The Road to Reconciliation

They were marked, he said.  Outsiders.  At first, by jeers and cutting glances, or blatant disregard, even from some who were once friends. But gradually the marks grew more overt.  Badges on their clothes to identify them in public. Permission slips they needed to walk the streets after hours. Sheets they were forced to hang from their storefronts and home windows.  Illegal searches and seizures, usually at gunpoint.  Orders to relocate into city ghettos. Boarded up doors.  Bruises. Missing limbs.  Fear.

Then it began in earnest.  Screams in the night, as the marked ones were torn from their homes, confined in concentration camps, raped and murdered in their front  yards-their children, or parents, often forced to look on.  A careful, calculated holocaust, he said.  All because the marked ones didn't fit the ethnic profile the leaders deemed requisite for life in the nation's future. 

Sadly, an all-too-familiar story. But this isn't the story of the Jewish Holocaust of the 1930s abd '40s. The perpetrators weren't Nazis and the victims weren't Jews, or at least not mostly.  The ghettos weren't in German cities, and the camps weren't called Auschwitz or Belzec.  This story is far more recent, and when a survivor of the early '90s Bosnian Genocide named Amir Karadzic visited Boiling Springs this fall, Gardner-Webb got to hear it firsthand.  

Karadzic is a native of Prijedor, a multi-ethnic region in Bosnia located in the strategic center of "Great Serbia," what Karadzic called "an imaginary nation" that Serbian ultranationalists hoped to establish.  To do so, the Serbs in 1992 launched an "ethnic cleansing" campaign against all non-Serb Bosnians in the Prijedor region, leaving thousands dead and even more displaced.  In the decade that followed, both the United Nations nad United States defined the conflct unquestionably as "genocide."

A well-respected citizen and real estate investor before 1992, Karadzic was forced from his job, robbed of his possessions, and was on several occasions nearly thrown into concentration camps.  "For three years," he remembered, "I lived in what seemed to be  a coma, a time during which my thoughts could not be heard and my actions were rendered useless."  He watched friends get beatened nearly to death, flee Bosnia and remained separated from his wife and son for months.  

The Karadzics ultimately escaped to the United States in 1995, where Amir began work as a laborer in a St. Louis cheese factory.  Today, he is a counselor for a mental health provider in St. Louis, and the founder of the non-profit organization, "Union of Citizens of the Municipality of Preijedor."

His organization was the driving force behind the development of a gripping testimonial exhibit called "Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide," which opened to thousands of guests at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and has been displayed in locations all around the United States.  That exhibit accompanied Karadzic to Gardner-Webb, and was displayed for a month in the Dover Memorial Library.

It features dozens of panels with gruesome photos, diary entries, official documents, letters, and anecdotes that testify to the brutality inflicted upon non-Serb civilians during the Bosnian Conflict.  Karadzic often travels with the exhibit, telling stories that many of the victims cannot bear to tell for themselves.

"The effect of war," he said, "is to kill inside you everything that's normal. If you survive, and you want to continue living a normal life, then you have to find some box inside your mind to lock it all away and set it aside.  I feel guilty talking about this, and sharing these stories, because so many others suffered so much worse than I.  But those people cannot bear to speak about it because they cannot rish opening up the box."

Fittingly, Karadzic's visit to Gardner-Webb corresponded with the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and the symmetry was not lost on GWU Political Science Professor Dr. Michael Kuchinsky.  "These are no easy subjects," he said, "but it seems fitting as we remember 9/11 to bring the real urgency of some of these problems to campus and ask ourselves, 'How far have we really come in matters of inclusivenes, tolerance of th stranger, openness to others and cross-cultural empathy?'"

"When it comes to these genocides and holocausts and large-scale human atrocities, we often use the words 'never forget,'" Kuchinsky added.  "We say that on purpose because in order to heal from these horrific crimes against humanity, in order to transcend or move on, one has to look at these things clearly and face-to-face."

This is precisely the cathartic opportunity Karadzic's exhibit offered to the Gardner-Webb community. "Behind the exhibit," said Karadzic, his finger shaking as it pointed to the panels, "are thousands and thousands of people who have been tortured and raped, people who were not soldiers, as many would tell you, but civilians.  Bottom line.  That's my problem, and in fact, that's my source of energy and the reason I'm doing this."

Karadzic explained that reconciliation has yet to occur in Prijedor because officials refuse to publically acknowledge that what happened was, indeed, genocide against civilians. "After WWII, the Germans erected monuments to honor the memory of Jewish victims of the holocaust, and criminals were brought to justice.  In Prijedor, there are no monuments, no memorials. What's worse, there is a monument to Serbian forces outside the gates of one of the camps, and the person delivering your mail today in Prijedor was a guard in one of them.  There has been no justice."

Still, Karadzic insisted that non-Serb Bosnians are now marked only by their desire for peace, and that his purpose is not to drudge up painful memories or exact vengeance against old enemies. Instead, he hopes for reconciliation after nearly two decades of silence and tension. "In Prijedor, we are not looking for more violence. We simply want to know where our friends are buried. We Want to talk about what happened."

Karadzic's exhibit has become a traveling monument, carrying the memory of those lost to colleges and universities around the nation. He even aspires to one day bring the exhibit to Prijedor, offering a chance, perhpas, for honesty and for healing. " We have to speak up," he said.  "We have to tell them, tell everyone , that war is something that should never happen, and to learn that the truth and honesty are our only ways to stop it. Without truth and honesty, reconciliation is impossible." 

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