Enisa Hadzagic started rummaging in a large urn in the corner of the room, and pulled out small chunks of white and greyish-blue powdery stone. With tears in her eyes she presented them to me as a gift. They were pieces of a 16th-century mosque from her home city of Banja Luka in Bosnia. It had been dynamited by Serbs during the war. When she fled Serb-controlled Banja Luka in 1993, she carried with her belongings, and five kilos of stone from the Ferhadija mosque. None of Banja Luka's 16 mosques survived the four-year war of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in which thousands of Muslims and Croats were systematically expelled from the city.
Living in Sarajevo
I met Enisa (52) and her family in Sarajevo, where they are now living. Just a few days earlier, I had visited Banja Luka myself, travelling for five hours by bus from Sarajevo through verdant countryside, past villages and houses which still bear the scars of the fighting that ended some four years ago.
Banja Luka is the largest city in the Serb-dominated Serb Republic, one of the two entities which divide post-war Bosnia into largely autonomous ethnic areas. The other is the Muslim and Croat-dominated Federation. Some 195,700 people lived in Banja Luka before the war, about half of them Serb, the others Muslim, Croat or of mixed parentage. Today, its Muslim and Croat population is about 6 per cent.
When the NATO bombardments against Serbia started last March, the US and British embassies in the city, as well as the offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, were attacked and badly damaged. For a few weeks, aid workers stopped going out to restaurants at night for fear that their cars, with their identifiable number-plates, would be targets. It's the sort of town where it's safe to drive a car spray-painted with the slogan: "NATO Child- Killers", but not so safe to sport international licence plates.
Banja Luka, the seat of the government of the Serb Republic, is not as hard-line as other towns and villages such as Foca and Pale, where the indicted war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, used to have his base. The international community has identified the city as a site for returning Muslims and Croats this year, in another drive to undo the ethnic cleansing of the war. To date, only 572 Muslims and 130 Croats have returned. "It's pathetic, but don't quote me on that," said one international aid worker.
Enisa and her family want to return to their "beautiful, beautiful city". Over coffee and home-made cakes we chatted for hours about their hopes for the future. They are effectively squatters in an apartment which belongs to a Muslim family who fled to America before the Serb siege of Sarajevo. On the walls of the apartment are prints of Banja Luka, a tree-filled city with the beautiful river Vrbas coursing through it.
Turning the screw
The expulsion of the Hadzagic family from Banja Luka was like the gradual turning of a screw. At the outbreak of the war in 1992, Enisa and her husband Sead (58) sent their daughter Majda (25) and their son Damir (28) out of the country. When Majda went to the bus station, a sign said that Muslims could not buy tickets or travel. "It was the same as during Nazi times when Jews couldn't move. We expected yellow stars," says Sead.
In May 1992 Sead was fired from his job as the director of a medical centre. Four months later, Enisa, who had worked as a judge for 20 years, also lost her job. Within a year, they had lost their state-owned apartment as well. After the mosque was destroyed, Enisa and Sead left Banja Luka. "I believed that I would stay and that everything would be OK, but when I saw that they had destroyed the Ferhadija and the grave of my great-great-grandmother in front of the mosque, everything was destroyed in me and from that moment I realised that I would have to leave Banja Luka if I wanted to stay alive," said Enisa. The family met up in Zagreb and stayed with relatives until after the war when they moved to Sarajevo.
Meticulous records
They have kept meticulous records of papers relating to their plight and their efforts to recover their house, which is now occupied by a Serb family. They even have a copy of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement which brought the Bosnian war to an end, with relevant bits highlighted in luminous marker.
Sead is the president of a recently formed association of refugees from Banja Luka now living in Sarajevo. Enisa visited the city recently and stood outside her own house, peering at it like a child looking through the window of a sweet shop. They will go to to Banja Luka again this month to file a fresh property claim under a new process. They know that their life in Banja Luka could never return to what it was, but they say they cannot just forget their home.
As I was preparing to leave, Sead picked up from the sideboard a little four-inch-tall white plaster duck with a long yellow beak and red wings. He made the ducks while they were in Zagreb and Enisa sold them on the street. He offered it to me it as a second gift. "My former profession," he said self-mockingly. We all stood around laughing heartily at the notion. I laughed hard, so as not to cry.