Bosnia: Bad Things Happen..

December 2018

Bad Things Happen When Good People Don’t Act

In the spring of 1998, I attended the 50thAnniversary celebration of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its humanitarian efforts after WW 2. During that day, I attended a breakout group lead by two professors, one from Harvard & the other from Haverford (Michael Sells). Cultural genocide of the Bosnian Muslim community was a thread of their talk. In typical Quaker fashion, at the end of the session, they asked each participant to identify an individual action step on this issue. My response was to learn as much as possible and to teach a Bosnia unit in my Peace, Justice and Social Change course.

Michael Sells had been instrumental in setting up a project to bring 150 Bosnian Muslim teenagers to Philadelphia areas schools and families. Wilmington Friends School (WFS) hosted five of them. I was awarded a sabbatical to travel to Bosnia to study the realities of the 1990-95 Balkan Wars and to visit with the families of the Bosnian Muslim students who were attending WFS. For six-weeks during the summer, of 1998, Rachel and I traveled around the region, finding stories everyday.

One piece of this trip was a two-week work camp sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) led by Doug Hofstedter.  We were living in a school in Sanski Most, a town in the northwest part of Bosnia. This area had seen some of the most heinous events of the Balkan wars: genocide, rape, ethnic cleansing to name a few. Pictures of imprisoned and emaciated men were commonly seen in the western press.

One day we traveled to the town of Kozarac, a place where the Muslims were returning after seven years. Led by several courageous women, one of them being Emsuda Mujagic, the Bosniaks started to return to their town where 25,000 fled in 1992, their homes ransacked and destroyed. They had returned to the town for the first time since 1992 the previous week and discovered 71 skeletons around their properties.

Our interpreter was one of the Bosnian students from America, then a student at Rutgers, who also was from Kozarac. We met with his father and ended up at their former home, which was a shambles with a small garden growing in the front yard. All of a sudden, a large Serb peasant woman came upon us, having heard that someone was in her garden. The owner and the women talked for quite a while. She was also a refugee from the war. Their initial fear and distrust transformed into the mutual recognition that the two of them were victims of the war. The women told the owner that she would get word to him when the corn was ready to harvest and that they both could share it.

During our time at his home, I asked the father to explain how the most ethnically integrated place in all of Europe became a place were man’s inhumanity took hold. His reply came very quickly and was as follows.

After the death of Tito, Slobodan Milosevic, the President of Serbia tried to consolidate power over the Yugoslavia Federation, using nationalistic rhetoric while igniting old ethic divisions by running documentary footage from WW 2, when 1 in 10 Serb males was reportedly killed by the fascists and their collaborators, over state controlled television. Political ads depicted Muslims as murderers. People watched him knowing that he was an extremist, yet no one did anything to counter his message of intolerance and extreme nationalism. “We did nothing he stated.” Milosevic was elected and the wars broke out as the six-member Yugoslavia federation dissolved. Death and destruction soon showed up for the 25,000 residents of Kozarac.

When thinking of this moment, I am reminded of the quote of    the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”…



1 comment:

  1. This is a breathtaking list of resources. Amazing and thorough work!

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.