. He is the author of three books: The White House in 1984; Letters from the War in 1992; and As Long As Sarajevo Exists in 1997. Kurspahic's op-ed pieces have appeared in numerous U.S. publications, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe and Miami Herald.

For more information on the visit, contact John Weiss, associate professor of history at Cornell, at 255-6754, or e-mail: jhw4@cornell.edu