In march,following an invitation by an English friend, I drove from London to Zagreb and flew on from there to Sarajevo.

There were several reasons for this journey. The first was to meet with the British Consul, to inform her of the student program that we have in the United States and try to persuade the British to allow a similar program in England. My friend, Sally, had obtained promises of scholarships from five different schools in England and needed the official go ahead in order to implement the program. The British were receptive and there will be seven students going to High School in England in the fall.

In Zagreb we stayed with the World University staff. This is a truly phenomenal organization, run on a shoestring, out of an apartments in the center of Zagreb; it is a hive of activity. Not only are there numerous applicants for foreign scholarships, there are also many Bosnian student refugees in Zagreb who attend the University of Zagreb, existing on very little money, who come to the center as a place of community, encouragement, support and advice. English lessons are given for free by a Bosnian professor and the students who have been selected for foreign scholarships are helped with the often scary business of applying for visas. The office is run by Vesna Smirtran, an energetic and capable Croation woman who cares passionately for the students and their plight.

Vesna managed to get us United Nations passes which allowed us to fly with a military flight, and arranged our trip to Sarajevo and Tuzla. This was a first for me, as I rode in the belly of a Hercules with troops from all over the world.

Sarajevo is heavily damaged. Rows of apartment buildings are completely destroyed and the ones that are still inhabitable have plastic on the windows, shell marks or actual holes in the walls, sometimes holes in the roofs. Everywhere there are burned out cars and the roads are pock-marked by craters left by exploding shells. I was taken to see the ruins of the Olympic Stadium, now surrounded by a huge, new cemetery. I was told that the inhabitants buried their loved ones quietly, in the night, for fear of sniper fire. From the stadium one had a clear view of Mount Igman, the one mountain not taken by the Bosnian Serb army, the defense of which saved Sarajevo from falling. Beside the cemetery is a hospital, heavily damaged as a result of carefully aimed shells and mortar blasts.

In the center of Sarajevo I went to the market where many people were killed and many of the shops destroyed. The main post office, library, and many university buildings, new office buildings, and hotels are burned out shells. The Government offices have holes in the walls, peeling paint, broken windows and bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

In the middle of this destruction live 300,000 Sarajevans, reduced from the 700,000 who lived there before the war. I was told that one out of every three people in Sarajevo was either killed or injured by the war. In spite of the horrors, hunger, fear and loss, the people were wonderfully welcoming and warm to me. I was given delicious meals of Bosnian pot (a kind of stew with meat and vegetables), rich and sticky Bosnian cakes and Baklava, always made from scratch! I was horrified to think of the deprivation the people were putting themselves though in order to offer me this abundance. The average salary in Sarajevo is $35-$50 a month, and meat costs about $10 a pound!

Everyone that I met had a personal story of pain, fear and loss which they wanted to tell me about. I was provided with a translator much of the time. When I was not we struggled with my few Bosnian words, their pigeon English and rudimentary French. It worked and I feel tht I made some good friends.

While in Sarajevo, I met with Svjetlost, a major publishing house. We talked of ways that we, COB, might be able to help them. They were devastated by the war, with their complete inventory destroyed and no money to pay their staff or to publish any books. They were the major publisher of textbooks, for which, with 50% of the schools destroyed, there is a desperate need.

In 1988 Svjetlost published a facsimile of the Sarajevo Hagadah, edited by Mirza Filipovic, who now lives in Haverford with his son Vanja, a student at Haverford College. I managed to find a copy of this beautiful book and brought it back. We hope to be able to find the means for Svjetlost to republish it.

The World University in Sarajevo gave me a report detailing their losses. Most departments have been completely destroyed, and their list of needs includes everything from roofs to pipettes, flooring to rulers. They also told me of a special program that helps he many hundreds of young people who have been disabled by the war to study at the University. I was told that just $80 per month would provide them with the means to attend class, purchase books and live. We would very much like to find a way to help some of these young people.

From Sarajevo we were taken by car to Tuzla. The road winds through a river valley and up through the mountains. A scenic drive, it was also extremely painful. Once there were many little red-roofed vllages nestled beside the stream and up the sides of the mountains. Most of these are totally ruined; in come places only some rubble and piles of trash show where the village had been. The stream, too, was full of trash. Every so often, we would pass a village that was unharmed and Azim, our driver, who spoke no more English that I did Bosnian, would point his finger and say, "Serb." This meant, I was told, that the village had either been abandoned by its Muslim inhabitants and resettled by people who were sympathetic to the Bosnian Serb Nationalist extremists, or that the original inhabitants were mainly Bosnian Serb. In these villages there was not a sign that there had been a war.

In Tuzla I was met by some of the parents of our students. What a welcome I received! I tried to give each family as complete a report as I could about their child. It was brought home to me, very forcibly, how incredibly painful it was for these parents to send their much- loved children so far away, to families and people they did not know. I was taken to see the cemetery where the 30 children and young people , massacred in the Tuzla marketplace on May 25, 1995, were buried. There is a special plot of ground set high up where there is a view over the town, set apart from the rest of the cemetery. There the students, ages 3 to 30, are buried. When they were killed there was a debate among the clergy as to how and where to bury them. Their parents insisted, "They lived together, they died together and we want to bury them together." There are Muslim symbols and Christian crosses together, and every grave is an immaculately tended garden. Among the flowers are letters, stuffed animals, little keepsakes.

In the fall of 1993, Michael Sell's concern about what was happening in Bosnia compelled him to draft a letter to faculty, students and staff at Haverford College, where he is a professor of comparative religions. He wasnÕt quite sure what response the mailing would get, or even what could be done to alleviate the horrors of the Balkan state.

At first, Sells, his wife, Janet Marcus and colleague Laurie Hart, a professor in the Anthropology Department tried to contact refugees and send packages. Their efforts were all but ineffective. When they met two Bosnian students brought to the US by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, however, they realised that this was an area in which they could be effective. From there the foundation, now incorporated, started to solicit scholarships.

A series of articles that Sells wrote on the religious ideology behind ethnic cleansing earned him an invitation to host a panel at a national conference. It was there that he met Andras Riedlmayer whose involvement led to the COB video, "Killing Memory."

Sells is an American of Serbian background, with relatives who have been killed, have been driven out of the Krajina region, are missing, are refugees or are living in government controlled areas.

"The idea [of COB] is to find a way to effectively address the genocide in a way that brings about the humanity of the people there, empowering Bosnians themselves in the reconstruction."

When genocide occurs, and governments do nothing about it, he points out, individuals feel that there is nothing they can do. The purpose of COB is to find effective things that individuals can do.

Though the problem is overwhelming, Sells is thrilled by how much they have been able to do. "The difficulty is that the need is almost infinite--you can never solve the problem. We've done more than we could even imagine when we started."

He views the scholarship program as truly reconstructive. "We have taken forty students and are involved with reconstructing their futures." The foundation, in fact, is shifting its emphasis from scholarships to supporting the students that are here and helping them to define what they'll do when they graduate.

By bringing students here, Sells points out, not only do we reconstruct what the ethnic cleansers tried to destroy, but we help to destroy stereotypes that were used to justify the cleansing process.

Sells is not hopeful about the current situation in Bosnia. "Nothing's going on. Peace agreements aren't being enforced and elections look like theyÕll be fake elections. Bosnia could be attacked again at any minute."

And what does the future hold for the COB? "It depends on how many individual, ordinary people are Vanja and Sells also spoke during intermission at the Tabor Lutheran Church during an annual German music festival and the concert raised over $1,000 for the student program. The festival was attended primarily by the community of German emigrants who came to the US before WW II."

Michael Sells's book, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, 1996) is now being released. The book examines the religious mythology behind the genocide, the role of priests and bishops in organizing, motivating, and justifying the "ethnic cleansing," and especially the way the symbol of the death of the Christ-Prince Lazar at the battle of Kosovo was used to make the Slavic Muslims into "Christ Killers" and "Race Traitors" through religious ideology. An essay-length version of the book appears as the lead article in a collection from Routledge, edited by G. Scott Davis, entitled Religion and Justice in the War over Bosnia.

The cover of The Bridge Betrayed is a work by Mirsad Konstantinovic, "The Message," one of 17 engravings included in Sarajevo 92/Expo. Aida Musanovic, organizer in the U.S. of Sarajevo 92/Expo, was commissioned to do the cover of another book by Michael Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism (Paulist Press: Classics of Western Spirituality, 1996). Aida depicts the mihrab (prayer niche) of the Colored Mosque (Aladza dzamija) of Foca, a masterwork of South Slavic architecture constructed in 1551 and destroyed three years ago by Serbian religious nationalists as part of the "ethnic cleansing" of Southeast Bosnia. The book has just appeared.

The COB needs to attain more corporate foundation and government grants to grow and adequately support our programs. In 1995, a member of Germantown Friends, Sally Kennedy, wrote a grant proposal for the New Initiatives program of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends on our behalf and attained a $12,000 grant for our student program, to benefit Bosnian students supported by COB who are on scholarships at Quaker schools. With the efforts of Abby Ryan, who has joined us as a grants consultant and who has wide and deep experience in the non-profit world, we have just attained an initial grant of $7,500 from the Huston Foundation. Azra and Amina Kurtovic, Deborah Cooper and myself had met with the Foundation last spring and they were clearly very moved by the testimony of Azra and Amina.

In the process, I have learned a great deal about grant writing. We will be hoping for more volunteers like Sally Kennedy to work on single grant projects.

PUBLICATIONS

COB friends Emran Qureshi and Nader Hashemi are working on important projects about Bosnia.

Amila Buturovic has published a number of important works on Bosnian culture, including "Producing and Annihilating the Ethnos of Bosnian Islam," in Cultural Survival, summer, 1995, pp. 29-33, "National Quest or the Anguish of Salvation: Bosnian Muslim Identity in Mesa Selimovic's The Dervish and Death in Edebiyat 7.1 (1997)," and a translation of the short story "Neither a Church nor a Mosque," also in Edebiyat.

Andras Riedlmayer continues to publish articles on libraries and museums, including "Libraries are Not for Burning," in Austrian Studies Newsletter 8.2 (Spring 1996), p. 2.

Vanja has set up a War Crimes Reports page on the COB WEB page that will be used as documentation for The Bridge Betrayed.

CULTURE PROGRAM

We are planning to work this year on increased funding for the culture program. In the meantime, Andras Riedlmayer has been meeting with the administration at Harvard to ask their support for educational and cultural programs for Bosnians. Andras Riedlmayer continues to give his extraordinary slide show, Killing Memory, which has now been updated, and wherever he does he generates support and awareness. He has now presented this important slide-lecture to more than more than 150 libraries, communities, and individuals. After one lecture, Riedlmayer received a $20,000 donation for cultural reconstruction in Bosnia, and Riedlmayer's talks and video have been vital in increasing support for Bosnian students. Expanded versions of his article on culture destruction and reconstruction in Bosnia have appeared in the May, 1996 issue of Art Libraries Bulletin (U.K.); in ISPEL: International Journal of Special Libraries (Berlin); and in the Hapsburg Studies Newsletter (Minn.).

In October, 1995, COB and the Gest Program for the Cross-Cultrual Studies of Religions at Haverford College helped sponsor an exhibit and talk by Bosnian artist Aida Musanovic. The exhibit, Sarajevo 92/Expo, consists of 17 art works produced during the worst of the shelling of Sarajevo, by 17 artists of various religious and ethnic backgrounds. By risking their lives to construct these extraordinarily powerful works of art, these artists protested the cultural destruction that was part of the "ethnic cleansing" program, and affirmed a work in which differnet religions and ethnic groups could affirm their life and existence as a community, amid the most relentless attack.

Deborah Cooper visited Zagreb, Sarajevo and Tuzla in April (see page 5) and returned with major treasures: copies of Mirza Filipovic's out-of-print books--the Sarajevo Hagadah, Art Treasures of Bosnia Herzegovina, the first book dedicated to Bosnia art and culture, by Ivan Lovrenic. COB will be working on reissuing these key documents on Bosnian culture, using the proceeds to support Bosnian museums, publishers and libraries. We hope that with increased funding for COB's culture program, Mirza Filipovic, once major editor at the Bosnian publishing house of Svjetlost, can direct the process.

In November, 1996, Andras and I will be presenting papers at a panel at the Middle East Studies Assoc.

Andras and I are presently host moderators of New York Times WEB page discussion groups on Bosnia.