Bosnia Feature Story

By Nick Hayes

In mid-June, this past summer, our group of five faculty members (Dr. Nick Hayes, professor of history; Dr. Jim Read, professor of political science; Dr. Noreen Herzfeld, professor of computer science; Dr. Manju Parikh, associate professor of political science; and Dr. Christina Tourino, assistant professor of English) from Saint John’s and Saint Benedict’s took our places in the main room of a two story home on the outskirts of Srebrenica. Our host, Hatiza Mehemedovic, had a story to tell.

We followed the trail of her memories back to a few days in July, four years ago, and for us the abstract statistic of the 7,000 Bosnian men massacred at Srebrenica in those days became the individual stories of the brutal fate of Hatiza’s husband, her two sons and all the men of her extended family who vanished one night into the horror of Europe’s most obscene act of genocide in the half century since the Holocaust.

Our purpose was not to assign guilt and blame to the Serbian paramilitaries who committed those crimes in Srebrenica or the other sites of atrocities throughout Bosnia. Besides, by the time we had come to Srebrenica and heard this Bosnian Muslim woman’s story, we had already listened to a Serbian Orthodox priest, Fr. Preodrag Jeftimir, recall for us the evening in 1992, when Bosnian Muslim militia slaughtered his grandparents, and 18 members of his family in the village of Vrbancji.

 We had also visited the remote mountain village of Borovica where a Bosnian militia devastated the isolated Croatian Catholic parish of Fr. Don Matto, in retaliation for an earlier crimes committed by Croatian soldiers against the nearby Muslim village of Stupni Do.  By the time a Muslim cleric, Klisura Elvedin, in the local town of Vares told us how “everyone knows that the Muslims suffered the most in this war,” we were no longer convinced that the comparison of numbers had any moral significance, or that we could make a judgment in favor of one ethnic community, over another.

The story behind our field seminar to Bosnia began early in the fall of 2002. Saint John’s Regent Dan Whalen ’70 has devoted much of his life over the past few years to working with the younger generation of Bosnia. Through his efforts and support, 15 students from Bosnia are today pursuing their studies at Saint John’s and Saint Benedict’s. Dan had offered to fund a faculty field seminar in Bosnia and the Saint John’s administration had turned to me to lead the project.

It was an offer I gladly accepted with two reservations. I wanted the faculty group to be kept small enough to fit into a mini-van for driving on tight roads and so that we could all squeeze into the small living rooms and kitchens of Bosnia that would be the real classrooms of this seminar. I also requested that the seminar include a short visit to Bosnia’s powerful neighbors to the east in Serbia and to the west in Croatia who must bear the brunt of responsibility for inciting Bosnia’s tragic war.

Bosnia Herzegovina was a nation broken by the horrors of the 1990s civil war. Our purpose for journeying there was to better understand what in Bosnia could be repaired and what would remain broken. Our approach to answering these questions began not in Bosnia, but in Zagreb, the capitol of its western neighbor, Croatia. 

Later, we would hear Bosnian Muslims and Serbs tells us Croats were little better than Nazis. Later in Zagreb, we met representatives from Croatian Caritas who spoke of the process of reconciliation among all three ethnic groups and  gave us the details of their agenda for social change that read not unlike a Balkan version of The Catholic Worker. 

From Croatia, the five of us with our Bosnian driver traveled on to Banja Luka, Bosnia’s second largest city.  For the next week, we visited the refugee projects of the American Refugee Committee, encountering there the frequently told stories of the main cities of Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Mostar and searching out the under-told stories of  such remotes towns and villages as Vares, Vrbancji, Vecici, and, unforgettably, Srebrenica. Our seminar concluded with a few days in Belgrade.

In Serbia, we found not the heart of an evil dark kingdom but a metropolitan center in the throes of the recent assassination of its Prime Minister, Zoran Dzindzic. In Belgrade, our conversation on Bosnia extended to Women in Black, a Serbian anti-war organization; the Belgrade Circle, an NGO that worked on behalf of dissident Serbian academics and artists; and representatives of the Helsinki Human Rights Committee, who had far harsher words to say about the crimes of the government of Slobodan Milosevic than had ever come from the western media.

In the end, our faculty seminar sought to be the eyes of Saint John’s and Saint Benedict’s on the plight of Bosnia, and to determine where our institutions might lend a helping hand to the healing efforts of others, including our Regent Dan Whalen, and the American Refugee Committee’s activities. Given the utter inhumanity that descended on Bosnia a decade ago, what is remarkable today provides grounds not for despair but for hope.

Later, I had the opportunity to meet with Lord Paddy Ashdown, the UN High Commissioner for Bosnia Herzegovina. “The international community,” he told me, “is on the brink of a monumental success in Bosnia.” He was right, but the key phrase is “on the brink.”  We learned that Bosnia today struggles to turn the corner on a recent past of bitter inter-ethnic conflict and move ahead to rebuild a nation.  We also learned that Bosnia’s single greatest export was its younger generation.

We left with the conviction that Saint John’s and Saint Benedict’s would do well to lend a hand through educational exchanges, student service internships and the spirit of ecumenical reconciliation to stem the tide of that export. 

In Bosnia, much that was broken is being repaired. Yet, much remains broken. We left Bosnia also with a sense of what wounds would never heal. On a second visit to Srebrenica, Hatiza Mehemedovic ended her last conversation with me with this: “What other woman, what other mother can say that this is what she wants for her children? Not children of her own, not grandchildren for me, but what she wants for her children is a coffin?  I am that woman. All I want is to bury my children and then I can die.” We wish that we could tell Hatiza that the bodies of her children and husband will be found and their murderers brought to justice. But what we learned this summer is that some wounds never heal and some unspeakable crimes will never be punished.

Dr. Nick Hayes is a Professor of History and holds the University Chair in Critical Thinking at Saint John’s.  In 1994-95, he held a Fulbright Fellowship in Journalism in the former Yugoslavia from where he reported on the war for Minnesota Public Radio and Twin Cities Public Television. He is a frequent visitor and commentator on the countries of the former Yugoslavia and was the director of the faculty seminar on Bosnia this past summer.

Nick Hayes
University Chair in Critical Thinking
Quad 451B, SJU
(320) 363-2623

Patrick T. Brennan
Research Assistant
ptbrennan@csbsju.edu

Norma Koetter
Administrative Assistant, University Chair in Critical Thinking
(320) 363-2770
nkoetter@csbsju.edu