IRMA VATRIC

On June 29th 2003 CMCE took students from Sarajevo and students from Lukavica to Igman Mountain to lead games and workshops with orphaned children. Irma was in the first group, who were mainly Muslim. The Lukavica group was entirely Serb Orthodox Christian.

Irma told us in advance that she did not want to know the Serb teens and warned us that she would not talk to them. She had survived the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo, when shelling and sniper fire by Serb soldiers and paramilitaries killed an estimated 10,000 civilians, including more than 1500 children. When her mother started working as a nurse and her father went into the Bosnian army she became responsible for her ten-month-old sister. She made many trips alone through a tunnel that the army dug under the airport runway to get supplies to the blockaded city: on the other side she bought food on the black market and then carried it back. The tunnel was low and narrow - adults had to walk bent over for 40 minutes each way - and it often filled with water and mud. She still remembered all these things vividly eight years later when she met Sara, a Serb, on the side of Igman Mountain. But describing the moment a few days later Irma said:

"When we first got to the mountain and started to know each other - because of the situation where we were sharing our food - there was a girl whose name was Sara. We talked about the children without parents and she started to cry. And I was thinking 'she's a human, she's like me. We could be human. We could be friends.' And then I pulled away and said 'I can't like her' because of everything what happened'. And then I said, 'No. We can make a difference at this moment'. And then I had a thought 'What if war starts now, at this moment. Would we shoot at each other?' And at that moment I was thinking 'No. It can't be Sara. It can't be Irma. I can't shoot at her because we shared our food awhile I go.' And I thought, if we could just do the project together and be sworn to each other, not to do the same thing again as in the past. In some way I really want Sara in my life because I want to make a difference. But there is also really confusion in my mind. I won't forget the past. But I'm not going to think of the future through the past. I think we young people could make a difference.

"First of all, we have to know that we can't feel regret or something like that about people like Milosevic from our or their side. We should know who's bad and who's good. And I want to know and I want to have some good people in my life, like Sara. It doesn't matter that she's from Lukavica because it doesn't matter even if some people that she knows shot at Sarajevo and people here, because I think there is a lot of goodness in those young people and if we make a difference at this moment war is not going to happen as I was thinking that it would. I was thinking we will have a war in ten years. Now we could make a difference. My children don't have to experience the same things that I have, because Sara, or Vuk, or children like that, Irma, Lea, Eldin, we could make a difference. I didn't let myself think like that before. First of all because I didn't know them. Second because I didn't want to know them. And now that I do, I think differently.

"I think that the most important moment was when Sara started to cry. I started to cry too but I didn't want to show it. I think all of this happened because we didn't want to show our feelings. Because some people told us then that we can't love each other, we can't be friends with each other. And I think we can. Yes we are going to have a lot of fights with other people and people will be mad because in their eyes it will be like we are forgetting our past, that we are forgetting the war and we are not, but we just want to make one step forward. Not for us, but for the generations which are coming."