Returning to an ethnically diverse Bosnia

BY KATHERINE BOYLE, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[an earlier version was published by the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, and has been republished by The Bosnian Institute, a London-based organization that provides education and information on the history and culture of Bosnia-Herzegovina]

Overnight people became beasts.

Seida Karabasic can think of no other explanation for the beginning of the Balkan wars, which, in 1992, turned neighbor against neighbor in Prijedor, her municipality.

"Because it happened so quickly, a lot of people don't trust those of other ethnicities anymore," said Karabasic, who is ethnically Muslim or Bosniak. "They feel [the fighting] could happen again at anytime."

Across Bosnia, this distrust is evident not only in civilians' attitudes but in the ethnic makeup of communities as well. Many areas that were ethnically diverse before the war are now home to ethnically homogeneous communities.

The shift has been facilitated in part by the large number of Bosnians who were killed during the war or chose to flee the country. But another significant contributing factor has been the relocation of many Muslims, Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats to different areas of Bosnia.  (More)

A Chechen family finds refuge in the Netherlands yet yearns to return

BY NATASHA ROTSTEIN, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

[A version of this story also appeared in The Moscow Times on Sept. 20, 2006]

[to the lead story, The Sound of Chechen music and related stories, A Chechen copes through Sambo fighting and Chechnya's war legacy]

Every night during the first war in Chechnya this family slept in the same bed. Mother and father separated by their daughter and son.

If a bomb hits the building, we'll die together, they reasoned.

Nine years have passed since those dark days when they witnessed dogs eating people and snow black from debris. They buried 23 family members.

The family - 56-year-old Kuri, his wife Nina, and their children, 26-year-old Kerim and 23-year-old Heda - moved to the Netherlands in November 1997.

For their safety, they asked that their last name and town of residence not be included in the story.
  (More)

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