Word: serb
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week Serbs and Muslims were once again supposed to start living together in Grbavica. Under the Dayton peace accords, Serb-held parts of Sarajevo and its suburbs were to be turned over to Bosnia and Herzegovina's Muslim-Croat Federation. A new multiethnic police force would take over security, and Muslims would start going back home. When Grbavica was handed over on March 19, the reunification of Sarajevo was complete, and the occasion should have marked a tremendous achievement for the Dayton negotiations. The noblest dream of the agreements was to restore Sarajevo to its prewar condition...
...small apartment off Branka Surbata Street, however, they have never been divided. The story of Rabija Oprhal, her husband Kruno, 53, son Alen, 26, daughter Irma, 19, and their Serb friends provides heartbreaking evidence that a fraternal feeling between Muslims and Serbs survives. The family's experiences during the war and now in the midst of this vengeful peace prove that members of the two groups can live together and care for one another, even under the most dangerous circumstances. For the Oprhals were saved, they say, by their Serb neighbors and by sympathetic Serb soldiers. "They were nice. They...
...didn't know where he was." To her relief, he made his way back home through sporadic gunfire, and the Oprhals spent the next few days indoors, making and receiving telephone calls filled with worry and rumor. "Nobody knew what was going on," says Kruno. In fact, Bosnian Serb nationalists, backed by the Yugoslav army, were firing the first shots in their campaign to divide the newly independent Bosnia along ethnic lines. By April 6, Kruno continues, word went out that people should report to work, though friends called to warn of roadblocks manned by ominous-looking civilians with stockings...
From those earliest days the Oprhals found Serb friends willing to take risks to help them. When Kruno and Rabija finally ventured out to buy food, they chose a time when a Serb acquaintance was doing duty as a guard at the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity, leading into Sarajevo's center. He passed them through, no questions asked. "We spent our last money on cevapcici," says Kruno, referring to the spicy sausage that is a Bosnian specialty. "That," he says sadly, "was the last time I was in town...
...peace of the past three months, says Kruno, has been in many ways worse than the war. As the March 19 turnover date approached, thousands of Serbs--either fearful of Muslim reprisals or threatened by Serb hard-liners--began to flee with their belongings and anything else they could take with them. At night, firebugs and looters took over the streets, stripping apartments of everything from TV sets to parquet floors and setting fire to what remained. As in the first year of war, the Oprhal family huddled in their apartment, fearful of going out. Trucks loaded with loot prowled...