Academia - Udruženje mladih eksperata u BiH

It's 3:15am Central European Time, midway through december, and i can't sleep. The snow has slowly settled, concealing patches of ice that gladly tout over clumsy people, and this town of ours is coughing out dense clouds of grey exhaust. I'm not really into this stuff. Notes and all. But sometimes, of all things, i just feel damn happy to be Bosnian. And this one of those moments. I felt the obsessive urge to share this with you.

Not that it's been an extremely good day, or an extremely bad day, for that matter. It's been a normal sunday in the life of a hedonist - wake up at 11am, go out to get the paper at noon, have lunch at 1pm, coffee at 2pm, write a research paper until 6pm, go for dinner at 7pm, meet friends, surf, and watch telly and then doze off to bed at midnight. Occasionally praying and saying grace, sipping that extra cup of coffee and thinking about what research comes next and what to do with frequent flyer miles.

I'm in bosnia. It's one of the (very) few places in the world that i get to call home. For a long time, it was the only one. Bosnians smile a lot, and i know i am exaggerating, but this whole smiles affair makes me feel like almost like in Thailand. A city which has survived everything from siege to starvation and potholes to Paris Hilton stands boldly and waits nervously to tell its story.

Sarajevo is my wake-up call. I've lived long enough in this country to know it, but have studied it from outside for long enough, too, to be able to feel what it really means. Eli Tauber and his wife, Miriam, invite me over for coffee. Their neighbour, Lejla (a sweet twelve year-old), knows me from the papers, and wants to interview me for homework. Fine with me. Lejla's parents are there, as are Elihu and Alma Richter, from Israel. Heaps of Bosnian coffee and a fudgey cake are on the table. Eli tells the story of his uncle who, in 1941. and at the age of 6, was rescued by his Musilm neighbour's sister-in-law who came all the way from Mostar, by train, stuck a fez - that's one of those funny red oriental felt hats - on his head and kept him in Mostar until 1945. He survived the Holocaust. On the ride to Mostar, he apparently kept smiling during the whole ride. Lejla, too young to remember the Bosnian Genocide, smiles listening to the story. I ask her what she liked about it - she says it's the happy ending. And the fact that they went to Mostar, which is her favourite city. Lejla's uncle didn't have one of those happy end stories. He ended up in a horrible place called Dretelj and has been missing - pause there and read the word again: missing - since 1993. Lejla never got to meet him.

Finding the missing is never much of a joy, either. I have had the dubious honour of having been to two dozen mass graves over the past five years. When you get to deliver the news to a family that their relative has been discovered, you get a haunting smile. Hatidza Omerovic, from Glogova, which is quite close to srebrenica you're likely to have heard of, also smiled when she found out that her son had been discovered. more precisely, his ulna and his pelvis - that's a hint more than two bones - were discovered. As was a note he had. 'Bajro Senada', it said, a male and a female name. 'They married', Hatidza says. 'They're in Australia now. Bajro drives a truck now.' Nobody quite knows what the note was doing under her son's forearm bone. 

I thought i'd never see Hatidza Omerovic smiling again once she burst into tears. But i was wrong. Within five months from her son's burial - the coffin had the two bones - we went knocking on Hatidza's door again. His right femur - again, a bone - had also been found, 20. miles away. The body - or more precisely, a third of it - had been dug up by a Yugoslav army dredge and taken to a secondary site, 20. miles away. Hatidza smiled. Imagine the pain she was trying to fend off by smiling. The decision she faced was to either excavate the coffin, put the additional bones and bury her son again, or to wait until more bones are found. Hatidza said nothing. It was the wrong question at the wrong time. She smiled, drowning in tears, whispering her son's name.

So why, of all things, am i damn happy to be Bosnian at 4am?

Because people who don't understand Bosnia don't understand anything about Hatidza, about Eli's uncle and Lejla's uncle, about Eli's uncle's neighbour's sister-in-law (that's, mind you, a typical Bosnian relationship), and ipso facto, have no clue about what life really means. Because it takes understanding a place like Bosnia - where, in the town of Doboj, where a Jewish man, of the atijas family, was saved by a Muslim in 1942., and when the Muslim's son got taken to a Serbian detention camp, the Jew's son came all the way from Israel to get him out of there, and suceeded - to understand life; because it takes understanding people like Jasmila Zbanic and Mirjana Karanovic, the director and star of Grbavica fame and Bakira Hasecic, the lady who tirelessly leads the rape victims, to understand courage; because it takes taking a name like Muhamed Shlomo for granted to know how normal coexistance is; because it takes an example like that of Bosnia to understand Stefan Zweig's wisdom of how a little whole in this nylon stocking we call The International community can ruin the whole stocking within hours, if you don't darn the hole immediately. Bosnia may be a little hole, like Rwanda, like Cambodia or East Timor or Sderot or Hebron, it may be somewhere on the back of our agendas, but it just may be the key to understanding how sexy the stocking is that we so desperately need to keep.

In Bosnia, you feel like you belong. To a bigger thing. Tomorrow, The University of Sarajevo will officially mark the 1479. days it spent under siege. Elihu and Alma Richter, Tilman Zülch, Eli Tauber, and even Hatidza Omerovic, will be there. Those who "watch over Bosnia" won't. They know better. They know that when you speak about genocide, your sinister idea is to demonize "the other", to paint a whole nation as perpetrators. Which is darn wrong. The only way to keep the spirit of Bosnia alive - which is what makes a Muhamed Shlomo the Muhamed Shlomo that he is - is to remember the kind of b*s that tried to drown it fifteenish years ago. And that we have, sadly, become masters at forgetting. We forgot the Holocaust in 1945. - fearing someone may feel demonized or insulted - and we're banishing places like Srebrenica, Glogova, Dretelj, Brcko or Omarska from our minds. for fear that, indeed, never again may truly become never again.

But it makes me happy to believe i know these sort of things. It makes me happy to know that when i hug Igor, my brother into times immortal, who's working his ass off at The Drama Academy in Sarajevo, i hug a good old piece of the wonder that makes Bosnia alive. And i know that those dense clouds of grey exhaust smile in relief, knowing that Bosnia happily lives.

And with all these Bosnians, it will live forever.

Muhamed Mešić