Shaping community responses to catastrophe

Abstract

Vahidin Omanovic was 15 when war came to his rural village of Hrustovo and the nearby city of Sanski Most, Bosnia, in 1993. Bosnian Serb militias dragged men and boys from their homes, shooting some immediately, capturing others for concentration camps, and deporting the elderly on buses. The homes they left behind were plundered down to the copper wiring and then dynamited. Hiding on a departing bus under his mother's ample peasant skirt, Omanovic survived in a displaced persons camp. Returning to Hrustovo after the war, he helped build a graveyard for 300 murdered villagers and reconstructed homes for surviving residents or newly arriving refugees. Twenty years later, Hrustovo is repopulated. Omanovic lives in his rebuilt home with his family, working as founder-director of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), the Center for Peacebuilding, dedicated to reestablishing relationships between Bosnian Muslims and Serbs.