Jasmina Joldić was nine years old when she learned that she was born a member of a certain religious community.
Her mother Selma was trying to give little Jasmina and her older sister Ameli explain why their father was taken away by armed men.
"I didn't know who I was, or what I was, until the war started," says Joldić, speaking of the labels that - she realized it at the same moment the day her dad was taken - violently interrupted her idyllic childhood.
Until that moment Enver and Selma Joldić managed to protect their daughters from the state and society that were falling apart around them.
“We knew something was wrong when Dad was taken to a concentration camp, and Mom couldn’t explain what that meant,” Joldić says. “Or where it was.”
Imagine, adds Joldić, that you are nine years old and you hear how "they" took your father.
"These are your neighbors," she says. "They come with guns to take him away. And you don't know where he is. And you don't know when he'll be back."
Then, for the first time in your life, the conversation goes deeper. You start talking about faith, she says.
"You're trying to grapple with big concepts and big ideas."
Joldić then learns that she was born a Muslim, although she was not raised that way.
Her mother says, "You know, twice a year we go to lunch at my grandparents', where the whole family gathers?"
“And it's like, 'Oh, that's a religion?'”
Joldić was born a citizen of Yugoslavia. It was July 1992 and the Balkan socialist federation was falling apart. A three-way conflict had erupted in Bosnia between Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats. The lives of the Joldić family, like the lives of hundreds of thousands of others, would be irrevocably upended.
The events of that day, 33 years ago, pushed the Joldić family on a journey marked by trauma and triumph, which would force them to leave their homeland and eventually put down roots in the southern suburbs of Brisbane.
It was a journey that made Joldić, now 43, even more determined to succeed. After a distinguished career in public service, she rose to become director-general of the Department of Justice and attorney-general of Queensland. When the new LNP government purged the top administration a year later, Joldić was among those removed.
She is now the federal government's deputy secretary of state for higher education and knows the workings of government very well. As she listens to the increasingly fierce anti-immigrant rhetoric - both in Australia and around the world - and the "demonisation" of the other, Joldić says she feels a sense of post-traumatic stress disorder.
"It can escalate very quickly. I know where it leads - it can destroy a society," she said.
The peace agreement that ended the war in Bosnia - reached in Dayton, in the United States of America - was signed in Paris on December 14, 1995, almost exactly 30 years ago to the day Joldić sat on the wooden veranda of a café in the Taragindi neighborhood of Brisbane.
During those three decades, much has changed in Joldić's life, including her view of the Dayton Agreement.
Negotiated at an air force base in Ohio during the Bill Clinton administration, with the participation of the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, Dayton divided the country into two entities: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska.
The result was what some scholars call an “ugly peace” – a complex mosaic of ethnic blocs bound together by a complicated power-sharing agreement, maintained by the veto power of each party.
From his seat on the café terrace, where there are more than just customers - the Turkish owner's daughter is playing soccer with her niece - Joldić looks around and sees the Sika family walking their dog through the park. Two little girls scream with delight as they ride their scooters down the concrete bank of an occasional stream. Kookaburras grin from their perch in the black, overhanging eucalyptus trees. A man mows the lawn.
Jasmina says that there is a German word for this place that she learned during her years as a refugee child in Berlin - Stammkundin. It means: “regular customer”.
"As Bosnians, we have always been quite skeptical about what Dayton did to our country. That skepticism stems from the fact that that agreement froze us in time. For me, I think the turning point was when Gaza happened, and then Ukraine - that's when I started to change my views and think: well, at least it stopped the war. It stopped the killing. It stopped the bloodshed in the Balkans."
So much blood was shed in the war in Bosnia that a gruesome euphemism, a translation of the Serbo-Croatian expression "ethnic cleansing," entered the English language.
In Srebrenica, 30 years ago, Republika Srpska forces rounded up and executed more than 8.000 Muslim men. The world watched in horror as the first legally recognized genocide in Europe since World War II.
Joldić watched those indelible images of Bosnian Serb forces advancing on the besieged city in a one-room refugee apartment in Berlin as they appeared on television. She still sees the scene clearly today: her father in a purple tracksuit and undershirt - "the central heating was really strong."
"I remember absolutely everything," she says.
“I vividly remember my dad saying, ‘My God, Selma, they’re going to kill them. They’re going to literally slaughter them.’”
***
Across the Brisbane River, in the New Farm suburb, Ian Kemish also has vivid memories of the Balkans in the mid-1990s. He and Joldić have become friends as they both try to understand the legacy of Srebrenica and Dayton, which they experienced from completely different perspectives 30 years ago.
Kemiš was thirty years old at the time, a mid-level Australian diplomat. He remembers the flight from Zagreb to Sarajevo, strapped into the fuselage of a large Ukrainian Antonov aircraft. Putting on a body armor and helmet. Driving through “sniper alley,” from the airport to the city center, while the driver deliberately kept the car between trucks - “just in case.” Sarajevo under siege by Serbian secessionists. Its inhabitants, so well-groomed and elegant amidst chaos and ruins.
At that time, a ceasefire was in effect, but despite this, "shooting could be heard almost constantly in the distance."
“Sarajevo was a gloomy place,” he recalls. “The minarets all around were really impressive. But at that time, every piece of free land was either planted with cabbage or turned into a cemetery.”
Yugoslavia was known for its coexistence of different religions, says Kemiš. Christians, Orthodox and Catholic, Muslims and Jews, lived and prayed side by side for centuries. Now, he says, a new breed of politicians has fanned the flames of ethnic nationalism. Ancient hatreds have resurfaced. Neighbors have turned against neighbors.
Dayton, says Kemish, froze the dividing lines where they were and left nationalists in power. Tensions remain and occasionally flare up again. The political framework that is the legacy of that agreement “is quite shaky,” and skepticism about it is justified.
“When I think about different peace agreements, it’s almost always like that,” says Kemiš. “While ending the killing is imperative, a political solution often remains elusive.”
However, like Joldić, Kemiš believes that Dayton's achievements seem increasingly impressive over time.
“One thing I keep coming back to is that 30 years of peace, in a strictly military sense, is an extremely valuable achievement,” he says. “Considering the circumstances in which these agreements were reached.”
The retired diplomat and novelist is currently working on his second book, set in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. He says it's about people who carry hidden histories and repressed traumas with them to peaceful places.
Is it the palm trees or the humidity, Joldić wonders. She's traveling to Canberra for work today, but there's something in the Brisbane air that tells her she's home the moment she steps off the plane.
“We are typical migrants, it was the only area we could afford,” she says, explaining her parents’ decision to settle in Rockdale South, in the far south of Brisbane’s suburbs, two decades ago.
"It was really strange, to be honest. Imagine a teenager growing up in Berlin... Brisbane looked very, very different about 24 years ago. When we came to Australia we didn't know the language. It was hot. It was muggy. The shops closed at five in the afternoon."
Today, her uncle and aunt "live right around the corner," and her sister got married and moved "three blocks away."
“So we’re all in Rockdale South – real migrants,” she says. “We put down roots here and it’s our home. And, by God, we love that community.”
The Joldićs were among the families who founded the city of Bijeljina thousands of years ago. It is now part of Republika Srpska - and while Joldić remains connected to and proud of her Bosnian heritage, she has severed ties with the city of her ancestors.
But that's not the story Joldić wants to tell today.
She wants to show how much migrants contribute to enriching Australia, both culturally and economically. And here, she says, she feels a sense of duty to highlight it - at a time of increasing rhetoric about immigration and race.
“As a society, we have a responsibility not to take social cohesion for granted,” she says. “It can happen quickly, it can escalate, and it can escalate horribly wrongly. Cohesion is the responsibility of all of us.”
This, adds Joldić, is a responsibility to preserve the peace and prosperity we enjoy.
“And, my God, how happy are we?” says Joldić. “How happy are we?”
Prepared by: A.Š.
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