Aida: He was knocking on the door, saying Open, I want to get in, because they were bombing and it was two or three am. He was a man but he looked like a child. When he get in, he was shaking, he was so afraid.

Mohamed: How did you manage to leave the basement?

Dino: When war ended, we left basement. We were in Serbian’s house, but we weren’t in basement, we were on second floor.

Raeshma: Some of you missed last week, but what ended up happening is that Serbians moved out of their houses, Bosnians moved in. What happened to Aida is that she moved out of her house and Serbians moved in. Those are the connections that you miss. Some people leave houses, some people move into them.

Aida: Yeah, because some of the Bosnia land Serbia people took over and of the Serbia land, Bosnian people took over. So we just exchanged houses. There are still Serbia people who live in Bosnia house and there are still some people without their homes. Like my grandma, she has a house, but there are Serbian people living there who don’t want to get out. So my other uncle he came here and bought my grandma like a small house just to live in because in her house there are still some people living there. And I believe in Aida’s house, there are still some people living there.

Aida-S: Actually, those people are not from Serbia. They were born in Bosnia, but they are Christian and people who are Christian, we think they’re Serbian people.

Aida: Actually, they’re not the Christians. I hear that here in America people call them differently. They’re like Christians but not really. That’s kind of strange. They’re going to church like Christians. They believe in Jesus, but they have something else that Christians don’t have. They’re a little different. I hear that in America, they call them different.

Raeshma: Orthodox?

Aida: Yeah.

Mohamed: In your country, I have someone in my school and she’s from your country. And she says that in your country the Christians and the Muslims don’t like each other.

Aida: Yeah, that’s because of the war. The war started, I said, because of the land, but also because of the religion. Because most people who lived in Serbia, there are some Muslims, some live in Serbia, but most of them are Serbians. There were a lot of Serbian people who lived in Bosnia and when the war started, they moved out and went to Serbia. And there are some that stayed in Bosnia. They didn’t fight or do anything. Like Dino said, they’re not from Serbia, but they still Orthodox and they still live in Bosnia and they took her house and they live in there and they don’t want to get out and they don’t like each other because of the war.
Loulou: Aida, I was wondering, what is the government doing about this situation? Because I don’t know about your grandma, but look, I built that house and that house is for me. How can you just stay in my house without paying rent and I have to find another place to live?

Aida: My grandma she went over there to her house and she wanted to take over her house, like you said, that’s my house and I wanna live in there. The people who live in there, they didn’t do anything to my grandma. But some of the people who went there, they had guns and they wanted to kill them. Like my cousin he went over there and they beat him up like he couldn’t walk, they beat him up and they told him, ‘If you come back here again, I’m gonna kill you. I’m not gonna beat you up, I’m gonna kill you.’ They’re really mean. Especially where my grandma live, that’s north of Bosnia and they’re really really mean over there.

Loulou: What’s the government doing?

Dino: Nothing.

Aida: They say they’re trying, but really, they’re doing nothing. They started to do some of the houses, they’re free.

Aida (other one): I was able to go back to my house, but actually we didn’t want to. We moved to a bigger city and we liked it better there. All Serbian people lived there; we didn’t want to go back there to go to Serbian people. There were really good schools in the city I lived. We didn’t really want to go back, but we could. The government made it possible that we could go back to our house

Aida: Yeah, that was in some parts, but in some parts, no way. Like east of Bosnia, no way that you could go back. Even government can’t do nothing about that. There is one, like a little city called Frogadicha(?). The most killing happened there. A lot of people, they just disappeared. They took mans and boys seventeen or older, maybe younger, sometimes younger, and they put them in a concentration camp. For some of them, the parents or the family doesn’t even know nothing, they just disappeared, they took them there and maybe they kill them. People don’t know where they are. The most killing happened there. No way people can go back there. The worst Serbian people live there. Like Aida said, you can go back, but most of the people who came like in the bigger cities, they don’t want to go back. Like countryside, they don’t have good schools; they don’t want to go back.

Loulou: Man, but that’s my house. That ain’t fair.

Raeshma: But the whole community changed, right? The whole population changed from being- So it’s not just one house, it’s like an area changes. Communities shifted a lot. They call them internally displaced.

Aida: Especially people from north and east of Bosnia, in like the Serbia sides, they all moved down, in the bigger cities, from the north and east to the central Bosnia. They all moved especially north and east Bosnia. That was the worst area. They can’t do much in the city; they can’t go into your city to come into your house like they do in the east of the Bosnia. Like where my uncle lived, they were walking down the streets, bumping into the houses, killing the people with a knife, they just cut your head off. There’s river between Bosnia and Serbia.
In the time of 1993, which was the worst year. The whole river, I didn’t see it myself, but people told me, my uncle said it was red, the whole river was red. The people -there was a bridge and then they bump into a small village then they cut your head off and throw you into the river. It took a long time to clean that river out, for new water to come in. The river was all red because of the blood; they were throwing people into the river. Those parts are the worst. By myself I didn’t have any contact to Serbian soldiers or anything like that. The other kids who lived east or north of the Bosnia who actually saw her mother or father get killed and a Serbian soldier or something like that. And a lot of women has been raped in those parts. A lot. A lot. And killed or just raped. There is a big book that’s published in Bosnia; it’s about raped women.

Loulou: Aida, can you clear something up for me? On the news, they say Bosnia Herzegovina. What is that?

Aida: Oh yeah, that’s the full name of the country.