INDEPTH: A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE
Bosnia: Prijedor Homecoming
CBC News Online | February 19, 2004
From The National, Feb. 19, 2004
Afghanistan is like too many countries in the world today, trying to rebuild from years of bloody fighting. A case in point is Bosnia. About a quarter of a million people died in the civil war during the 1990s. Tens of thousands of others fled the fighting in Bosnia, leaving everything behind. But slowly some are returning to places like Prijedor to reclaim what once belonged to them. But that's easier said than done, and that's where some Canadians come in. They work on the principle that even the smallest of victories can make a world of difference.
The silent ranks of the dead have abruptly doubled in the past year in a Muslim cemetery near Prijedor. These are the victims of Bosnia's ethnic cleansing, rounded up, killed, tossed into mass graves. Thanks to years of meticulous forensic testing by international investigators, each of the dead now has a name and an individual grave. All share one thing: the same year of death, 1992.
A dozen years after their exodus of terror and fire, other victims, still living, have also returned to the Prijedor region.
Prijedor itself is a bleak provincial city. In these drab streets, there is little work. For Anil, a Muslim, the decision to come back to a Serb stronghold is daunting. Six years ago, this man decided to return from exile in the U.S. His parents and brother refused.
"This thing here on the wall was the only thing... this parquet on the floor. [They ripped up the floor] …Not whole, but parts. Which means everything. Really, you know, we had to start from the beginning," Anil says.
In what is a common story, it took two years to evict the people who had taken his family apartment.
"Psychologically, it was very tough. I knew that still many war criminals are working freely, you know, in town, that many people who committed crimes during the war, especially here in '92 are present here. It was a tough decision to come back," Anil says.
The Muslims' return is due in part to people like Jeff Ford and Jim Attris, Canadians working for international organizations, living in Prijedor and constantly prodding the local government at meetings like this one to tiptoe unwillingly towards justice. Ford heads the local office of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. He says those who come back often find their return unnerving.
"Many returning still feel like strangers in their own home. Prijedor is still predominantly of a Serb essence. The town mosque in the downtown core hasn't been reconstructed. That process should hopefully take place in the next year. And I think it would restore some sense of that symbolic multi-ethnic community that existed here before the war," Ford says.
The new roofs, the mosque being rebuilt, represent success in post-war Bosnia, but look under those roofs. Many of the houses remain empty.
Of the 49,000 Muslims in the Prijedor Region before the war, just over 20,000 have returned. That's perhaps not surprising. For if Prijedor is held up as an example of the best of post-war Bosnia, it was during the war a symbol of the worst of ethnic cleansing.
Just 15 kilometres from Prijedor is Omarska, a mining complex where 3,000 Muslims and some Croats were held, starved, tortured, raped, and killed in the spring and summer of 1992. It was a concentration camp, a camp of hell and hellish memories.
Muhara is a survivor of Omarska. He's also Anil's uncle.
"It was the darkest point of the history of Prijedor and my own as well. The conditions were inhuman. We were exhausted. Many of my friends were executed, but I always vowed I'd return," he says. "It was such a large injustice, a huge evil, it couldn't be left like that. My belief in justice drove me to come back."
He transformed his will into reality. He reclaimed a small coffee bar he's about to reopen. He even won a seat on the local city council.
"Some of the people who survived carry the biggest scars," he says, "because we have to accept that life goes on, even though we are living today with those who were our murderers yesterday. We have to find a way to go forward. Imagine that you've been kicked out of your house and your street. You come back and find it has been renamed the Street of Serb Warriors. We now live in a different country, and yet, what the Serbs did to us has not been dealt with."
Living with the former oppressors and with those who looked on and did nothing is not made easier by their belief that they are the victims. That belief found artistic expression in this monument to Serb martyrs and victims of wars recent and distant. It was erected in the late '90s. The city council still hasn't found money to rebuild the city's 300-year-old main mosque.
Most Muslim families who have returned prefer to live in their own villages and communities near Prijedor. The ethnic groups no longer live together, but side by side and sullenly. Parents in all groups find little to hope for.
"There is some sense of hopelessness," Ford says. "In fact, my neighbours in particular express the notion that they're used to living in this environment, you know, they can make a life for themselves, but they don't see much opportunity for their children. And they're actively seeking some way to get them to a third country."
Houses can be rebuilt, memories cannot. The past sits like a stone in the minds of many here, but it also serves as a warning and a spur to action.
"When you hear some of the examples of either corruption or obstruction or whatever and violation of human rights here in Prijedor, but if you also look at the context of the war and you mention Omarska, then you definitely feel endowed with a certain obligation in this work and a certain responsibility. I think a lot of people who work for the international community have that same motivation," Ford says.
In this region, the dead can now be buried properly, and the living can return to take up threads of shattered lives. That, in this corner of Bosnia, is success.
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CUSO tracks volunteers from:
AFS Interculture Canada
Canadian Crossroads International.
Canada World Youth.
Centre for International Studies and Cooperation
Canadian Executive Service Organization (CESO).
CUSO.
Oxfam Québec.
SUCO - Solidarité Union Coopération
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World University Service of Canada (WUSC).
CUSO Statement
Collectively, our organizations send or receive more than 3,000 volunteers each year and remain in touch with more than 60,000 returned volunteers. These figures include significant numbers of volunteers from the South, but by and large they represent Canadians so concerned about the disparity between life here and life in poorer countries that they are willing to give up weeks, months or even years of their time to improve the world. Through our network of members and volunteers, we reach into almost every community in Canada, coast to coast to coast. Ours is a real, concrete presence for Canada around the world, often the only Canadian presence outside of capitals, or even in some entire countries.
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