As names go, hers will never be so easy to remember as that of Anne Frank. But if ever the world looks for one victim, if one name can symbolize the frustration, suffering and absurdity of a war - this one in Bosnia not Nazi Germany - the name belongs to another child, Irma Hadzimuratovic.
Five years old and critically wounded by a mortar blast, Irma is the tiny embodiment of a global nightmare. For days on end - while her doctors and the news media went for broke and made her the most famous casualty in Sarajevo - Irma lay before the world's eyes like her country: helpless, in pain and doomed without intervention from outsiders.Despite the numbing effect of 16 months of daily tragedy and death from Bosnia-Herzegovina, the world could not help but hear this child's feeble whimpers. We memorized her infected baby mouth, her glazed eyes, the incongruous earrings in her pierced little ears. When Irma's hand groped weakly for her doll, the world felt the moral weight of that pitiful effort. It was as if Irma's hand had somehow reached for, found and wounded the world's carefully guarded heart.
Because none of us, big country or small, has been unable to "fix" the nightmare in the former Yugoslavia, we instinctively want to ignore it. After all, how many times can we grieve for strangers?
A year ago, we grieved for the Sarajevo musician who refused to surrender all gentility and grace to war and defiantly played his cello in the streets of a once-thriving and beautiful city. Then our grief was for the gaunt prisoners of war, staring from behind barbed wire like the inmates of Dachau or Auschwitz.
Then it was for the tens of thousands of victims of systematic and brutally sadistic rape. That was back when Sarajevo still had running water and electricity. Now the city is so devastated, Sarajevo carpenters rip up the wooden seats of Zetra Olympic stadium - site of the Winter Games just nine years ago - to build coffins.
As the destruction and atrocities mount in Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is obvious that this war is no different from any other ever fought. There are always "reasons" for fighting, killing and dying; almost never do they justify the exercise.
Try as we may to distance ourselves from the illogical, the enraging and the grotesque in Bosnia, Irma Hadzimuratovic has pulled us right back in.
Near death in her blood-stained hospital bed, she has personalized the horror. And that is as it must be.
In this war and in all wars, individual tragedies - irrevocable and overwhelming - are suffered, but each gets lost on the canvas of collective tragedy.
The personal element of war disappears. And that can only make war easier to declare and tolerate, again and again.
On the day the bureaucracies finally cracked and Irma was evacuated to Great Britain for medical treatment, the Bosnian government's public information officer in London could not mask his resentment.
"For one child, a lot of cares," said Mamon Nahas.
His bitterness is understandable. And yet, attention paid to one child may be the best hope remaining for Bosnia.
"Every day in Sarajevo, a child is wounded or killed," said Peter Kessler of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the agency responsible for Irma's evacuation. "Sarajevo is a city under siege, and this child is a representative of what the situation in Sarajevo is."
Irma Hadzimuratovic, 5 years old, with her back and stomach blown open by someone who thinks he has a good reason to do such a thing. This is what war looks like in Bosnia, what it always looks like when we no longer can turn away.