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Faces from a broken past

Emir Delic's basement shakes violently as grenades fall around his home. Trying to forget, he plays chess. But as grenades hit his city, the chess pieces fall over. It shakes him into the violent reality of war.

Maya Lazarevic crouches in her family's basement, wondering when the grenades will stop. To pass the dreariness of the time, she counts the grenades for fun, hoping somehow it will make everything go away.

These are scenes from Bosnia, where two University students spent their childhoods. As word of Slobodan Milosevic's long-awaited political upset filters back to the United States, these children, now adults and students at the University, remember and tell their story.

Delic, a third-year College student, and second-year student Lazarevic lived in Bosnia, where they witnessed people's legs cut off, houses burned down and dead bodies strewn in the streets.

Neither of them had reached the age of 14 yet.

Emir's story

Emir Delic is Bosnian Muslim, the main group targeted by the Serbs in a decades-old ethnic conflict that culminated with war in 1992.

Until the war began, Delic said he never noticed the ethnic and religious differences among the people he grew up with in ther northern city of Bihac. But with the start of war, Delic's sheltered childhood ended.

"A typical day - I would wake up with the whole family, and we would live in the basement. There was no school. I did not have the entire fifth grade," he said.

He shuddered lightly, paused and shook his head, unable to speak.

"I cannot explain what it was like. We would play chess or read and a grenade would go off and the pieces on the board would fall over," Delic said.

Because of the grenades, he could not go outside.

For many Bosnians, this repressed existence got to be too much. They tried

to venture outside, to carry on with their normal lives, he said. But amidst the grenades and bullets flying about them, this was a deadly choice.

"One day I went to the grocery store. A shell fell 50 to 60 meters from where I was a minute ago," he said. The shell missed him, but it hit a woman standing in the spot where he had been.

"She lost her leg and started screaming and fell unconscious," he remembered.

Delic's mother decided it was time to leave when tragedy hit their family. Delic's father was killed while trying to protect the bridge to their city, Bihac, from Serbian invasion. The Serbians spotted his father, and the shells killed him instantly. Not three days later, "a close cousin of mine died," Delic said in disbelief. They had been so close that he called her his sister.

"She was sitting on a stoop with three other 11-year-old girls, comparing diaries, and a grenade fell in front of them," Delic said. "My uncle had to clean up all the body parts."

These deaths prompted his widowed mother to flee to Croatia. But after a year of persecution from the Croat Catholics, the family fled to America, where they stayed with relatives in New York for a few months, then lived in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Delic went to high school in Brooklyn for two years and then received a scholarship to the private Dwight School on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

"I did not have experiences like other people did, running around and playing. I always had to worry about a grenade shell falling," Delic said. He laughs a little when he compares his New York City life to his Bosnian life. "I had the experience of the Bosnian kid and the inner-city child."

Maya's story

Maya Lazarevic's life is strikingly similar to Delic's, though her cultural background is vastly different and not in her favor in war-torn Bosnia. Lazarevic is the child of a mixed marriage - Greek Orthodox and Muslim.

Lazarevic, from Sarajevo, lived in a mixed neighborhood, where, in her early years, people got along. She was an only child who loved to play with Barbie dolls.

But her world changed when the war began.

She went from living in a house, as she says, to "living in a basement, counting grenades for fun" to pass the time. There was little or no food or water. When they did eat, it was soup made out of flour and water. Lazarevic laughed dryly at the memory and said, "It gets to be good after a few days ... lemme tell you."

It was like this every day, staying in a basement, praying the shelling would stop. If she or her family ever dared to venture out, it was into a barrage of gunfire.

Lazarevic sighed softly. "It was like being an insect in this world waiting to die," she said.

Like Delic, Lazarevic did not get to go to school. She didn't finish fourth grade. Fifth grade was spent in a dank, quiet basement.

But her life was to start over again. She and her family were among the first to leave. A refugee organization concentrated on removing the children and members of mixed families first, since they were in the most danger. Lazarevic left at the end of 1992 to live in Spain for two years, where she continued school before voyaging to America in 1994. She said her family lost everything.

"The house burned down, bank account was gone, lost three houses," she said.

Familial losses added up as well. "I lost my grandfather, who was wounded by shattered glass in his chest," she said softly.

The repercussion was a brain seizure that killed him. Her grandmother was also killed.

"A grenade wounded my grandmother. She was in the hospital for an hour before dying," she said.

Her neighborhood, a mixed one, was known for ethnic cleansing, she said. Many of her friends and neighbors were lost to the concentration camps. Lazarevic came out of the disaster with "only a sweater and pants" and what was left of her sanity and life. With the help of a church's humanitarian organization, her family settled in Richmond. She then got a scholarship to study at the private St. Catherine's school. From there, she came to the University.

The loss of family and friends and the desperate race for freedom strengthened her. "It taught me not to take things for granted, to go for it in life," she said.

On her loss of childhood, she shook her head and gestured with her hands. "I took a leap from playing Barbie to helping out parents financially and emotionally."

Looking back

Although many of their families, friends and neighbors died in the war, neither Lazarevic nor Delic blame Milosevic alone. It was several actors, they said.

"It's not necessarily Milosevic's fault. Can't blame it on one man," Delic said.

Lazarevic agreed. "Military ... [the] Secret Service, made a lot of the commands," she said.

But that didn't stop Lazarevic or Delic from being overjoyed to have Milosevic and other hardlined leaders out of office when Milosevic was ousted last week.

Delic said it clearly: Milosevic "should not be excused. He should answer for his crimes."

Asst. Professor Steven Dickey of the Slavic Literature and Languages department saw the war through the eyes of an American intellectual. He had been to the former Yugoslavia several times before, during and after the war. He worked for the United Nation's War Crimes Tribunal, where he translated court documents at the Hague in Holland. "Things were pretty dismal. There was a social and economic psychosis" in the former Yugoslavia, he said.

He said "people who were there couldn't leave ... they were too exhausted socially and economically to overthrow Milosevic."

But later the people woke up, especially when Milosevic was "willing to have his country bombed for his own political game," Dickey said, referring to U.N. air strikes on Bosnia.

While translating documents for the United Nations, Dickey said he came across "various scenes of cruelty." But after a while, "you develop a thick skin to them.

"It came home to me ... people that I knew had friends killed in the streets," he said.

As an intellectual, he is neither na_ve nor cynical. To young people, he said, "Rather than viewing the world as a safe place with a few hot spots, look at is as rather unsafe place with a few havens of securities," he said, emphasizing that young people should not take American freedom for granted.

It is something Lazarevic and Delic know all too well. Both study foreign affairs at the University, hoping to make a difference.

"It is important to take a role as a leader and make people aware that wars should not be happening in the 21st century," Delic said.

Although happy for the turnaround in their homeland, neither of them are eager to go back.

"The democracy they say will happen ... will happen," Delic said.

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