She was lucky, she got out alive

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Even now, she doesn't understand why it happened, why it's happening still. The politics elude her. She is 33, a wife, a mother of two young boys. Until two years ago, her life was urban ordinary. She lived in an apartment in a bustling city, worked as an attorney for a bank. Her husband was a businessman, her parents lived close by. Her children went to good schools and on holidays and weekends she socialized with family and friends.

Had she lived in London or Paris, New York or Rome, her life would still be ordinary. But Amila Orucevic lived in Sarajevo, and nothing there is ordinary anymore.

During the winter Olympics, Amila used her ability to speak English to work as a translator. On Wednesday, 11 hours after arriving with her husband and children in the United States, she used it to beg the world to put a stop to a war that is fueled by hate.

We met at the headquarters of the International Rescue Committee in New York. The IRC, a nonsectarian volunteer relief organization founded in 1933 by Albert Einstein, is currently in the business of aiding Bosnian refugees. Amila and her family are just four of 300,000 people who've lost their homes, their jobs, friends, family - every earthly possession - except their lives.

She insists she's one of the lucky ones, that "nothing horrible" happened to her. To look at her you wouldn't think anything did. She has no scars. She's pretty, with expressive eyes and a friendly smile. She doesn't look like she's been through hell.

But when she talks about how she contemplated suicide, and how it was only because of her children that she didn't take her own life, you know that things are seldom what they seem.

Which is what she says about Sarajevo.

"It was a wonderful city. America reminds me of my city, of what it used to be. Full of mixed nationalities. People got along. That's what I thought. When the war started in Croatia, we in Sarajevo said, `It can't happen to us because we're so mixed and so friendly."'

But it did happen. "Maybe because I was an ordinary citizen caring about family and job, not involved in politics, I didn't imagine this. I remember standing at the window of my apartment, looking out at the old part of the city and I couldn't believe my eyes. I called friends on the telephone and I asked: `Is it possible that they are shelling us, the army that I was taught from childhood would protect us?" Suddenly she wasn't just a citizen of Sarajevo anymore. She was a Muslim.

Still, she believed that what she was seeing wasn't real, and that the war would stop as quickly as it started. But a month and a half later it raged on. The city by then was surrounded on all sides. There was no electricity, no water, no food. Snipers were picking off civilians as if they were clay ducks.

"My husband says, `You have to leave. You have to save our children."'

On the radio, announcers begged parents to get their children out of the city. A metropolis that only weeks before had been a center of commerce was now a center of death.

Amila and her boys left Sarajevo in a make-shift convoy. All the city's buses had been shelled by the Serbs. Private citizens donated their own cars and their own scarce gasoline to save the children.

"My friends in Belgrade said to me, `Come.' But I am afraid, not of them, but of their neighbors, of anonymous calls, of ethnic cleansing. Deep in my heart I believe the world will stop this war. That we will go home soon. But the world does nothing. Governments and politicians talk, and all the time people are dying and suffering. So many young people have died. So many young people now live without limbs. So many more lost their minds.

"Children, 6 years old, see this. They hide in cellars and when they come out they have gray hair. I saw people eat grass to survive. On television, there is this news. People see what's happening. But they do not feel."

Amila lived with her children in a city called Split.

"It was full of refugees. My friends and I, neighbors from Sarajevo, knew no one. A man gave them a flat - a man with a wonderful heart. There were 17 of us in three rooms, but we had shelter. And the Red Cross gave us food."

Amila's brother, who lives in California, and with whom she and her family will now go to live, sent clothes and money.

Amila is one of the lucky ones. Still survival was tough, communications non-existent. She didn't know from day to day whether her parents, her husband were dead or alive.

"After a year as a refugee, I lost faith. Why doesn't the world see what's going on? People must know. Why doesn't the world stop this? They let Serbs do what they do. They lost the chance to bring peace. Now people are full of hate.

"Last winter in Sarajevo the toilets were frozen. It was 10 degrees in flats. People burned furniture for heat. In hospitals there is no medicine. Winter is coming again. Someone must force the Serbs to stop. Why don't they? That's what I don't understand.