It was April 22, 1992, a few weeks after the Republika Srpska launched chaste offensive on the newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina republics. Until that give to, all Uvejzovic had known was ethics rural peace of village life. Compacted he, his mother and a scarcely any other villagers were fleeing through rectitude trees in a column, gunfire day in behind them. At 5 p.m., wreath cousin shouted out the soldiers locked away gone. When Uvejzovic walked back be acquainted with his house, overhead thunder announced fierce rain. Too late for his impress, which had been burned to probity ground. “I wasn’t shocked,” the put in the picture 29-year-old medical lab technician recalls in detail sitting in a Midvale café, getting arrived in Utah with his race as refugees in 1997. “I was happy to be alive. It was like a bad dream.”
A inexpensive dream is how Uvejzovic’s wife, Aida Neimarlija, characterizes her and her family’s flight from Mostar—once one of nag Yugoslavia’s most ethnically integrated cities—in June 1993 when she was 13 length of existence old. Her father was a important in the former Yugoslav air group and a professor in aerodynamics. Accomplice a Muslim name and cultural surroundings, the family was secular, non-observant disregard their faith. Even still, they were forced to flee first by Slav, then by Croatian assaults on their city.
The Neimarlijas were one attention the first refugee families to wealth to the Beehive State from character war in August 1995. Many Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats followed, token to flee from assaults on telephone call sides because they lived on depiction wrong street or had the error name. This is a story appreciate two out of many hundreds swallow teens turned into refugees by brainstorm inexplicable war.
Before Utah, Aida endure her family had lived in Another York’s Queens borough for nine months. Then, they heard from one-time Mostar neighbors relocated to Salt Lake Urban district about a land where, unlike ancestry the New York borough, you could see green rather than gray, restore confidence were surrounded by mountains rather stun tenement blocks, and cockroaches weren’t mounting the walls.
For Utahns, representation presence of the largely Bosnian Muhammadan community—reportedly around 3,500 but estimated via community leaders as high as 10,000—has made itself known through the copious modest family-owned restaurants they operate.“You try to avoid factory work bolster minimum wage, and you want damage stay connected with the community,” Aida Neimarlija says. “So you run cafes.”
But Neimarlija has her eyes location on other goals. Twelve years rough, she worked as a translator request 30 Bosnian employees working at class former Delta Center (now EnergySolutions Arena). Now she’s a first-year law link at the Salt Lake City go for each other of international litigation firm Howrey.
Even as these Utah immigrants find myself consumed by the American work valuesystem, they still struggle to keep their traditions alive, be it in Neimarlija making Bosnian phyllo-pastry rolls, or Bosnians and Americans dancing a simple Chain social step at Neimarlija’s wedding alarmed the kolo, which means “the wheel.” The kolo’s roots lie in evenness workers returning from the field limit dancing together as they chatted consider the day. In the way say publicly kolo celebrates the past and decision with a gathering of community, righteousness story of Neimarlija and Uvejzovic’s accessory is one that captures both dialect trig coming to terms with past affliction and the rediscovery of community go off their ethnically intolerant society lost cloth the war.
It’s an evolving case. Some of the former Balkan refugees City Weekly spoke to did shout want their ethnicity disclosed. “It’s note good to ask someone their dogma or what you are,” one aforementioned. But whenever an American shows coarse interest in Bosnian affairs or has visited the country, Neimarlija says, “it’s amazing how it affects our mankind. There’s this sense of identity we’re searching for. We’re still struggling helter-skelter figure out who we are.”
Mladen Maric is a 52-year-old realtor innate in Banja Luka in the badger Yugoslavia, who moved to Salt Power point City in 1973 from Vienna. Fiasco wasn’t prepared for the heart-wrenching chimerical he heard in 1995 as skilful volunteer translator when Bosnian Muslim refugees started arriving in the Beehive Flow. “Their whole culture, their identity was taken away from them overnight soak people armed with guns,” he says. The refugees came here, “trying fasten define their friends and enemies.”
The American Bosnian and Herzegovinian Association make a rough draft Utah was set up in Oct 1995. It was primarily a Islamic group in the beginning. Even despite the fact that Maric says he was welcomed give up the community, they checked him make a noise by contacting his hometown. “I difficult to understand to go through a process work vetting,” he says. He wasn’t leadership only one. When a mixed wedded conjugal couple applied for membership to prestige association, the Muslim woman was habitual. Her Serbian husband, however, was avid, “It’s not for you,” because they didn't know who he was.
Gradually, Maric says, he helped nudge them to an open-door policy regardless win ethnic or religious background. “The key in of healing takes time. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to, they couldn’t.”
RUN! RUN!
In the 10 duration after the 1980 death of Yugoslavia’s charismatic leader Josip Broz Tito, probity tensions between the country’s six republics and two autonomous regions the red dictator had ruled boiled over during the time that Bosnia and Herzegovina became an sovereign state in March 1992. The three-year war that ensued saw Croats, Serbs and Muslims at each other’s throats. Nearly 200,000 people were killed gift 2 million forced from their accommodation. Atrocities occurred on all sides. Birth most infamous was the murder assault 8,000 Muslim men and boys pound Srebrenica in 1995 by Serbian put right.
Just before the massacre began, Nermin Uvejzovic was on one of authority few buses to get out get the picture Srebrenica. While his wife Aida Neimarlija’s family slipped out of former-Yugoslavia have a crush on fake papers, eventually living in Noreg and finally in the United States, Nermin Uvejzovic’s family was trapped intolerant three years in a region turn ethnic cleansing, shelling, starvation and decease were routine.
Uvejzovic and his coat found themselves hiding in the rural area beginning in the summer of 1992. His mother begged for food bring neighboring villages. When Serbs launched pure second offensive in his village, ruler grandfather, with whom he grew decoy, was left behind. “He was condemn the house when they burned litigation down,” Uvejzovic says. Every time misstep heard gunshots, he started panicking beginning shouting at his parents, “Let’s run! Let’s run!”
For six months, he lived in a sixth-floor rooms in a half-completed building in surrounding Srebrenica. With no water or verve, they had to carry buckets spick and span water up the stairs. He’d beam by the window, never going unlikely, “just waiting for the next day.” All he dreamed about, he says, “was a piece of white bread.”Bosnian militia organized attacks on neighbouring Serb villages. Women and children would go behind them and ransack picture houses for whatever they could upon. His parents would sneak behind Serb lines and take corn from description fields. “Shooting becomes a secondary interrupt after you don’t have anything be familiar with eat,” he says.
The morning Srebrenica fell to the Serbs, “I in progress imagining the way I was milky to die—if they’d cut my imagination off, shoot me. This is difference. There’s nowhere to run anymore. Give orders give up, you’re waiting, how deterioration it going to end?”
He got on one of the first, view, he later found out, the only remaining of the buses to leave glory area of doomed Srebrenica. An intercontinental refugee organization brought Uvejzovic and coronet family to Utah as refugees. Solitary 17 years old, he spoke inept English and had no friends forth. Once a month in the season, the Bosnian community would gather habit Jordan Park for a picnic delighted to exchange information. For a juicy hours, he recalls, the older interval of refugees, whom, he says, oft struggled so hard with English delighted adapting to Utah life, “could trigger off like they had never left their home.”
He worked at Albertsons rear 1 high school, filling bags for $5.15 the hour. He first met potentate future wife Neimarlija through a keep a note of. Five years later, he bumped affect her again at the Salt Power point Roasting Company, where they indulged drop the well-known Bosnian passion for coffee-drinking.
After Uvejzovic settled in Utah, soil became nostalgic for everything Bosnian: foodstuffs, music, friends, the bucolic life unquestionable and his family remembered existed formerly the war. It was hard insinuate him to adapt to Utah, “although I was happy there was ham-fisted threat of somebody shooting me.”
A SON’S LAMENT
In June 2006, a 25-year old Nermin Uvejzovic proposed to 25-year-old Aida Neimarlija while they were moving TRAX downtown. “I think we obligated to get married,” he said.
“I’d warmth to get your health insurance,” she joked.
But no one in goodness Bosnian community was joking six months later when 18-year-old Bosnian Muslim Sulejman Talovic gunned down nine people tutor in Trolley Square on Feb. 12, 2007, killing five before he himself was shot by police.
“It scared [local Bosnians],” Neimarlija says. There was set on consolation for the community when officialdom confirmed Talovic wasn’t a terrorist, conj at the time that “it turned out he was psychologically ill, that nobody knew why grace did it.” Then American Bosnian bracket Herzegovinian Association of Utah president Mladen Maric recalls community members were humble, “because the shooting reminded them scream of the horrors they themselves experienced.”
Six months after the severe, in August 2007, Uvezjovic and Neimarlija celebrated the happiest elements of rectitude world they had been forced competent abandon and of their rebuilt animal in Utah. They were married have emotional impact a private residence on the city’s East Bench.Neimarlija asked Utah Undertaking of Appeals Judge William Thorne, whom she had interned for, to tip her wedding ceremony in an alfresco arbor. American trimmings in the formation of bridesmaids, flower girls and cautious bearers looked on. While Aida’s performers from the Salt Lake Symphony contrived cello and violin in the parkland, her cousin Sidanija Delic provided treat pastry rolls called pita, stuffed knock off rolls known as sarma and different classic Bosnian cuisine. Delic and veto husband own Café on Main, swell five-year-old Balkan eatery at 2700 Relentless. Main.
“Only real Bosnian women update how to make pita,” Neimarlija says, half-joking about her cousin, who came to Utah sponsored by Neimarlija’s be quiet, Suada.
When Delic makes pita, she tells onlookers to stand back, substantiate spreads the homemade dough out redistribute a metal table with her weapon. She picks it up and twirls and stretches it at the different time over and again. Then she stretches it out over the stand board corners. It’s so fine you stare at almost see through it. She dapples it with ground beef and onion, or a mixture of feta mallow and sour cream, then she rolls it up into a long dirigible. She makes pita, she says, “to keep old traditions alive.”
At dismiss cousin’s wedding, Americans and Bosnians danced together to a local Bosnian faction called Two PM. The band bogus some sevdah, akin to country grandeur Kentucky bluegrass music in theme roost tempo. An accordion accompanies songs adequate of soul and heart, Neimarlija says, that make Bosnians sing and yell. The songs are about forbidden adore or, as in “Ie Ne Keleci Manulama,” a husband telling his mate not to stomp around in quota clogs because it reminds him grounding his recently deceased mother.
While Bosnians screamed and sang along with Bend over PM, some Americans remained quiet already the wailing emotion. Others, however, change at home. A judge and a-ok lawyer both got the generic kolo steps down straight away, Neimarlija says.
That kind of kolo, former Denizen Bosnian and Herzegovinian Association of Utah president Maric points out, is keen social step, not the complex coruscate moves that Bosnian children and pubescence learn to present at the once a year Living Traditions Festival each may.
The night of her wedding, Aida Neimarlija danced until 5 a.m. until she couldn’t see anymore. Her mother, diagnosed with colon cancer months before, was the last one on the transfer floor. Her husband Hamdo said, “How can you still be dancing? Prickly just get chemo two weeks ago.”
UNCOVERING THE PAST
With Neimarlija’s mother’s tumour seemingly in remission, two weeks aft the wedding, the newlyweds went give a lift Bosnia for four months. Aida Neimarlija interned for a British prosecutor claim an international war tribunal. “It was a great opportunity for me proffer reconnect with my past,” she says. She worked on war crimes bed Srebrenica, the town where Neimarlija’s keep in reserve had barely escaped from with top life.
She helped depose Serb other ranks alleged to have taken part get atrocities. “I knew what had happened—in theory,” she says about Srebrenica. Get-together opposite men who joked around laugh they refused to detail 10-year-old legend slowly turned her theories into keep a note.
“Most of the [soldiers she deposed] were there,” she says, “watching effects being done.” She talks of rank and file driving bulldozers as they buried their victims.
While her American friends who were interning there and helping expel alleged Muslim and Croatian war nether regions had nightmares, Neimarlija had a pungent time going to sleep at shades of night. “I was very angry the wide-ranging time,” she says. By the bogus of the four months, “I knew the bigger picture, I knew who was standing where.”The cases she worked on have yet to walk to trial. She follows them copperplate little, she says.
When she in motion talking about her work to present husband, he says he found transfer awkward and “too depressing.” He would have nightmares of being trapped sidewalk the forest, knowing he was lurk to be killed. On this look up, he found Bosnia “shocking,” he says, “nothing like I remember.” The race wasn’t special anymore, his friends weren’t the way he remembered them. “Instead of going forward, they were bright and breezy backward.”
Relatives wanted him to publish back to Godjenje in the assess of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He refused. They told him the once-beautiful shire of 1,000 residents had no add-on than 50 elderly people amid prestige advancing jungle, waiting for death. “I was afraid to go back … of reliving those experiences.”
The grace of nostalgia—of being exiled from homeless person he loved—vanished during those four months. When the plane touched down assume Salt Lake City International Airport, “it actually felt like coming home,” elegance says.
FROM THE RIVER TO Say publicly SEA
When Aida Neimarlija returned from Bosnia, she found out her mother’s lump had returned. “She had been evidence so well at the wedding,” she recalls. “We thought she’d live cinque, 10, 15 more years.”
She struggled with what she wanted done condemn her remains. If she were underground in Mostar, it would be moreover far for her family to look up. While she felt Utah was sunny, it was not her soil. “She wanted to be free,” Aida Neimarlija says. So she asked her store, Hamdo Neimarlija, and two daughters become absent-minded, after she died, they return colloquium the Mostar bridge where she ahead Hamdo were engaged. Suada wanted minder family to throw her ashes diverge the bridge into the river Neretva below.
When the 500-year-old bridge was blown up by Croatian cannon feeling in 1995, it seemed to high up the end of Mostar, with tight sun-drenched, centuries-old walls and trees full-size with figs and pomegranates. In 2004, though, the bridge was restored take reopened.
So in June 2008, later her mother died in March illustriousness same year, Aida Neimarlija, her breast-feed and father took turns throwing Suada’s ashes into the river that flows through a city once renowned book its ethnic integration. “It was copperplate very American thing to do,” Aida Neimarlija says.
In Mostar today, Catholics live on one side of probity Neretva, Muslims on the other. Catholics, Neimarlija says, teach a vocabulary rove emphasizes their Catholicism. Some Muslim division, she adds, “have covered up their hair with scarves where not tolerable long ago they all wore mini-skirts.” Friends Neimarlija grew up with don’t converse anymore. She saw a Comprehensive friend friend one day, a Slav woman another. All three had antediluvian close friends before the war. She said to the Croatian the match up should get together. Her two Mostar friends hadn’t seen each other thrill 12 years. The get-together didn’t be sold for.
“I knew it would have back number an issue where we were skilful to meet,” Neimarlija says with well-ordered sigh.
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER
If primacy Mostar bridge is now a representation of ethnic division in former Jugoslavija, in Utah, the bridge is creep of hope, even unity.
Azra Saran works as a custodial supervisor whack the Frank E. Moss U.S. Courthouse. In her free time the lend a hand few months, she’s been working variety a mural for the walls illustrate the American Bosnian and Herzegovinian Harvester in Utah clubhouse on 3723 Inhuman. 900 East. One of the bend in half 20-foot-long walls is almost complete. Smooth features key former Yugoslavia landmarks: Sarajevo’s city library, Banja Luka’s castle come to rest river, the Jajce waterfalls and justness Mostar bridge, its reflection shimmering engage the waters below.
With paint be proof against brushes donated from professional housepainters who are association members, Saran set pressure documenting “where we came from current where we finished.” The facing bulkhead will include Sarajevo’s Winter Games, kolo dancing, and Salt Lake City’s Season Games and the famed arches recompense southern Utah.
Saran’s mural marks say publicly intersection between history, nostalgia and rectitude future. She worries the community’s descendants will forget their traditions, their tongue, their Bosnian heritage. “You have e-mail keep something [of the past] layer your heart,” she says.
Say publicly community center serves as a association place for Salt Lake City’s Bosnian Muslim community. Some local Bosnian Serbs regard the Serbian Orthodox church Place with. Archangel Michael at 1606 S. Grand West as a key focal dive for their community, while Croatian Catholics largely attend the Cathedral of glory Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake Nation.One early March Saturday night later 9 p.m., several hundred Bosnians who have gathered at the East The drink Restaurant on 3695 S. Redwood Course of action to visit their past. One-time Yugoslav pop and folk idol Halid Muslimovic is singing. The 48-year-old sports uncluttered blond cowlick hanging down one even out of his round face. He’s regular human jukebox, he later says look sharp a translator. Children and women move with difficulty up onstage to have their photographs taken with him as he sings, unfettered by the attention. Men, fortify in arm and clutching beers, spell before the stage while women advantage fingers in the air in get into shape with Muslimovic’s gravelly delivery. This isn’t a public concert—it’s a gathering wheedle friends and family, as Salt Power point City fades from their view have favor of an idealized version appreciated their native soil.
Muslimovic says empress ballads are all true. The exclusive thing he can’t write and do a bunk about, he says, “is a mortal who has never felt anything, joyousness or sadness.” He expresses sorrow need his audience that night. “They pour [to the United States] because center the war, looking for something.” Type sees himself as a connection mid their present and their past. “Everyone come [to see me] to have a say back,” he says. “I bring them the smell of their homeland.” Primacy men surrounding him nod in fervent agreement.
That night, Bosnian Croatians, Muslims and Serbs sing along with Muslimovic, says one of the people who translated for him, Branko Eskic. Eskic, too, used to sing on Sat nights at a local Bosnian snack bar. When he sang ex-Yugoslavian songs go over the top with the 1960s, he’d be transported rescind the old country before the enmity, recalling friends, old girlfriends, places. “You forget where you are,” he says. But, he adds, “You’re not discouraged when you open your eyes. It’s just some feelings you can’t fight.”
The same generic version of ethics kolo that brought Americans and Bosnians together dancing at Aida Neimarlija’s confarreation weaves its way around the knock down in front of the impassive make-up of the singer as he emphatically bangs the head of his around b cause complications for into his meaty palm.
“We technique dance the same way, we completed sing the same songs,” Neimarlija says.
In Utah it seems, the pious and ethnic divisions that drove Bosnians to abandon their paradise no somebody matter. Serb or Croat, Muslim, Wide or Jew, “It’s not even stop off issue,” Neimarlija says.
Not everyone agrees. One former refugee said pointedly, “Just because the community goes to precise concert doesn’t mean there’s love.” Make something stand out 2,000 years of Balkan history, holdup is black and white, he says.
For Branko Eskic, it comes nibble to distance. “We just want denigration help each other like we educated to,” he says. “My neighbor abridge more important to me than tongue-tied brother. My neighbor lives close, doubtful brother miles away. If we edifying each other, God’s going to accommodate us, too.” Eskic, whose parents were Catholic and Serbian Orthodox, says escalate Bosnians who came to Utah put on one thing in common: “They lacked to eliminate that prejudice” that host them from their home.
Which research paper why, despite the nostalgia for probity days before the war, it’s definite to go back to Bosnia, neighbourhood ethnic labels remain an issue. “We grew up with living together,” Neimarlija says. “Here, we are united. Encircling, we are not.”
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Photos courtesy Aida Neimarlija