Bosnian Student Project Fellowship of Reconciliation. Box 271, Nyack, New York 10960 (914) 358-4601 EMAIL: forbsp@igc.apc.org FAX (914) 358-4924 Maya's story The following is the story of the past year and a half in the life of a young Bosnian woman. Although the name I have given her, Maya, is fictitious, her story is recorded here as she has told it. have used an assumed name to protect her family and friends who are still in the former Yugoslavia. Maya is 23 years old and had almost completed her freshman year at the University of Sarajevo when the war started. She has a younger sister who had just completed high school Her mother is Serbian Orthodox and her father is Muslim. They lived together in an integrated neighborhood of Sarajevo. Her father was the director of a large and successful company in Bosnia. They lived in a comfortable apartment in Sarajevo and had a second house in the mountains. "When the war started in Sarajevo our neighborhood was immediately occupied by Serbian soldiers. Most of Father's business was destroyed in the first days of the fighting. I remember how he cried when he saw the destruction. After the war continued into the second week, my parents sent my sister and I to our Aunt's family in Belgrade. They were Serbs so parents knew that we would be safe there with them. "Two weeks after my sister and I had gone to Belgrade, three Serbian soldiers came to our house. One was a neighbor whom my parents knew well. They took Father away to a concentration camp where they tortured him to try to extort large amount of money. "They were simple criminals who were trying to get money from my father. But he was Muslim and they were Serb, so they could do anything that they wanted. They were sure we had lots of money because my father was the director of this large company. The employees of the firm ran around trying to get the money, but the banks were closed and there was almost nothing left of the business to try to sell. limy aunt in Belgrade told my sister and I that we had nothing to worry about for my father. 'You are fortunate,' she assured us, 'the soldiers who took your father were Serbian, so they certainly would not hurt him. He will be back soon.' I still don't know whether she believed what she told us. "The men who were torturing my father also told him that they would rape, torture and kill his daughters if he didn't hand over the money. My father said, 'you wouldn't dare, and besides, you don't know where they are.' They picked up the phone and called someone in Belgrade and handed the phone to my father. 'We know your daughters well', the voice on the other end of the line said, 'Your older daughter has short red hair and your younger daughter has long black hair.' He then gave the address of the home in which my sister and I were staying and told my father where we had been in Belgrade that morning. "My mother was frantic when Father was taken away, and refused to leave Sarajevo for the safety of Belgrade with her sister. Mother tried to use our Serbian friends to find my father but no one seemed to be able to help her. She finally found a close friend of ours who had been an officer in the Yugoslavian Army. He lived in Sarajevo and we were very good friends with his family. He was in the center of Sarajevo when the war broke out, but his family was in the part of city which had been occupied by Serbs. He was a loyal Bosnian and Sarajevan. He was not a Serbian chauvinist or an ultra-nationalist. He would have stayed with Bosnia, but the Serbs sent word that they would torture and kill his wife and children if he did not come over to their side. So he was forced to go over. They gave him an important position in the Serbian Army as a high ranking military officer. My mother found him and begged him to try to rescue my father. He tried so hard, but no one could give him any information on what had happened to my father or where he had been taken. My mother was going crazy. Finally our officer friend decided just to go from camp to camp trying to find him. When he finally found my father, he was barely alive. He had 5 broken ribs, a broken leg and had been beaten black blue all over. In many areas of his body, he had been beaten so severely that the flesh was falling off of his bones. Our friend found my father in a warehouse with a mound of recently killed bodies, mostly women. The floor was slippery with their blood. His captors had just pulled from the pile the body of a woman who's throat had recently been cut and were trying to force my father to rape her. When our friend arrived, he immediately claimed my father as his prisoner. Since he had a high military rank, there was nothing that my father's torturers could do but release my father to him. He immediately ordered a military helicopter and had my father flown to a hospital in Belgrade. I could barely recognize my father when I saw him. 'Soon after my father was taken to a hospital in Belgrade, my mother was taken by Serbian soldiers from our apartment in the Serbian controlled part of Sarajevo and forced across the line into the Bosnian government held part of the city. As soon as she was gone, Serbian neighbors came to our the apartment and stole everything that we had. It was many months before my mother was finally able to leave Sarajevo in a Red Cross convoy to Zagreb, Croatia. "The Serbs who were trying to extort money from my father in the concentration camp would not leave us alone even in Belgrade. They drove my father's car, which they had stolen, to Belgrade and parked it under my father's hospital window. They then came up to my father's hospital room and told him that they would never leave him or his daughters alone no matter where we lived until he paid them the money they demanded. "My father arranged for my sister and I escape to a Muslim country were we were received as refugees. My father stayed in the hospital only one month. As soon as he was well enough to be moved, he was picked up by a friend and taken to Macedonia. After another month of recovery in this friend's home, he as well enough to join us in our new location abroad. Eventually we were able to locate my mother in Croatia and inform her of where the family had gone. She was soon able to come to join the rest of the family at our country of refuge. We were very fortunate because my father had been the director of a large company which had business relationships in many places, including the country to which we fled. We had lost all of our money and material things, but my father still had friends. We were able to get jobs and work to support ourselves while we were there. I worked all day yesterday before getting up at 4:00 this morning to come here. "There are many Bosnian refugees in the country to which we had fled. There are also many Muslim relief organizations which are there to help the Bosnian refugees. - But unfortunately they expect you to all be 'good Muslims', to pray five times a day and to cover your heads. I have never seen a Bosnian Muslim woman in Sarajevo with her hair covered, never. There was much pressure from these organizations for us to look and act like good Muslims if we were to receive assistance. My sister and I were in a school to learn English and the language of our host country. One day it was discovered that our mother was Christian. We were soon asked to leave the school. "My parents always taught us that if we were good and honest and treated people kindly, they would respond to us with decency and respect. It has been so difficult to go through this experience to see people hating you and trying to destroy you to whom you have done nothing. In January 1994 Maya was contacted by phone and told that there was a US college which, after reviewing her resume, had offered her a scholarship and an American family that had offered her room and board. Her first question was, 'Do you know that my father is Muslim and my mother is Christian? Do you still want me to come?' -- interviewed by DOUG HOSTETTER February third and fourth 1994 Maya was brought to the United States and assisted in obtaining a scholarship by the Bosnian Student Project, a project of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) in cooperation with the Association of Students of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Anyone interested in learning more about this project, or assisting Bosnian students to continue their education in the US, write to: Bosnian Student project/FOR Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960 USA Tel. 914-358-4601, Fax 914-358-4924