by Michael Anklin
Staff Writer
How could anyone forget the pictures? Sarajevo under siege. Vicious snipers praying on innocent civilians. People running for cover. Streets emptied by fear. Death and despair at every corner.
Sanela Hadzihasanovic, a freshman broadcasting major at the University of La Verne, has lived through the horror and survived.
“You see death at every moment, on every corner, everywhere around you and you know that you are a potential target,” she said. “You kind of know, but you don’t want to deal with it.”
Hadzihasanovic is a true survivor in many ways. She has been a war reporter, a leader of a political party, a press representative for a humanitarian organization and a refugee. When she came to the United States, she worked in a variety of jobs.
When Hadzihasanovic was 16 years old, the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina broke out. She and her family soon found themselves trapped in Sarajevo, where Hadzihasanovic was born, besieged by hostile Bosnian Serb forces.
“One day, they just started bombing us,” she said. “[We wondered], ‘What the heck is going on?'”
She would not always listen to her parents’ warnings about the dangers of going outside.
“Now I feel sorry that I didn’t listen to my parents,” she said. “I probably would have left earlier; I would not have gone through three years of hell.”
The family members, friends and neighbors started spending their days and nights in the concrete basement of the house.
“We lost power, running water and gas,” Hadzihasanovic said. “Imagine your life with no phone. I thought a phone was the main thing in your life, but [it is not.]”
Eventually, they ran out of food. Many people in Sarajevo still had a lot of money, but there was nothing to buy.
“Then the black market showed up,” Hadzihasanovic said. “You would pay $60 for two pounds of sugar or $120 for one kilo of coffee beans.”
In late 1993, a help organization finally managed to bring food into the city. “It wasn’t that much but it was food,” Hadzihasanovic said. “We pulled through.”
On day, she had enough.
“I got sick and tired of the situation,” she said. “If I’m going to get killed, I’ll die either on the street, in the basement or in my own bedroom. So what the heck, I’ll take the risk.”
She went to the only local independent radio station, “Studio 99,” and applied for a job.
“I knocked on the door and said ‘Hey, how are you guys doing? I want a job.'”
Tirelessly she worked, sometimes for 24 hours, without ever being paid.
“You do the job, but there is no way of making money because it’s the war. You don’t know if you’re going to live tomorrow,” Hadzihasanovic said.
She went on to have her own six-hour radio talk show and to work for the independent television station “TV 99.”
One day, Hadzihasanovic decided to leave Sarajevo. Like many times before, she got a letter from her sister in California asking her to come to the United States. But it had been virtually impossible to leave the city.
“The Bosnian government would not let you go. Even if they did, the Serbs would certainly not let you leave,” she said.
Yet, the opportunity to leave arose one day. Representatives of the Young European Federalist Party, whose goals include a united, peaceful Europe without borders, had come to Sarajevo to establish a chapter of their party in Bosnia.
Hadzihasanovic agreed to being the president of the chapter, which turned out to be a clever move. She was allowed to leave the country to attend the party’s conference in Strasbourg, France.
On April 26, 1995, Hadzihasanovic arrived in Sacramento with the help of World Relief and a resettlement program for Bosnian Muslim refugees. She later moved to San Jose, where she stayed with her sisters.
She started working in a variety of jobs because the government money she received as a refugee was not enough to make a decent living.
“I was a dental assistant, I was a waitress, I worked for the Certified Public Accountants (CPA),” she said. “I did all kinds of things and I was pretty good at everything.”
She also started taking English lessons. However, Hadzihasanovic was already fluent in English when she came to the United States.
She had English in high school in Bosnia. Before she left she was studying at the University of Sarajevo’s political science department with an emphasis on journalism.
Hadzihasanovic heard about ULV through a friend and ended up applying.
“They [ULV] were impressed with my essay,” she said. “They asked me to write an essay about a moment in my life that I would never forget. I had a lot of those moments; trust me.”
Last semester, Hadzihasanovic, now an official resident, started her studies at ULV.
She has taken out loans and received government support to pay for her education.
Making money is important to her. The day Hadzihasanovic was packing her bags to leave her family, her father came to her room and gave her 20 German marks-the last money in the house.
“That was the first time I saw my father cry,” Hadzihasanovic said. She said he did not only cry because his youngest daughter was going to leave but because he could not support her the way he wanted to.
“I did no want to take the money, but I knew I had to. I told myself that this was never going to happen to me again,” she said.
When she was working in California, she started supporting her parents.
People, who were not born in the Balkans might sometimes wonder about Hadzihasanovic. She is a very outspoken woman; she drinks alcohol; she wears jeans, shorts or even short skirts, and, yes, she is a Muslim.
“This is Europe; it’s not the Middle East,” she said.
“[In Europe] it’s up to you [whether to strictly follow the religion or not.]”
Nevertheless, “there is this unwritten rule in Bosnia,” Hadzihasanovic said, “that during the month of Ramadan, you don’t drink.”
Hadzihasanovic cannot understand how fellow Bosnians could kill each other because of their religion or ethnicity.
“It’s something that’s messed up,” she said. Out of her three best friends, one is a Christian orthodox Bosnian Serb, one is a Muslim and one is half Catholic, half Muslim.
“When they say that it was a religious war in Bosnia,” she said, “that is totally not true.”
When one talks to Hadzihasanovic, naturally, the situation in Kosovo comes up.
She supports the NATO bombing and gets mad when the argument is raised that innocent civilians are the victims. It is not that she wants them to die but, “when the Bosnian Serbs, supported by Milosevic, attacked Bosnia, the people of Serbia supported Milosevic. And now they are innocent victims?” she asked.
Hadzihasanovic thinks ground troops would not solve the problem.
“You have to be one of us to understand how we think,” she said.
Despite her past experience and the ongoing problems in the Balkans, Hadzihasanovic has a positive attitude.
“I hang out with people a lot,” she said. “I love socializing. I love to learn from other cultures. I love to travel, but I can’t afford it right now.”
Nevertheless, she has gone back to Bosnia in the past and family members have visited her in California.
Her primary goal right now is to graduate. After graduation she would be willing to work anywhere in the world as long as she gets paid.
“I moved once from home. I don’t even know where my home is anymore,” she said.
Hadzihasanovic said, “[You have to] take everything life offers you and if life doesn’t offer you, anything you just take it.
“Because we have only one life, we must appreciate what we have. Let me just live. I have learned how to appreciate my life.”
Michael Anklin
