Jacqueline "Jackie" Shymanski, a Canadian journalist who spent a decade reporting from the front lines of the wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, died in Winnipeg on May 13, 2016, after a battle with breast cancer. She was 51.
Photo Courtesy CancerCare Manitoba
Born in Winnipeg on January 21, 1965, to Monica and Roy Shymanski, Jackie grew up in the city's north end, attended Garden City Collegiate, and studied journalism and public relations at Red River College. Her first job was as a reporter and weather presenter at IMTV in Dauphin, Manitoba, before she landed a position at CTV Winnipeg in 1989. But after watching the Berlin Wall fall on television, she decided her future lay overseas. So, with no job lined up and a thousand dollars in her pocket, she left for Eastern Europe.
What followed was a decade as an international journalist — first freelance, then under contract with CNN International that took her through dozens of countries, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the wars of the Balkans. It was in Sarajevo, under siege, that she did some of her most lasting work.
Jackie reported from the Bosnian capital through the worst years of the war, filing dispatches for CNN on shelling, sniper fire, mass graves, and the long, grinding toll the siege took on civilians — among them an eight-year-old boy, Eldin, who survived a mortar blast that should have killed him, and the forgotten wounded who waited years for medical evacuation. She worked out of the besieged Holiday Inn, the hotel that became an improbable headquarters for the foreign press corps, and out of the "Sarajevo Agency Pool," the shared newsgathering operation that let competing networks survive and cover the siege together.
News Package from 1994 from Sarajevo under the Siege
"Luckily, CNN reporter Jackie Shymanski's jeep was just there at that point. She saw me, took a deep breath and screamed on the soldier who was approaching our car. She then began to shout at everyone else. They turned towards her and just waved us off to carry on. As we were passing by, she looked at me and waved at me." — Dr. Edib Jaganjac, Sarajevo surgeon, recalling how Jackie helped get him safely through a Serb checkpoint while he was fleeing the besieged city in 1993 (Memory of Nations oral history archive)
Colleagues who shared the Holiday Inn's shattered lobby with her remembered a young, determined reporter who worked herself to exhaustion. In his posthumously published memoir Inviati di guerra, former UN spokesman Andrea Angeli recalled visiting the makeshift Eurovision broadcast point in the hotel's basement, where Jackie — then twenty-five and far from home filed dispatches around the clock: "the other correspondent from the same network, Jackie Shymanski, a twenty-five-year-old Canadian from Winnipeg, was extremely talented, though she didn't have the same stamina as her [more experienced] colleague; every so often, when I went down to the Eurovision basement from which she broadcast, I would find her with her head resting on her folded arms, snatching even a brief moment of rest."
Zahid Bukva, longtime Holiday Inn hall manager, with CNN correspondent Jackie Shymanski in besieged Sarajevo a keepsake photo Jackie later inscribed to him: "to my absolute favourite... hugs, love and many kisses, Jackie."
Photo: RFE/RL, courtesy of Zahid Bukva.
For her part in CNN's coverage of the Bosnian war, Jackie shared in the network's 1994 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton — American broadcast journalism's highest honour — alongside Christiane Amanpour, Jim Clancy and Brent Sadler. She continued reporting from Bosnia and the wider region for years afterward, covering the aftermath of the war, the uncovering of mass graves, and — in 1997 — the U2 concert at Koševo Stadium that marked Sarajevo's return to something like normal life.
When Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladić was finally captured in 2011, newspapers and broadcasters turned to Jackie, by then long retired from the front lines, for her recollections. In a piece for the Winnipeg Free Press titled "The Serb monster I remember," she wrote candidly about having covered the conflict as a CNN correspondent and about what it meant to see him finally answer for the war she had witnessed firsthand.
"Will remember him as a great newsman, when our paths crossed during the wars in the Balkans." Jackie Shymanski, writing in 2014 to mourn a fellow Balkans war correspondent, signing her condolence as "Sarajevo Agency Pool, fellow Winnipegger"
Eventually, after "she had seen enough of the human tragedies of wars," as her family put it, Jackie came home to Winnipeg. She found a quieter life working among the English gardens at Assiniboine Park before moving into public relations roles with Manitoba Telecom Services (MTS) and the Manitoba Lotteries Commission. From 2010 until her death, she served as Director of Communications and Public Affairs at CancerCare Manitoba, where she was described as instrumental in building the Cancer Patient Journey Initiative for patients undergoing treatment.
"In her role as director of communications, she worked with newsrooms to raise the profile of CancerCare Manitoba and managed difficult issues skillfully. Many staff at CancerCare also remember Jackie as a trusted friend and confidant who would listen to concerns and try to help. People have told me her door was always open... She was very proud of her years as a journalist for CNN."
Dr. Sri Navaratnam, President and CEO, CancerCare Manitoba
Those who knew Jackie beyond the newsroom remembered a magnetic, intellectually curious woman who loved a good debate about world affairs as much as she loved a dinner party, a garden, or an afternoon with her horse, Lucky, on her grandparents' farm in Fraserwood. She spent summers at Sandy Hook and Gimli with her partner, Paul White, with whom she wanted to grow old, and she doted on her two nephews.
Jackie is survived by Paul White; her brother Michael Shymanski and sister-in-law Anna; nephews Nick and Andrew; Paul's son John; and many cousins, extended family, and dear friends around the world. She was predeceased by her parents, Monica and Roy Shymanski, her grandparents, and her first nephew, Eric.
A reporter who told Sarajevo's story and the story of the Siege.
International correspondent, CNN International, 1990s. Recipient of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, 1994, for coverage of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Later, Director of Communications and Public Affairs, CancerCare Manitoba, 2010–2016.
JACKIE SHYMANSKI was born on 21 January 1965 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.
Died on 13 May 2016 in Winnipeg, of breast cancer, at age 51.
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