University of New England

Sometimes the War Continues: Merima Ramovic, UNECOM Class of '09

[Editor's Note: This profile appeared originally in the December 2005 COMmunicator.]

She Never Saw Their Faces

Merima still doesn’t know who shot at her.

She never saw their faces. Serbian snipers shooting from an upstairs window, probably. One moment she was playing with her friends amongst the abandoned bungalows of Sarajevo, the next second a spray of bullets went thrashing through the wooden walls and whined among the bricks. The bullets missed their mark and the children scattered from their play. They were all moved to a hotel with thicker walls. When the truck came to take them to Croatia, her father was conscripted into the Bosnian army before his wife and children were allowed to flee. The war raged on for another three years.

How do you write a story about Merima?

A Brief History of Time

You start by recounting a story you’d rather not tell. How many Americans are familiar with the recent Balkan war? It is a black chapter often left out of our collective consciousness. Yet in order to understand the magnitude of Merima’s accomplishments, one needs to grasp the gravity of her childhood.

Oddly, Merima’s story starts before she was born.

The Turks conquered the Balkans over five hundred years ago. They introduced Islam to the Orthodox Christian area, and most Serb nobles converted in order to maintain power. The Serbian peasants remained steadfastly Orthodox, while the Croats clung to Catholicism. For the better part of five hundred years, the Serbs simmered with rage at the grievances perpetrated by the Islamic elite in their country. 10% of all Christian boys were taken from their homes as a “Boy Tax” and impressed into the Corps of Janissaries to fight the sultan’s battles.

Orthodox Serbs lived and died in the hope that one day they would throw off the yoke of their Muslim overlords.

During World War II, the region of Yugoslavia put up a stiff resistance to the Nazi armies of Adolf Hitler. The guerrilla movement, led by Josip Tito, evolved into a Communist government after the war. Tito held together the multi-ethnic region of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Vojvodina through sheer force of personality. After his death in 1980, the country was left without strong leadership. By the late 1980s, another leader, a Serbian by the name of Slobodan Milosevic, gained power through the use of nationalistic rhetoric and religious hatred.

Milosevic inherited the heavy weaponry of the former Yugoslav army and the hate of his repressed people. He quickly put both to use by invading the break-away republic of Croatia. The Croat government had enacted discriminatory laws against Orthodox Serbs, and Milosevic and his Serb army swept in ostensibly to protect the mistreated Serbs. They bombarded the city of Vukovar for 86 days, turned it to rubble, and began mass executions of Croat men after the city fell.

In April of 1992, the independence of another break-away republic, Bosnia-Hercegovina, was recognized by the international community. Bosnia was a mostly Muslim country with an Orthodox Serb minority of 32%. Milosevic declared a crusade to ‘liberate’ the Serbs from their Muslim neighbors. The Serb army invaded Bosnia in the spring of 1992. Five hundred years of bitter history reared its ugly head as the Serbs laid siege to the capital city of Sarajevo. The world watched in horror as mortar shells crashed into markets and 3,500 children were gunned down by Serb snipers.

Serb paramilitary groups also began a campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ throughout the country, rounding up thousands of Muslim Bosniak men to ‘process’. The Serbs developed a system of rape camps where they terrorized and abused non-Serb women and children. Many of the troops were foreign Cetniks with long beards and square hats. They were driven by their own dubious religious beliefs and a lust for revenge against the Muslims whose forefathers had ruled the region. The Serb militias rampaged in an ever-widening circle of torture, rape, and death.

The Wolf Brigades reached Merima’s town in April of 1992.

The War That Wouldn't Quit

Foca (pronounced FO-cha) clings like a child to the skirts of the Drina River in Southeastern Bosnia-Hercegovinia, about 32 miles from Sarajevo. It is a frontier region: rugged, mountainous, sharing its spiny ridge with the nearby towns of Krivaje, Budimlije, and Sukovac. At 43۫۫ N, Foca is almost exactly the same latitude as Portland, Maine. The municipality had a population of 40,000 souls in the last census before the war. Foca proper had a population of 15,300, about the size of the city of Saco. Half the population was Muslim Bosniaks, the rest Serbs.

According to a 52-page document published by The Human Rights Watch, Foca’s troubles started in April of 1992 and continued for the next three years. It is never a good thing when Human Rights Watch writes a 52-page paper about your town. During this time the Muslim population was liquidated or forced to flee. The report summarizes the violence in rather cold, unaffected language:

“Once the Bosnian Serb and Serb forces had completely occupied the Foca municipality, they began rounding up all non-Serb civilians from the surrounding villages, separating the men from the women, and imprisoning them in numerous detention facilities. The Foca police worked closely with the Serb military forces occupying the municipality and played primary and direct roles in the arrest, expulsion, detention, rape, torture, and murder of the non-Serb population of the town. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) was denied access to Foca from the time of the takeover on April 7, 1992, until the beginning of October of that year. By the time they gained access, it was too late for thousands of non-Serbs from Foca who had been imprisoned and subsequently either expelled or killed. By the time the ICRC entered, few non-Serbs were left alive in the municipality.”

Many more details are available about the itemized list of abuses perpetrated by the Serbs in Foca, but after reading a few pages I felt sick to my stomach. It is enough to understand that such a report exists, and that Merima and her family were fortunate to escape. Many did not.

The war went on and on and claimed 200,000 lives before a NATO and U.S.-led coalition stepped in as a direct result of the Srebrenica massacre. At Srebrenica in 1995, Serb paramilitary troops known as ‘Scorpions’ filmed themselves killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys. The footage shows them laughing.

The Girl Who Won't Give Up

Maybe it takes a war that wouldn’t quit to produce a young woman who won’t give up. Insert into this horror a nine-year old Bosnian girl and her family. As I listened to Merima my face reddened. I thought of all the excuses I have used over the years to cover what amounted to academic laziness. Merima does not make excuses, though she has an ample arsenal of challenging circumstances from which to draw. Instead, she speaks frankly of the difficulties she has faced, as though they were the stuff from which success is made.

Merima’s bandolier of unused excuses could include bullets of various calibers. When the Serbian Wolf Brigades tore through Foca, she could see smoke rising from villages on the hills. Because she lived on the other side of the river from the main town, her family was spared some of the ravages that many others suffered. But not all.

Serb troops collected all the local weapons, including her father’s rifle, so that the Bosniaks could not resist. Her father barely escaped the roundups of fighting-aged men. Trucks usually came at night. A squad of Serbian soldiers would leap out, roadblock an alley, then go house-to-house pulling all the men and teenage boys from their beds. After being beaten in detention centers, the men were selected at random for further processing. The overflowing trucks would leave the village and the occupants were never heard from again. A friend of Merima’s jumped out of one such truck and survived - for a time.

A Dream From a Dumpster

The Ramovics slept in the forest at night to avoid Serb patrols. Eventually it became too dangerous even to stay in the thickets behind the village, and the family received warning that a raid was pending for their region. They fled on foot for 15 days until they reached the Muslim enclave in Sarajevo.

During these dark days, Merima began to dream. Her father had been a businessman before the war, and he would bring home little presents for his children. Merima received dolls, and she always did the same thing with each of them. She explains, “The dolls were made out of a soft substance, maybe rubber or something. This may sound weird, but every time I got one I would take a knife and cut carefully into the doll. Then I would take a needle and thread and stitch them back together.” She laughs shyly and adds, “I knew there was nothing inside them, but I could dream.”

When the war disrupted everything, Merima had no toys at all. She went out one day and looked through the rubbish. Among the detritus of human misery, she found a doll. But the war had touched even this little thing, and its arms were missing. Merima made limbs for the doll and threaded them through with rubber band ligaments to keep them in place. From the dumpster she had saved a doll. She made it a goal to nurture others for the rest of her life.

The Incredible Journey

In happier days, Sarajevo had hosted the 1984 Olympic Games. The Ramovics stayed in the shell-pocked and gutted Olympic Village, where snipers shot at Merima. Danger was too great there, and so Mrs. Ramovic and the children caught a truck to Croatia. The condition of their escape was the conscription of Mr. Ramovic into the Bosnian army. The family separated with no assurance that they would ever see each other alive.

While in Croatia, they lived as refugees for a time in a stadium in Split. They had nothing, says Merima, except the clothes they wore. Eventually, her family was allowed into Germany since her father had relatives there. Merima began to learn German and started 4th grade. She worked very hard, and was a good student despite her initial language deficit. Her father survived the war and rejoined the family.

In 1999, the Ramovics were granted a visa to the United States. Merima’s mother has a cousin in Utica, NY, so the family stayed there. The children took a language course in the summer to augment the two words of English they knew, “Yes,” and “No.” In September, Merima started 11th grade at T.R. Proctor High School in Utica. On the first day, the translator never showed up. Merima remembers searching for her classroom by herself. She took mostly science courses, since numbers, symbols, and equations easily crossed the language barrier. By 12th grade, she was an A-student and received her Regent’s diploma. After excelling at a nearby college, Merima went through the medical school application process. UNECOM was a top choice because she knew she could do some of her rotations in Utica.

When she was accepted to UNECOM, she was ecstatic. I remember Merima bursting into the RSAS office with a huge grin on her face, ready to tackle Gross Anatomy and whatever other challenges med school offered. Her joy was obvious, and contagious. Joy is one of the few nice things to catch.

Determination to Excel 

Merima’s eyes tell two stories. The first is her zest for life. The girl fairly sparkles. Spend any length of time with Merima and you are treated to her flashing smile and ready laugh. Second, and less obvious, is her sheer determination to excel. There is a fire behind the light. Merima really wants to be a doctor. She knew this from those early childhood days suturing dolls, and her resolve has only increased over the intervening years. She thinks she might like to specialize in cardiology, but her rotations will help sort out her specific interests. There are still plenty of classes to take.

It is amazing what Merima has achieved despite her difficult background. She is tri-lingual in a day and age when most American students seem to have trouble learning English. She claims not to be a risk-taker, though risk has seemed to follow her of its own accord. She laughs and says she’ll climb a tree, but not one out of which she might fall. You can understand her desire for security, and her drive to excel. Though Merima escaped from Foca, Foca still has not quite left Merima.

Sometimes the war continues. In an email sent just before Thanksgiving, Merima wrote, “On the 14th of November, 2005, my grandfather’s remains were identified from a mass grave in Spilja, 40 km from Foca. The authorities suspect that one of my uncles may be in the mass grave as well. Happy Thanksgiving. – Merima.”

Merima still doesn’t know who shot at her. She never saw their faces. But she survived the Balkan war and her dream is to nurture other human beings who suffer. Serb snipers failed to kill her as a child, and now she wants to save other lives.

You can see it in her eyes.

- Steve Smith, RSAS

Sources: "A Closed, Dark Place: Past and Present Human Rights Abuses in Foca," The Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org/reports98/foca/; www.TravelPost.com; The History Place: Genocide in the 20th Century, www.thehistoryplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/bosnia.htm; USA Today: The War in Bosnia, www.usatoday.com/news/index/bosnia/nbos002.htm.