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GORNJI-VAKUF, Central Bosnia -- The shooting started in the middle of the night. Hadija Petrovic, a Muslim, and three of her children fled their home, leaving everything that she and her husband had worked for during their 20 years of marriage.
Her 18-year-old son, who had stayed behind to stand guard, was severely wounded only 40 yards from the family's home. He died in a hospital later that same night. The house itself was set on fire as 55-gallon drums filled with explosives were rolled down the hills surrounding this Muslim village and detonated. The attackers likely were Croats from a village literally a stone's throw away.
Several miles from Petrovic's house, Nermin Saric, a Croat soldier, watched his own home burn after an attack by Bosnian Muslims.
The war between Croats and Muslims ended over a year ago, with a federation now formed to fight invading Bosnian Serbs. But reconciliation and rebuilding does not come easily to a place where neighbor has fought neighbor. Both the minaret of the local mosque and the steeple of the Catholic church are riddled with the evidence of bullets and artillery shells.
It is in this divided community that the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) has been working for the past year to help bring physical and psychological healing. For Petrovic, the war claimed not only her son and her home, but also the life of her husband, who died on the front lines fighting the Croats.
"I lost everything," she said tearfully. "If we have to go on, we have to go on, but it's only misery now. I don't know when or if peace will ever come to all of Bosnia ... for me it doesn't matter. I only have my children to save, nothing else."
During the past two years, she and her family have lived in one and a half rooms of a village school which had been turned into temporary shelter for 20 families.
Saric's family has fared a bit better. They were able to move into the empty home of a friend who was living in Germany. But the friend plans to return soon.
By this fall, UMCOR hopes to place both Petrovic and Saric back in their own rebuilt homes. The agency has provided extra building materials and support for new roofs and repairs to external walls and plans to contribute other materials needed to make the homes habitable. When the Bosnian Muslim-Croat war began in 1993, the Muslim and Croat communities in Gornji Vakuf literally squared off on opposite sides of the main street.
Even now, a year after the fighting ceased, buildings still lie in ruins, devastated by shelling. Children can't play in the hills around the town for fear of stepping on land mines and Croats and Muslims rarely defy the invisible dividing line between each other's sections of town. As a "first step" toward reconciliation, UMCOR is turning one of those badly damaged buildings into a community center. "It's the first building where both groups can feel comfortable meeting with each other on neutral ground," explained Dirk Van Gorp, coordinator of the agency's work in Bosnia. Both Croat and Muslim work teams are taking part in the actual construction. Saric said he believes it will take a long time for the two communities to join together again. "In peacetime, I would be very angry," he added. "But what can I do? We shoot at them, they shoot at us and that's how it is ... but I can't be angry because I don't know who was shooting." Petrovic is not so willing to forgive, but she is concerned about her children's future. "I would love it to be better for them than it was for me and I wouldn't want this to happen to anyone else," she said. "I wouldn't wish this even on the people who killed my son and my husband ... I don't know what got into them and what got into us ... who knows?"
July, 1995