11/29/93

Dear Faculty Colleague,

I am writing to you about something of grave concern to me personally. I hope that you will take this letter home and read it over when you have a moment out of your busy, end-of-semester schedule, and will be able to give some thought to it over the winter break.

My purpose in writing this letter is not to complain about the tragedy I will be discussing, but to explain to you a number of small, but significant steps that are being taken at Haverford and Bryn Mawr. These are practical, immediate, effective steps that will save some lives. I am hoping that each of you, in your own way, will contribute.

As some of you may know, my mother's family are Bosnian Serb, their home has been burned, and the survivors are now refugees from the city of Tuzla, having fled to Croatia, and now living underground in Eastern Europe without papers. Several of them are missing. The situation is murky, but they seem to be fleeing ethnofascist Serb extremists who are in control of Serbia and the "Bosnian Serb Republic."

One thing that is perfectly clear to me from my immersion in this catastrophe for the last year: the genocide in Bosnia is far worse than the last year of televised reports from Sarajevo and Mostar can possibly indicate. What has happened in the countryside, away from the cameras, is unspeakable. And while it is true that there is a "civil war" among Croats, Muslims, and Serbs (with some 10,000 dead on each side), there is also a pre-organized, systematic genocide, organized in Belgrade, and directed against Muslim civilians and Bosnian Muslim culture in which some 200,000 Muslim civilians have been killed, and millions made homeless. By my calculations, the kill rate (number of killed per day as percentage of total population of Bosnia) is at least equal to the Nazi/Ushashe/Chetnik killings during World War 2. The genocide is driven by criminality (lucrative, organized, mass pillaging) and ethnoreligious ideology (istraga nekrsti--extermination of non-Christian slavic Muslims--istraga poturica--extermination of slavic Muslims--as the "initiation" of Serb nationhood).

In view of the refusal at governmental levels to acknowledge the significance of this crime against humanity and to oppose it effectively, it is up to each of us to try to do something. Before introducing the program of activities at Haverford and Bryn Mawr this semester, let me repeat my response to someone who said to me that Bosnia was already dead and it was only a question of how long the death-agony would last:

"What you say may be true. We are not gods. We are not saviors. But we do have a choice of doing something or doing nothing. And that something--however small it may seem--may be of greater importance than we will know. We cannot judge its effect. Whether we act to resist the destruction of the multicultural and multireligious Bosnia will determine whether the world we leave for our children is worth living in. We can do something, however small it may seem. Or we can do nothing. If we do nothing, we cannot call ourselves human."

1. Bosnian Students at Haverford and Bryn Mawr? At a recent Collection, we heard from Bosnian students of high-school and college age. Those Bosnian students who escaped to Croatia, before the genocide began in earnest in Bosnia, are in a grave situation. Precisely because they represent the best educated future of multicultural Bosnia and the human bridge to the multicultural heritage of Bosnia, they are being targeted by ethnofascist gangs and secret police. There is now a rescue effort to get these students admitted to U.S. high schools and colleges and thereby get them out of the war zone and into a supportive environment (organized through the Fellowship of Reconciliation).

Bryn Mawr is working to bring at least one Bosnian Student. Tom Kessinger and I will be working on trying to bring one of these students to Haverford with a scholarship. I've contacted dozens of major colleges and universities in this area and throughout the U.S. The response is very positive. However, even those colleges like Villanova (which immediately promised a scholarship) cannot supply living expenses, so I will be publicizing this effort widely in order to find sponsors. Haverford has little money for students who are not residents of the U.S. I am deeply appreciative of Tom for his willingness to help work to bring one of these students here, and on my part, I will not leave a single stone unturned in the effort to find any additional funding that will be needed. If you have or know of anyone who has an extra room for a mature, Bosnian student attending Haverford or another area college next year, that would be a major step forward. We can then move on to finding a sponsor for food and living expenses. At the very least we will be saving the future and career of Bosnian most promising young men and women. In many cases, this will be a matter, literally, of life or death. If you know of anyone who might be willing to help sponsor (in any way) one of these students, please let me know.

2. A Bosnian Scholar and Teacher at Haverford

Haverford will be honored to have with us a Bosnian Muslim scholar from Sarajevo, Amila Buturovic, who has just completed her PhD dissertation in Arabic and Islamic Studies at McGill University. Professor Buturovic exemplifies the tragedy of Bosnia. Her sister Aida, her only sibling, was killed in August of 1992, during the deliberate shelling of the National Library by Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic. Her father was killed last month by a sniper as he went out to receive his meager UN ration. Her mother is trapped in Sarajevo, where the Bosnian Serb army and the United Nations have a complete blockade on the city, and refuse to allow anyone out (except those who have political or underworld connections or who wish to pay a large bribe). Her cousins are dead or in concentration camps.

Professor Buturovic will be replacing me this spring, and will be teaching courses on Islamic literature and civilization, Islamic philosophy, and Bosnia's Islamic heritage. There will be a Collection on February 2 in which she and I will be announcing a series of activities, including a non-for-profit foundation that is now being established by concerned members of the bi-college community. I am trying to arrange for Professor Buturovic to speak at Bryn Mawr as well.

3. The Community of Bosnia Foundation

With the help of several concerned people on campus (Laurie Hart, Janet Marcus, Seth Brody) I have started a non-profit foundation, The Community of Bosnia. Communities like Haverford (that is, the concerned students, faculty, and staff of Haverford) "adopt" a village or neighborhood in Bosnia, obtain records as to who lived there, and contact survivors in refugee camps. In addition to the Bosnian Student Program, our goals are: 1) to allow immediate, personal, and practical avenues of action for people who wish to do something; 2) to resist the political capitulation to ethnic cleansing by the world's diplomats and politicians by remembering who lived where and keeping that memory alive; 3) to resist the program of turning Bosnian Muslim survivors into nameless, faceless refugees without a voice. 4) To explain to Bosnians who fit the refugee priority 1 list (victims of rape and torture) how to apply for refugee visas (many are now languishing in subhuman conditions simply because there is no one to explain to them the procedures).

The Haverford branch of the Community of Bosnia is adopting Foca, the "Florence" of Bosnia, with some of the most magnificent Islamic architecture in Europe, dating from the 16th century. Foca was utterly annihilated by the genocide squads sent into Bosnia from Montenegro and Serbia in the spring of 1992. After mass-killings and the establishment of rape-camps, every mosque, cemetery, library, shrine, every trace of Muslim presence was destroyed. When asked about the exquisite "Colored Mosque" of Foca, one of the treasures of Yugoslav culture, the war-lord "mayor" of Foca announced that "there never was a mosque in Foca." We must not allow memory to be controlled by such people.

I have established preliminary contact with Foca refugees in Croatia. Gradually, as the "sister community" Haverford and other Foca host communities will register the people of Foca, who was killed, who has survived, and document the city as it existed before the genocide. This spring I hope to be able to start an active correspondence with Foca survivors, whose names and faces we will come to know.

I will be making available a brochure describing the international activities of the foundation, as soon as we are incorporated (with the deeply appreciated pro bono work of a local law firm) and has applied for tax-exempt status. The activities of the Haverford Community of Bosnia group will be announced regularly on the new newsgroup, set up for us by Kyle Barger, Bico Bosnia . If you wish to be on our e-mail mailing list or on a print-mail campus mailing list, please just send me your name and, if applicable, your e-mail address (I won't stuff your metal mailbox or your Eudora box--the mailings would brief, infrequent updates on Community of Bosnia activities). Last spring Roy Gutman (A Haverford alumn who saved countless lives by revealing in his NewYork Newsday columns the death camps and rape camps whose existence had been suppressed for months by the UN and Western governments) spoke at Haverford. From the extraordinary turn-out and response to his talk, and from the intense support for the Bosnian students at the Collection this year, it is clear there is a strong student concern.

I will be contacting the Student Councils and the Bico-News about these issues. Pam Sheridan in Public Relations will be helping me get the story out to the wider media. The point of the activities listed above is to offer feasible, local, channels of action. There is no point in raging at the darkness. With my understanding of Haverford and Bryn Mawr traditions, I am hoping that each of us can, in her or his own way, light a candle.

Pozdrav,

Michael Sells
Associate Professor
896-1027 msells@haverford.edu
Gest201

P.S. When Haverford computing is able to reach worldscript (probably through the Nisus program), we will be able to write Pozdrav (greetings) in both Latin and Cyrillic characters. (The ethnonationalists are banning either Latin or Cyrillic in order to create an ethno-linguistic chasm where none actually exists; people are actually being killed for using the wrong alphabet).

P.S.S. Roy Gutman's Pulitzer Prize winning articles on Bosnia, along with and introduction and conclusion, are now collected in a new book: Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide, Macmillan, 1993. Julie Summerfield said she will be ordering the book and keeping it in stock at the Haverford Bookstore.