Lula's Story

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We met this man in a wonderful little camping place on the Drina river in Foca BIH. We often hear of the conflict here but not from one who survived it. This is his story.



Lula’s story



Lula is 63 years old and now a citizen of the USA. He has 3 kids, 2 born in Bosnia Herzegovina and one in the USA. Both of his sons are successful in their careers and his daughter is in high school. He lives in a large urban area on the west coast and will soon take a new job as a bus driver for the city. But that is not who he is or was.



In the 90’s he was a influential land owner and a member of a small Serbian community near Sarajevo. In 1992, as tensions built and sabers rattled (and sometimes clashed) he and others of differing ethnic, political and religious persuasions from Sarajevo and smaller surrounding villages tried to get the powers that be to sit down and talk. Didn’t happen!



So, like the 100,000+ that demonstrated for peace in Sarajevo, he and 4 other influential leaders of his community organized over 1,000 local people to demonstrate in front of the city hall. They called for talking not guns. They asked government leaders to begin negotiations to resolve the conflicts before they erupted. The demonstration produced no tangible result but it did produce serious consequences for him and the other leaders.



He along with his cohorts were arrested by the Serbian Police and put in jail. Not just for a day or two and then bailed out to await court but for months with no charges, no trial and no real hope of release. His brother was a Government official at the time and had no ability to secure a release. Then Lula found out that he was not only going to be held in jail but that his name was on “the list”. The list was of those slated for execution. His name was 3^rd of 20.



He would not tell us how he finally got out of jail, probably because he still has enemies in the area that could harm those who helped him, but he did get out. He left the village and headed for Croatia with his wife and 2 kids. “It was easy to get to the USA from there” because he was a political refugee. He spent the rest of the war in the US as an interpreter.



We mostly heard stories and news reports of how the Serbs (military or militia or para military) treated Muslims but we never heard much about how they treated simple dissent. Lula is still proud of his Serbian heritage but not about what his countrymen did. He returns most summers to help his nephew run a small beautiful camping site on the Drina river, some 75 kilometers from Sarajevo. But he will not live here again. He believes his name is still on that list. And so do we.

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