Svetlana Broz, a cardiologist and the granddaughter of Yugoslav president Josip Tito, is combating ethnic nationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina by talking to its youth about an aspect of the war many had never heard before: the stories of those who tried to help and remain human.
Broz travels around Bosnia giving lectures on civil courage to young people. This can be difficult, she said recently at a talk at New York University, since nationalist politicians sometimes prevent her from speaking in municipality buildings. She gathers the students in restaurants, or in front of these buildings, addressing hundreds of listeners sitting on the grass.
She also organizes eight-day seminars for university students from different ethnic backgrounds. “It’s a chance for them to meet one another and realize they are quite the same,” Broz said. “Same dreams, same problems.” Many end up becoming friends, sometimes against the wishes of their parents, who carry old biases.
After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina descended into a civil war between Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats living in the region. From 1992 until 1995, Bosnian Serbs, backed by Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, carried out a ethnic cleansing campaign against the Bosnian muslim population, or Bosniaks. More than two decades later, ethnic tensions still exist within Bosnia, most recently visible in the election of Serb-nationalist and anti-EU president Milorad Dodik in October.
Today’s Bosnian youth didn’t experience the war, so their understanding of it is shaped by what parents, teachers and other authority figures have told them. Broz said that her students have often been “brainwashed” by one-sided narratives.
While Broz’s students are open to a different perspective on Bosnian history, they would often leave the lectures feeling as though their parents had lied to them. Broz tries to persuade them not to hold grudges against them for their actions, or inaction, during the war.
“Something we miss in our society is a critical mass of responsible individuals,” said Broz, noting that a large number of Bosnian youth want to leave the country. “They think it is easier to leave than to fight.”
Broz was born and raised in Belgrade, where she studied to be a cardiologist. Tito, her grandfather, was the president of Yugoslavia from 1953 until 1980. The first communist leader to resist USSR influence, he was responsible for the unification of the “second Yugoslavia,” a federation which came together after WWII and lasted until 1991.
The recent rise in ethnic nationalism in Serbia has disturbed Broz, who comes from a mixture of ethnic backgrounds, including Russian, German, Czech, Croat and Jew. “I was raised all my life to be a citizen of Yugoslavia,” she said. While she says that she is European, “Europe is somehow too small for me.” She prefers to call herself “cosmopolitan.”
After the 1999 NATO air strikes in Serbia, a response to Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kosovar Albanians, Broz remained in Belgrade helping those who needed medical attention. She remembers hearing the people there ask “‘Why did this happen to us?’” Broz said she found these remarks ridiculous in light of what the Serbians had done.
Curious to know what people in Bosnia were saying about the bombing, Broz went to Sarajevo and stayed there for seven days. She had a broken leg, so she persuaded friends to bring her to cafes in the city, where she would sit for hours, drink water and listen to people talk. The conversations surprised her.
The Bosnians Broz overheard weren’t celebrating the bombings in Serbia. “I never heard people say, ‘It is a good thing that they will bomb Belgrade,’” she said. “I thought I would hear it everywhere!”
Broz admired the resilience of the people in Sarajevo. “In spite of the fact that they had passed through the siege, they kept their spirit,” she said. She spent the next 14 years living in Sarajevo. Even today, she feels more comfortable in the Bosnian capital than in Belgrade.
“I feel the atmosphere among the people in Belgrade is even worse than in the 1990s,” she said. “For me, it is very disappointing.”
In the late 1990s, Broz began working with an organization called Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide, or Gariwo. The organization was founded in Milan in 1999 to memorialize individuals who have stood up for human rights in dangerous times. Broz created a Sarajevo branch of Gariwo in 2000. She tried to build a garden in the city, but pushback from a member of city parliament stopped the project. According to Broz, the parliament member said that he would cut down the trees planted in the garden commemorating individuals from other ethnic groups.
“The people who are examples of civil courage always, in their own societies, become traitors,” said Broz. People who had turned a blind eye to atrocities, she explained, did not want to be reminded of those who stood up for what was right.
“This is the real hatred,” she said. ”The hatred toward those who had the strength to be a human being.”
The organization also translates books about civil courage and distributes them for free. Broz said that Bosnian professors would complain that there was no literature written in their native language. Her own book, Good People in an Evil Time, is a series of testimonies of individuals who performed heroic acts during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s.
Broz, who has received death threats for her work, continues in the hope that people will “wake up” and develop a conscience. She believes that the youth she educates are the key to this process.
“Very often they will come back to their societies and start a fight for the truth,” she said. “I know there is no future in the society without the young people.”
PHOTO: Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo. Source: Marco Fieber / Flickr. Filed under CC.
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