A Reunion in Bosnia Typifies Uneasy Peace

Minka Bogdanovic watches wide-eyed and quietly as she rides through the streets of Sarajevo for the first time in three years and nine months.

A Muslim woman married to a Serb, Minka is venturing back to the battered capital where she was born and raised to see the mother and brothers whose faces and voices have become memories during their forced separation.

“Look, there’s a woman covered with a veil,” she says, adding that she is surprised more women are not veiled, after what she’s heard on Bosnian Serb television. “Well, I’m not against it. I just don’t like when something is imposed.”

Arriving at her mother’s home in an old Muslim neighborhood, the 40-year-old woman skips down a snowy driveway and bursts inside.

“Look who’s here!” she says, sending her mother into a spasm of sobs and kisses.

“Oh, my child!” cries Zehra Bostandzic. “God give you health! You are my soul, my sun. Are you OK?”

The reunion between Minka, who lives with her Bosnian Serb husband and two daughters in the nearby Serb-held suburb of Ilidza, and her mother and brothers, who have remained in Sarajevo, is one of hundreds taking place following the formal reunification of a city that was divided, bludgeoned and besieged by nationalist gunmen.

The last checkpoints that broke apart the city have come down, and five Serb-held suburbs have now been brought at least formally under the laws of the Muslim-Croat central government. Muslim-Croat officials and police, however, will not be allowed to report to duty in those areas until after March 19, leaving Serbian officials in place for now.

Each day, mothers and children, brothers and sisters embrace and cry as they encounter one another on bridges and at road crossings, reconnecting long-interrupted lives.

The story of the Bogdanovic and Bostandzic families--living throughout the war just a few miles yet worlds apart--tells of the possibility of reconciliation. But it also shows how basic fears, awakened and sustained by more than 3 1/2 years of conflict and propaganda, may well overwhelm that possibility.

“If every other marriage here were a mixed marriage like ours, there would not be a war,” Minka says, describing a happy 15-year relationship with her husband, Dragan.

“How could I fight against him and his, he against me and mine? The cake I make for [Orthodox] Christmas I would make for Bajram [a Muslim holiday].”

Yet as Minka sits on a low couch in the warm living room of the mother and two brothers she has not seen in so long, the family begins to bicker over what really happened in the war, over which side shelled which the most and whether the Serbs of the suburbs can live safely under Muslim-Croat rule.

Minka says she, her husband and children may be forced to leave, like thousands of other Serbs.

“Minka,” her brother Mirso says, “don’t be tricked by propaganda. Stay, Minka. It won’t be better for you anywhere else.”

“I don’t dare stay [in Ilidza],” Minka says. “I am scared for my husband. . . . He is not afraid of you, and you are not afraid of him. But there are people who you both should be afraid of.”

*

The decision to venture into Sarajevo did not come easily for Minka. She was afraid she would be harassed or stopped by “Muslim police.” Her husband was also worried--first about her safety and second, privately, about whether she’d come back.

Several weeks before the visit, Minka sat in her comfortable two-story home in Ilidza and recalled the Red Cross messages that had served as her only contact with her Sarajevo relatives. Like tens of thousands of Bosnians whose families were split by war, Minka would scrawl short greetings on sheets of paper that the International Committee of the Red Cross took charge of delivering across enemy lines.

“When they write, they say they love me, they miss me,” she said. “I would love to see them. They would love to see me. . . . But what if one of my neighbors says, ‘Oh, that’s the daughter who married a Serb’? Maybe someone would kill me.”

(Ultimately, after Minka made her decision, two American reporters gave her a ride into town. The Times interviewed Minka and both of her families over a period of six weeks--before, during and after their first reunion--as they all wrestled with the thoughts and issues that every divided family confronts in Sarajevo today.)

Minka, with a strong, wide face and a smile that makes her eyes crinkle, is determined and opinionated. Husband Dragan, slightly balding and with a bushy blond mustache, was in the Bosnian Serb army, like all men in Bosnian Serb territory, and was demobilized about a month ago.

Dragan confided that he has checked out real estate in Vlasenica, a city deep in Serb-occupied Bosnia-Herzegovina where he is contemplating moving his family. Such a move would be devastating, he and Minka said. They would be forced to abandon the friends, family, land and home they’ve enjoyed for years.

Dragan and Minka met and fell in love while working as clerks for the old Yugoslav army back in the 1970s, when, if the stories people now tell are true, religion and ethnic background made little difference.

They have two daughters, Dijana, 14, and Dajana, 8, both blond, slender and very shy. The 8-year-old frequently clings to her mother, whispers something, then peers timidly at a visitor. The 14-year-old is sometimes morose, moping at the prospect of having to leave her home in a Serbian exodus.

“It is hard for any of us to trust on a large scale,” Minka said. “Can you expect us, overnight, to have to trust? . . . I don’t hate anybody, even after 3 1/2 years. I simply cannot understand the war.”

Dragan agreed that reconciliation will take a long time, if it is possible at all.

“How long did it take the Americans and the Japanese to start working together?” he said. “It hurts more in this war because we were fighting our neighbors, people we knew. . . . Practically the only kind of contact I’ve had with a Muslim is when he’s shooting at me. We have to have contact again.”

Minka insisted that as a Muslim in a Serb-controlled area, she was never harassed or given trouble during the war. But she clearly has conformed to much of the Serbian way of thinking, which will become a point of contention when she finally visits her Sarajevo family.

She considered the prospect of a reunion with mixed emotions.

“Sarajevo is so close,” she said. “You could go there on foot.”

*

The day Minka chooses, finally, to reunite with her Sarajevo family is cold and snowy. The fears she and Dragan had in December and most of January have eased; they have watched, encouraged, as cars with Sarajevo license plates drive through Ilidza.

Minka is so nervous that she doesn’t sleep the night before, and she forgets to fix her hair. Her daughters are scared. “Mommy, please don’t go,” one cries even as Minka puts on her long wool coat and loads a sack of potatoes into the waiting car.

Her nerves are soothed by joy once she arrives at her childhood home and sits down for coffee, beer and brandy with her sobbing mother and two elated brothers. They ask about Dragan and the girls. And Minka is eager to learn how her mother cooked without gas, water or electricity.

But almost immediately they quarrel, first over whether the mother, Zehra, should return to Ilidza with Minka for a visit.

Minka insists that Zehra would be safe, that her own arrival proves it. Brother Senad objects, saying a visit would be too soon and still too dangerous. Zehra, in her 60s and slightly paralyzed by a stroke, wavers.

“Can I go? Will they capture me?” she asks as Minka and Senad argue. “I don’t care even if they capture me!”

“She won’t go, yet,” Senad says, ending the topic.

Zehra and the brothers then bring Minka up to date on relatives and friends. Who was in the army, who was in a “concentration camp,” who has been killed. Minka is especially stunned to learn that her own mother was wounded by a Serb-fired shell. They show her the holes in the wall where it sent shrapnel spewing inside after Zehra was hit in the head and leg as she sat under a walnut tree.

Both sides have suffered, Minka says.

Minka: “Mirso, it was difficult over there also. I used to work in our garden, digging. I just counted the shells. Then the shooting. . . . One hundred bullets. [Dragan] used to come out of the house and tell me that I’m crazy and that I’d get killed in that garden.”

Zehra: “A lot of shells were falling here also.”

Mirso: “Minka, more than 2.5 million shells landed here. More than 2.5 million! . . . Minka, we were completely cut off. For so long we couldn’t go anywhere, until a tunnel was dug so we could bring in food.”

All have clearly been influenced by rival governments’ propaganda, each citing to the other something seen on state-controlled television. In addition to discovering that all women in Sarajevo are not veiled, Minka is surprised to learn that her young nephew’s school does not require Islamic religious courses. Mirso, on the other hand, seems to believe fully his government’s line about ethnic tolerance in Sarajevo, exaggerating the number of Serbs and Croats who have remained and ignoring the discrimination they have suffered.

*

Later, Minka returns home to a chain-smoking Dragan, waiting anxiously by the window. She is full of news for him--of her mother’s wounds, of the reality she has seen and the hardships her Sarajevo family has suffered.

“We have everything and they have nothing,” she says, listing the things she saw in her mother’s home: the improvised wood-burning stove, the buckets to collect water, the war coupons used instead of money.

She says she wants to visit again, and maybe next time take one of her daughters.

“The good thing,” Minka says, “is the war did nothing to us as a family.”