January/February 2005

Featured Story

Seeds of Reconciliation Sprout in the Shadow of Genocide

By Doug Hostetter

Twelve years ago, in the midst of the worst ethnic/religious slaughter in Europe since WWII, the Fellowship of Reconciliation embarked on a daring experiment. The Bosnian Student Project(BSP) was started in the summer of 1993 as a collaborative effort between FOR and the Jerrahi Order of America, a Sufi Muslim organization. The BSP sought to find and smuggle out of the war zone talented Bosniak Muslim, mixed ethnic, and other students who were unable to continue their education because of “ethnic cleansing” or the war. The program sought to find Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and other homes in the U.S. to offer food, shelter, and love to these young people. FOR chapters, religious congregations, and individuals provided funding for transportation, health insurance, and books, while U.S. high schools, colleges, and universities were asked to offer full tuition scholarships to qualified Bosnian students. The program continued throughout the remainder of the war, ending in 1996 after the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords, which brought the war in Bosnia to an end.

The Bosnian Student Project was set up on a strong decentralized model. FOR and the Jerrahi Order of America served as the core, the inspiration, and the catalyst. The Jerrahi Order made the connections with organizations in the war zone that helped to identify qualified Bosnian students in urgent need. FOR handled extensive administration on the U.S. side. BSP national staff, FOR local chapters, religious congregations, and concerned individuals found the schools willing to offer scholarships and opened their homes to BSP students.

The strength of this model was its effectiveness and its reflection of our values. The program involved thousands of individuals of diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in the war zone and the United States who wanted to actively work for life, tolerance, and pluralism in the midst of a deadly genocidal war. A drawback of the way that the program was organized was that once a student was placed in a school, national FOR had very little ongoing contact with him or her, unless there were problems. After the program ended and most students had graduated from the schools in which they had initially been placed, FOR lost contact with many students.

In April 2004, some of the former project staff and participants organized a reunion of BSP students still in the U.S. [See “Bosnian Student Project Ten-Year Reunion,” Fellowship, Sept/Oct 2004. Eds.]. About 20 participants came and shared information on their advanced degrees, successful careers, and families here in the U.S. During the reunion, we saw that the primary goal of the program had been accomplished: through the cooperation of people of many faith traditions, we had saved lives and secured an education for students at risk in the midst of a genocide.

A secondary goal of the Bosnian Student Project had always been that many of these talented Bosnian young people might return to their country to assist in rebuilding a tolerant, pluralistic society. In October 2005, I returned to Bosnia to look up BSP students and families, to learn how they now view the program and how they are using the education acquired through the project. During my two-week trip, I visited nine BSP alumni, three spouses, one child, and parents or siblings of seven BSP alumni still in the U.S. or Western Europe. This short article cannot offer a full report of those conversations, but I can tell you that every student and family member expressed gratitude to FOR for the Bosnian Student Project and the education that the project enabled them or their child to acquire.

I can further state that all the students are actively involved in working to build a more just and equitable society for their families, their country, and their world. It is not easy. The elites from the former Yugoslavian socialist society, and the nationalist parties that emerged from its breakup, are still entrenched in the government and universities, and have viewed the return of well-educated BSP alumni to Bosnia as threats to their positions. They have moved effectively to block Bosnian recognition of U.S. academic degrees. The process of degree accreditation is long and humiliating, costing US$1,800 for the paperwork alone, and involving a battery of tests with no guarantee that your advanced degree from MIT, Stanford, or Harvard will be recognized in Bosnia. This obstacle has steered BSP graduates away from older, often corrupt, institutions into emerging democratic nongovernmental organizations and an economy oriented toward the European Union. European-based NGOs and corporations have welcomed the returning BSP alumni with their American degrees, fluency in English, democratic values, and internationalist perspectives.

I would like to highlight three BSP alumni whose work illustrates the creative role that BSP graduates are playing in healing and reconciliation in their country.

“Truth is the first casualty of war” is a widely accepted maxim that is tragically reconfirmed with each new conflict. Its corollary, however – “Truth is the precursor to peace and reconciliation” – is just as certain, though it is not nearly as widely accepted. Propaganda and dishonesty are the stock-in-trade of all wars, but the war in Bosnia brought deception to new lows through the skillful distortion of information and “facts,” so that longtime friends and neighbors of different ethnic/religious backgrounds were turned against each other.

At the end of the war more than 30,000 Bosnians were listed as missing. Each side viewed itself as the primary victims in the war. There were widely different versions of who was killing whom, and the identity of bodies discovered in mass graves found after the war remained uncertain. The international community recognized that large numbers of missing persons not only posed a humanitarian problem for the families of the missing, but also posed a political problem for reconciliation between warring parties and for the effective building of post-conflict democratic institutions.

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) was formed in 1996 at the end of the war in Bosnia. Its mandate from the G-7 nations was to form an intergovernmental organization to deal with the issue of missing persons related to the different conflicts relevant to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro during the time period 1991-1995. Since that time, ICMP has been using the latest in science and technology to promote irrefutable truth in the interests of justice.

Its work begins with the Exhumations and Examination Program (E & E), which uses satellite photography and ground-piercing radar to detect the location of mass graves. The E & E program seeks to secure the cooperation of governments and other authorities in the effort, but uses its own archeologists and anthropologists to recover and examine human remains and uses antemortem and postmortem records to establish identification.  A second program, the Identification Coordination Division (ICD), establishes a profile of the missing, and is responsible for collecting blood samples from families of the missing and preparing bone samples for DNA extraction. Finally, ICMP laboratories extract DNA from bone samples from bodies in the graves, and through an elaborate computer database they match the DNA from the bone samples with that of living relatives to establish irrefutable evidence of the identity of the body.

Two former Bosnian Student Project students now work in the ICMP. Zlatan Krkic, 27, is in charge of the ICMP office in Zagreb. His responsibilities include relations with the Croatian government, monitoring recovery operations at mass graves in Croatia, monitoring the media, and English translation. Zlatan graduated from Horace Mann High School (N.Y.) in 1997 and from Ripon College (Wis.), with a B.A. in psychology and English literature, in 2001. His host families were Jack and Bernice McConn-Doyle of Westchester, New York, Yusuf and Amina Quinn of Chestnut Ridge, New York, and Tosun and Jean Bayrak of Chestnut Ridge, New York. Zlatan expressed thanks to FOR, the Jerrahi Order of America, his host families, and his schools for his excellent well-rounded education. “We were poor kids who were given an upper-class education and exposure to values which continue to guide our lives. You started us on the right path … .”

Azra Sisic Alijic, 27, works as a database software developer for the ICMP office in Tuzla. Azra graduated from Ramapo High School (N.Y.) in 1996 and Mt. Holyoke College (Mass.) in 2000, with a B.A. in computer science and international relations that included a study year abroad at the Sorbonne (Paris). Azra also completed an M.S. in computer science at Northwestern University (Ill.) in 2002. Her host family was Charles and Ralfanita Forman of Chestnut Ridge, New York. After returning to Bosnia, in 2003 Azra married Nadzad Aljic, a high school history teacher from her hometown of Tuzla; they now have a one-year-old daughter, Nayra.

Azra reminisced about how she had arrived in the U.S. with only $130, and how her host family, schools, and professors had helped her with everything she needed. “I got an excellent education. I learned self-reliance, critical thinking, and what are the really important things in life.

“I am really happy to be working at ICMP. In Bosnian I would describe this work as hajr. That means that the work is good, and for an inherently good cause. We are helping families find and bury their dead and move on with their lives. We are helping governments, armies, and people acknowledge the atrocities committed against innocent civilians, which lays the foundation for future reconciliation. This work is hajr.”

Azra acknowledged that her work sometimes also has side benefits. “I was driving 60 km in a 40 km zone yesterday and was pulled over by a policeman. His first question was where did I work. I replied that I worked at the ICMP. He responded, ‘Your work is very important. My brother is missing.’ I spent the next few minutes explaining how he needed to come to the office with two of his relatives to give blood samples so that we could do a search for a DNA match for his brother from among the 8,395 DNA bone samples in our database. He completely forgot about the ticket, and promised to come soon to our office with his relatives.”

Prijedor is a city of close to 100,000 people that before the war was almost equally divided between Serbs (Orthodox) and Bosniaks (Muslim), with a much smaller population of Croats (Catholic). During the war, the city became a laboratory of ethnic cleansing. With the help of the Yugoslav army, Serbs took over the government and police force of Prijedor and sent the Bosniak and Croat civilians to three concentration camps. The most notorious of the camps was located in the New Lubijya iron mine in the nearby village of Omarska. Prijedor’s Bosniak mayor, chief judge, police chief, and between 3,000 and 4,000 other citizens of non-Serbian ethnicity died in those camps.

In August 2004, Mittal Steel, of the United Kingdom, bought the Omarska mine. The Bosniak and Croat survivors of Omarska petitioned Mittal Steel to build a memorial at the mine, but the mine management did not want to antagonize Serbs. The Soul of Europe, a British NGO (founded by Rev. Donald Reeves, former rector of St. James’s Church, Piccadilly, and directed by Peter Pelz, painter and writer, to cultivate relations between Islam and the West), offered to help to mediate. The Soul of Europe hired Anel Alisic, BSP alumnus, and Zoran Dukic, a local Serb, as their project managers for the Omarska Memorial Project.
   
Anel graduated from Ramapo High School (N.Y.) in 1996 and from Spalding University (Ky.) in 2000. In the summer of 2000, Anel returned to Prijedor with a BSP Work Camp. In 2001 he received an M.S. in human rights and democracy from a joint program in Sarajevo run by South Eastern European University, the University of Sarajevo, and the Bologna Law Faculty; in 2002 he received an M.S. in local development for the Balkans from the Free Universities of Trento and Bolzano, Italy. Anel’s host family was George and Jean Edwards and the Louisville FOR chapter.

After several months of meetings with the survivors, the mine union, and local Serb officials, broad agreement has been reached on the establishment of a memorial. It will be located in the “white house,” a small four-room building where most of the torture and killing at Omarska took place. Anel and Zoran will be working with the local interethnic committees to create the memorial and monitoring its effect on community relations in Prijedor.

FOR members and members of the Jerrahi Order of America may be justifiably proud of the long-term outcome of their visionary collaboration of the 1990s. The spirit of interreligious solidarity that many are searching for today was alive and functioning during the Bosnian Student Project. That spirit has now communicated itself to a second generation of activists among the young people who were personally affected by the project. These students are the seeds of a better future. The continuing peacebuilding effects of the BSP form a telling proof of the ancient adage that actions speak louder than words.

Doug Hostetter, a former executive secretary and interfaith and international coordinator of FOR-USA, is the new Mennonite Central Committee liaison to the United Nations.