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The pain of memory

Bosnian war lingers for 'U' students

By Alice Robinson
Daily Staff Reporter

For Ahmed Halilovic, dreams do come true.

Bad ones.

"This is like a terrible dream for me," said the Sarajevo native and Engineering first-year student about the break-up of his country. "As of now, I don't have a place to return to."

The homeland he and his family fled four years ago no longer exists.

Under the Dayton peace agreement reached last November, the state of Bosnia will be composed of two separate regions -- a Bosnian-Croat federation and a Bosnian Serb republic. A multi-ethnic central government will be mostly symbolic, with the Croatian and Serbian federations maintaining internal autonomy.

Most of Halilovic's family still lives in Bosnia despite the chaos.

"I was only 15 when I left. I was cut off suddenly," he said.

After fleeing the besieged Sarajevo for Austria, his family was able to come to the United States to stay with relatives.

For a time, Halilovic's family was afraid they would be forcibly returned to Bosnia, like many refugees.

His aunt was not so lucky.

"One of my aunts was in prison in a town called Prijedor," he said. "The town was occupied by Serbian paramilitary forces from the beginning of the war." Prijedor is located in northwest Bosnia.

While others fled, "her family stayed there. Her and a group of five or six other people were charged as being spies for the Bosnian government. They were going to be put to death," Halilovic said.

The sentence was dropped as a result of pressure from the human rights group Amnesty International and others.

"Maybe I've been really fortunate that no one in my family has been raped or murdered," he said.

A beautiful day

For students with Balkan roots, lingering scars are all that remain of the drawn-out conflict that once seemed out-of-control.

"It's different when you hear stories and different when it happens to someone you know ... when it's people you visited and stayed with," said LSA junior Olga Savic, who lost a Serbian aunt and uncle to the fighting four years ago.

"It was a beautiful sunny day. I was eating corn flakes, and I was shocked to read that they were killed," Savic said. The deaths were listed in her church paper.

"The Ustasa rounded up Serbs and killed them. This man reported my aunt and uncle -- we don't know why. They were taken to a camp and held for four days, then released. That day they were found dead," she said.

"All of my friends have been drafted," said Engineering sophomore Boris Kokotovic, a Serbian who moved here from Belgrade when he was 10. His father and grandmother live in Bloomfield Hills.

He said he was able to avoid the mandatory two-year service requirement in Serbia by studying abroad. But the war called for an additional draft.

"I feel guilty that I can't do anything about it from here," said Kokotovic, who keeps up with new developments by reading foreign newspapers.

"I can't go back now because if I do I'll get drafted. The military police has been looking for me," he said.

He has not been able to speak with his mother in Belgrade for several months, so he is not sure if the draft has ended since the peace agreement. "The last time the military police looked for me was seven months ago.

"In Belgrade, the blockade and sanctions have really hurt," he said. "It's difficult to find medication for the elderly. There are extraordinarily high prices for medicine. Fuel is in short supply."

An inconceivable thought

Ann Arbor resident Ghenna Fine, who was raised in Southern Serbia but has been in this country for more than 30 years, said her friends' ethnicities were not even a factor until the war started.

"It never dawned on me to ask them what nationality they were," she said. "It was inconceivable to think anybody hated me because I was a Serb.

"I truly feel I am Yugoslavian," Fine said. "I don't put too much emphasis on my Serbianism. I never felt when I was growing up that I was a Serb."

In fact, most students of Slavic heritage will seldom give a one-word answer when asked about their ethnicity.

"I'm sort of both Croatian and Serbian," said LSA junior Marko Kozul, who has a Croatian father and American mother. His paternal grandmother is Serbian.

"I sort of consider myself a Yugoslavian even though there's no such thing anymore. I feel just Yugoslavian, but there is no Yugoslavia," he said.

Kozul lived in Zagreb briefly as a child and spent many summers there growing up. He has also worked with refugees in Croatia.

Savic says she never considered her nationality until four years ago.

"I'm Serbian (but) I was never Serbian until the war started," she said.

"It would be a dishonor to people who were killed (for me) to be ashamed of my ethnicity. My uncles and cousins have lost everything they own. To pretend I'm not of the same ethnicity would be hypocritical," she said.

A war of confusion

On a visit to her homeland seven years ago, Fine detected a frightening intensity of political feeling in the people.

"In Serbia I sensed something is going to happen -- something very tragic. I could tell the political climate was changing rapidly," Fine said. "It scared me -- I felt very uncomfortable at that time."

Whatever the bad sentiment, Fine thought it would pass.

"When it happened it just hit me very hard," she said. "I didn't think it would ever break up in this way. It's still like a bad dream.

"I thought we had some intelligent people there," she said.

And she's not the only one who is bewildered.

"The peasants are probably just as confused as I am," Fine said.

The war "doesn't make sense because the (ethnic) groups are nonexistent," Kozul said. "Since I come from a Serbian and Croatian background it made very little sense."

Kozul said that when Yugoslavia was first formed after World War II, the government encouraged the different ethnicities to inter-marry. "They were trying to unify," he said.

Kozul pointed out the irony. "Everybody somewhere will have a cousin that is of the `other' ethnic group," he said.

"I think it's a myth to say they always hated each other," said University Slavic languages Prof. Benjamin Stolz of the quarreling ethnic groups.

The Serbian Kokotovic said, "Croatians and Serbs have lived together since World War II ... A majority of the people are against the war in the first place."

"Ethnic differences" are often touted as a reason for what many call the war's inevitability. But many believe this dangerous nationalistic pride was brought to the surface and exploited by power-hungry leaders.

"This war was started by politicians. Each politician had their own idea" of what Yugoslavia should be like, Kokotovic said.

"Milosevic is a disaster, truly," said Fine, who also blames politicians for the quagmire. Slobodan Milosevic is the Serbian president.

"They are feeding on the misery of the people. They are pushing people more and more to frenzy," Fine said. "There is nothing worse than nationalism."

Stolz said, "Most of all what we have in the ex-Yugoslavia is politicians who were power-hungry and they took advantage of nationalistic tendencies.

"We have three leaders who can be characterized as playing the nationalist card," he said.

Peace at last

The precarious peace agreement reached in Dayton is viewed cynically by some, confidently by others, gratefully by all.

"I think from the beginning there's been a very serious question as to whether the peace agreement will hold," Stolz said. " ... But it's the best we can hope for.

"Sooner or later, these people would have to stop killing each other," he said. "These people are going to need all the help they can get from Western Europe and the United States to ... learn to live in peace."

Although he feels the peace agreement will hold, the Muslim Halilovic said, "it's more like people who committed genocide, rewarding them with independence and political power. Nothing is going to happen to them. It's a very unjust peace because people have done all these atrocities and are being rewarded."

"I don't know if anyone wants to work together enough" for the peace agreement to succeed, Savic said. "There's nothing the United States can do about this. Americans will just get caught in the crossfire. I don't think anyone is innocent."

Amidst all of this, one thing cannot be disputed, Kokotovic said.

"The country's never going to be the same."