REPORT: Separated by war, reunited by love – a couple’s story

To an outsider, there may be nothing strange in the love story between Almir Salihovic and Dusica Rendulic: boy meets girl, they fall in love, live together and have a child. 

But he is Muslim and she is Serb and they are the first mixed couple in Srebrenica since Serb forces slaughtered around 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the overwhelmingly Muslim Bosnian town in 1995, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.  

They say they are not bothered how people perceive them in the town, where Serbs now outnumber Muslims, and expect no problems for their son, whom they named Jusuf after one of Almir's six uncles killed in the Srebrenica massacre.         

"If I had six sons, I would name them all after Almir's late uncles," said Dusica, 24, pointing at abandoned houses that once belonged to her partner's uncles.  

For many in the impoverished country, their tale offers hope Bosnia's Muslims, Serbs and Croats can learn to put their animosities behind them, even in places where the war still casts long shadows.       

International organizations have spent more than a decade trying to undo the "ethnic cleansing" that split Bosnia three ways, but less than a third of those driven out for having the wrong name have returned to their pre-war homes.    

The numbers are even lower in Srebrenica, where activists say Serbs and Muslims live in parallel worlds and there is no political will to bring them together.      

"These young people are definitely our only hope," said Dragana Jovanovic, the director of the Friends of Srebrenica non-governmental organization.   

Mixed marriages were widely accepted, and even encouraged, by communist authorities in the former Yugoslavia.    

Today, more than a decade after the wars ended, they are stigmatized by diehard nationalists across the Balkans, even though the ethnic and religious differences they play up are sometimes hard to spot in a broadly secular society.    

Jovanovic, a Serb, said of the young Srebrenica couple: "They need to be supported to persist in actions they were brave enough to undertake, they are the Bosnian bravehearts."     

They are not the first to be portrayed in such terms. Reporting from besieged Sarajevo at the height of the war, the late Reuters journalist Kurt Schork described that city's "Romeo and Juliet", a Serb and his Muslim girlfriend shot trying to escape.   

For Almir and Dusica, the publicity surrounding their lives came as a surprise. 

"For us, it was easy," said Dusica, adding she was well received by her partner's family and neighbors, and that they have not had any problems. They will formally marry once they make enough money to organize a decent wedding, she said, adding that Norwegian donors promised to buy her a white wedding gown.       

"If you behave normally, nobody will harm you," she said, watching over their baby boy as she sat on the porch of a new wooden house built for them by an Austrian charity.      

Dusica was born in Croatia to a Croat father and Serb mother. She left for Serbia in 1995 with her mother and siblings, when Croatian government forces drove rebel Serbs out of the pockets they had occupied since 1991, and thinks of herself as Serb.   

She first met Almir exactly two years ago this week, when she visited relatives in a northern Bosnian village where he was herding sheep. It was not long before they took off for Srebrenica to start their life together.      

Almir was 15 when his family was forced to leave Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, when the Bosnian Serb captors separated women and children from men. The men were killed over the following few days and buried in hidden mass graves.


For the full LBCI report, watch the video above.

REUTERS