The Sarajevo City Council declared the actress Mirjana Karanovic an honorary Sarajevo citizen, Fena news agency reported.

Besides Karanovic, Krunoslav Cigoj, late Croatian singer and diplomat and a US senator Chris Smith, a member of the Helsinki Committee, received the same title.

Karanovic told N1 she was pleasantly surprised and that she had “a special relationship with the Bosnian capital.”

The actress came under intense fire in Serbia after playing the leading role in the 2005 “Grbavica” film by Jasmila Zbanic, a Bosnian film director and screenwriter.

Karanovic played a Bosniak woman who gave birth to a child after being raped by a Serbian soldier.

She said the main message from the film was “that a child born out of hatred could be loved. Esma decided to love that child regardless of it being conceived in hatred. For me, that is the most humane message of films dealing with events from the 1990s.”

Karanovic, considered one of the best actresses in former Yugoslavia and Serbia, was often targeted of nationalists and homophobes at home.

She told N1 that “everyone chooses how to live their lives and what will they live with, but always, regardless of people around you, you have to live with yourself.”

Karanovic said, “the deaths in the Balkans were terrible, senseless, provoked and did not have any justification if there ever is any justification for death.”

Commenting on the current situation in the region, she said she thought “it was more difficult than in the 1990s.”

“Back then I believed that if we fight, join forces, put some effort to change things, that they will eventually change. But now, 20 years later, we're doing the same things, again. Everything is the same again. That’s why it is so difficult to accept it,” Karanovic told N1.