Bosnia
Communities in Dialogue: Healing the Wounds of War
A film about the vision and work of Karuna Center, focused on Bosnia. Ordering information
Three years of brutal war in Bosnia, 1992-95, left an estimated 100,000 people dead and 1.8 million people displaced. Among the casualties of this war were the inhabitants of Sanski Most and Prijedor in northern Bosnia. Before the war, these two cities with a combined population of some 200,000 were ethnically mixed and well functioning. At the beginning of the war in Bosnia, 58,000 Prijedor Muslims were expelled, with limited hope of survival and no hope of return.
Karuna Center staff led peacebuilding and inter-communal dialogue programs for six-years in the divided and war-torn cities of Sanski Most and Prijedor in northern Bosnia, first with women community leaders and later with educators.
“Karuna’s project DiaCom brought me back to life. I was able again to trust people and believe that humanity still existed. The work opened my heart and made me able to transform the hate and anger that was eating me up for years, to love, compassion and understanding. It taught me that this beautiful transformation was possible not only for me but for anyone who is brave enough to allow him or her self to be vulnerable and go through a healing process. The reason why I started an NGO is to help others experience the transformation that the Karuna Center provided for me.”
In 1997, a Bosniak (Muslim) refugee invited Karuna Center to work with women in her community. Our approach was to create a carefully guided process for the women to regain a sense of themselves and their dignity, as well as create a safe place to mourn their losses and bond with each other. Despite the multiple wounds of war affecting the Bosniak women, after one year they requested that we identify Serb women who would be willing to join with them in inter-ethnic dialogue. As the trust grew slowly and more women took part from both sides, the Bosniak and Serb women together urged us to initiate a similar dialogue process with educators, since they felt that educators could influence the future of Bosnia.
From this request, we created Project DIACOM, the Project for Dialogue and Community Building, to build bridges between Bosnian and Serb educators. We provided one of the few opportunities for inter-ethnic meeting in a region where family and collegial relations had been shattered by betrayal. We led workshops for three years with hundreds of teachers and administrators from both sides, and trained a core group of teachers in a Training of Trainers program to become the future trainers for Project DiaCom.
The work culminated with the formation of the first postwar interethnic NGO in northern Bosnia. Forming their NGO gave the educators ownership of Project DiaCom, legitimacy and legal agency in Bosnia and sustainability beyond our partnership with them. For our trainees, Project DiaCom and the education and skills they learned with us was the brightest spot in difficult times, as they coped with the collapsed economy, post-war trauma, delayed reconstruction, underlying fear and the isolation of Bosnia. They carry the work forward, both in the schools and through local NGOs that members have created in recent years.
