OPERACION CON GRÚAS Y EQUIPO PESADO

I left Bosnia as a refugee when I was a teenager. My family and I are from northern Bosnia, a region that now belonging to the Serbian Republic and a place to which I have made very few trips since entering into exile. Exposed to the heavy artillery of Serb forces, we left our home in the summer of 1992, and went to eastern Croatia, where we lived for over two years. With no means of survival and no indication of when the war would end, my parents decided to relocate to United States to start a new life in late 1995. My family arrived in the United States on Halloween in 1995, making it a rather interesting first day for us. Having left the horrors of war behind, not to mention our home and extended family, we settled into life in the American Midwest, just like thousands of other Bosnian exiles and refugees. In the months prior to the end of the war in December 1995, the United States opened its doors to Bosnian refugees, accepting thousands of families. Today the number of Bosnians in the United States has reached close to half a million, with the number steadily increasing as second and even third generation Bosnian-Americans are born. St. Louis, Missouri, in

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particular, is home the largest enclave of dislocated Bosnians, with over 75,000 residing in this heartland city.

I was fortunate to have arrived at a young enough age to complete my high school and college education in the United States. During those years, I did not struggle with who I was and what I wanted to be. Rather, I simply focused on completing my education.

However, the events of September 11, 2001 made me begin to question my identity. With the rise of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiments in the United States, I remembered what persecution involved and how it felt. Once again, being Muslim was not in my interest, and the injustice of being persecuted for a religion that few of us practiced or really knew much about became all too real for the second time in my life. In the end, I embarked on a dissertation project that was originally more of a personal quest than anything else.

As a first year graduate student at the University of New Mexico, I was waiting outside a professor’s office during the fall semester of 2004, when another student arrived and stood next to me, also waiting to meet with the professor. Small talk turned into a discussion of our interest in anthropology and the study of human behavior. I quickly found that this woman’s interest in anthropology, though undoubtedly valid, was saturated with what I regarded as ignorance of Muslims. She told me a story about her boss, who was “some sort of Arab” and described his wife as being clearly oppressed, subjugated, and veiled (i.e., wearing the hijab). She did not like it that her supervisor was a Muslim, nor that Muslims were allowed to “practice” their “barbaric traditions,” here in United States. I stood there speechless while she spoke of the injustices in the Muslim world, the

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oppression of Muslim women, and the inhumanity of the way in which Muslim women are treated.

As the gravity of her words settled in my mind, for the first time in my life I felt an overwhelming sense of duty to address common misunderstandings and misapprehensions about Muslims. After all, I was a Muslim myself, though not a particularly religious one. I first told the woman that not all Muslims were Arabs. I then inquired as to whether she had ever spoken to this apparently subjugated woman with whom she worked or were her assumptions based on the images and reports she saw in the media. In that moment, I realized that I was no longer just a girl from Bosnia; I was now an American citizen, and I felt a duty to protect that part of my identity that for a long time was suppressed for fear of discrimination. While I heard many comments over my years in the U.S. about Muslim terrorists, barbaric Muslim men who rape little girls, misinformation about teachings of Islam, I no longer felt like keeping my mouth shut. I certainly never looked or spoke the part of a commonly stereotyped Muslim, which undoubtedly encouraged some people to express their bigotry to my face.

I grew up in a household where religious practice included plastic Christmas trees and Easter egg hunts with the Serb Orthodox side of my family. Even though the other side of the family was Muslim, we never engaged in Islamic practices aside from marking the end of Ramazan (Ramadan) and Kurban Bajram (Eid Al-Adha2). Yet, my family suffered and lost everything because they were defined by others as Muslims. While I stood next to this woman explaining that Islam was not a monolithic or an oppressive religion, I decided to do

2

Also known as festival of sacrifice, celebrations start after the end of Hajj pilgrimage or seventy days after the end of Ramazan.

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something about the mis-representation of Muslims. I realized that I needed to break down the stereotypes of Muslims in general and find out specifically what was, and continues to be, so threatening about Bosnian Muslims that, in the former Yugoslavia, justified

murdering over 100,000 of them. I also wanted to learn about the more generalized anti- Islamic prejudices and discrimination throughout Europe and the United States.

My desire to right a wrong turned into a mission and my forthcoming PhD project became an integral part in how I could combat the growing ignorance and injustice towards Muslims in the past decade. Unsurprisingly, my anthropological plans involved a personal quest to find out what it was about my ethnic group, Bosnian Muslims that warranted their exile by the millions and their murder by the tens of thousands? The answer was not easy to find, not because there was not enough literature to tell us about what happened in Bosnia during the war. Rather, it was because there was little ethnographic literature about Bosnian Muslims in general. The people I belonged to, at least within scholarly and

academic circles, were a people with a scanty ethnographic record and history

Overlooked by the communist Yugoslav regime, except when it needed to show ethnic multivocality or advance political agenda, particularly during the formation of the non-aligned movement, Muslims of Yugoslavia, and particularly those from Bosnia, were rarely overtly acknowledged. However, this does not mean that Muslims were not present in Yugoslav leadership. Simply referred to as Bosnians or Muslims they nevertheless were subjects of the Yugoslav state and as such needed to abide by the rules and regulations, and nationality identifications as were prescribed by Belgrade. Yet, they became the main subject of discussion and worldwide pity when it was already too late; that is to say, when

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the bombs of Yugoslav National Army (headed by Serb and Serbian3 leadership) had already began the destruction of all that was Muslim, including the people themselves.

Undoubtedly, ethnically motivated atrocities and violent crimes were committed on all three sides of the conflict (Bosniak, Serb and Croat), but the undeniable fact remains that the Muslims of Bosnia, were “cleansed” from many parts of the former Bosnia (including my hometown) (Hunt 2004; Malcolm 1996; McMahon and Western 2009; Sells 1998; Sonyel 1994). In many places, it was not enough to kill or force Muslims into exile, Serb and Croat forces, and civilians also burned Muslim-owned homes, tore down mosques (as in the case of my hometown) and other holy sites, and sowed crops and built soccer fields on once Muslim graveyards (Hunt 2004; Mertus and Tešanović 1997; Sells 1998; Sonyel 1994).