Bitter Personal Losses Engulf Bosnia Teen

Alma Dautovic, 16, saw both her parents consumed by war.

Bosnian Serbs drove her family from Cela, their village near Prijedor in northern Bosnia, late in 1992. They took refuge nearby with relatives, but her mother insisted on returning to see their burned home.

“She was just sitting and crying, looking at the house . . . and then she got a heart attack,” Alma said. Her eyes welled with tears as she described sneaking back to Cela to bury her mother.

Her father kept returning to Cela and saw everything the Serbs did, Alma said.

One night, they came for him at his place of refuge, as her brothers listened from the next room.

“I used to go and see everybody coming back from Serb detention camps,” she said. “I tried to find his name on Red Cross lists, but no one has seen him or heard of him. I’m afraid he was just killed in the woods, like so many others. I almost completely abandoned hope of ever seeing him again.”

With her two older brothers in refugee camps in Croatia and Sweden, Alma sees only one way out of her camp in Zagreb: go to live with her boyfriend, Boro, a fighter with the Bosnian Croats in Orasje, northeastern Bosnia.

Boro, a Serb, was reared by a Muslim family after his parents were killed in an auto accident when he was 6 months old. Alma said Boro is a Serb “only by his genes.”

“I know I have to go on living, even though I already lived through all of that,” she said.