History > 2007 > USA > Bosnians (I)

Bosnians in America:

A Two-Sided Saga

April 29, 2007
The New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

CHICAGO — Like many Bosnian refugees, Mirza Mahic had a harsh adjustment to the United States. Back home in Tuzla, his parents were engineers who owned a weekend house and vacationed on the Adriatic Sea. In Chicago, where they were resettled in 1995, the family of four suddenly found itself on public assistance, in a cramped one-bedroom apartment infested with mice. Young Mirza, then 12, cried every day and begged to quit school.

Mr. Mahic’s father found a job as a maintenance man in a suburban apartment complex so his two sons could have more space, better schools and some distance from the drug dealers in their old neighborhood. Now a 24-year-old college graduate and senior manager at Monster.com, the job-search Web site, Mr. Mahic knows he has come a long way. But he also knows that many other young Bosnians with similar struggles have not.

In mid-February, an 18-year-old Bosnian refugee killed five people in a shooting rampage at a mall in Salt Lake City before he was shot to death by the police, who have not been able to determine a motive.

The Utah killings spurred Mr. Mahic and some of his peers to form a leadership initiative intended to help young Bosnian refugees on the verge of falling through the cracks.

From 1992 to this March, the State Department resettled 131,000 refugees from war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina in the United States. More than 9,000 were placed in Chicago, many of them clustered in the poorer quarters of the city’s North Side.

The multiple jobs that many of the parents juggle, combined with emotional struggles left over from the war, leave them little time or ability to understand the very American struggles of their children.

The desire to help their parents leads some teenagers to drop out of school to work, or to join gangs. Last year, a group of Bosnian teenagers were arrested on charges linking them to a major car-theft ring.

Adis, a 20-year-old Bosnian who asked that his last name be withheld because of legal troubles, cycled through three high schools before dropping out in his junior year. Because his mother was working long hours at two jobs — his father died during the war — she was largely oblivious to his truancy, fighting, drinking, drug use and drug dealing, he said. His older brother had dropped out of high school in his senior year to work.

“Sometimes maybe it was to get attention or something like that,” Adis said of his troubles. “I had too much time on my own.”

Dr. Stevan M. Weine, a psychiatrist and ethnographer who has spent the last five years chronicling the experiences of Bosnian teenagers in Chicago for a coming book, said Adis’s story was all too common.

“There are many young Bosnian people, especially young men, who left school and still have not found any stable ground or straight path to good,” Dr. Weine said. “And I don’t see who or what is really helping them process their experiences or get the kind of mentorship, support or education that they need.”

The high school with the largest bilingual program for Bosnians ended it two years ago because the Bosnian student population had declined. The Bosnian and Herzegovinian American Community Center closed last year because of financial problems.

Many of those who are doing well, in college or starting careers, have moved to more affluent areas, and their ties to those who are struggling have become more tenuous.

“When we first came, Bosnia Herzegovina was in the spotlight, but those days are over and nothing is free anymore,” said Mr. Mahic, who now owns a condominium in a gentrifying neighborhood on the west side. “The people who have become successful have to show other people how to get there.”

The support group Mr. Mahic helped start has met several times since the Utah shootings to pull their community forward. Elmina Kulasic, 21, a student at Loyola University, who was held in a concentration camp during the war, said of Utah’s Bosnian refugees, “I felt that maybe if they had had a better organized community there in that place, maybe they would have seen that boy’s symptoms, and that we should be doing that work here.”

Ms. Kulasic has started an after-school program for girls to keep them connected to Bosnian culture.

At a recent meeting at a north side library, Ms. Kulasic, Mr. Mahic and a half-dozen college students and young professionals wrestled with what else to do. Perhaps Bosnian clubs could be started to promote academic excellence in high school. Or workshops could be created for parents on how to spot problem behavior in their teenagers. Maybe start out with social activities and then work in serious issues down the line.

The same concerns were echoed that evening at a mosque in the suburb of Northbrook — the only local mosque with a Bosnian imam — where some worried aloud about what they called a lost generation of Bosnian youth.

“We have many sheep who have left the flock,” said Hajdar Sabovic, 38, a real estate agent. “It’s not like we can offer bingo or a Super Bowl party with beer at the mosque to get them to come.”

Nor, he said, do many religious Bosnians venture outside the mosque to places like Piccolo Caffe, a restaurant and nightclub popular with young Bosnians who embrace a largely secular Muslim identity.

A new Muslim cultural center is being built on the north side of Chicago to draw Bosnians who do not attend the suburban mosque. But Imam Senad Agic is not sure it will reach those most in need. “I think we have not done enough to reach out to people,” he said. “I will certainly go there. But I just do not know. Our way is to appeal to the souls of the people who come to us.”

Within the more secular group, too, there are conflicts. When Mr. Mahic suggested at the library meeting that their group also welcome Bosnian Serbs and Croats, the mood quickly shifted.

“Maybe you didn’t see people in your family die in the war,” responded one woman, nearly in tears. “I am sorry, but many Bosnian Muslims will not come if that is the way it is going to be.”

Amela Guso, 21, a college student born in Srebrenica, site of a 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims, sat silent but tense during the exchange. “My father’s brothers, cousins, so many family members were killed in the genocide,” she said later. “How can you expect people to just say, ‘O.K., let’s have dinner and hang out with these people?’ ”

Still, she said, she supports the basic goals of the group.

Adis is struggling to straighten his life out, he said. He says he wants to return to school for his high school diploma, though he has yet to take meaningful steps to do so. He said his priority was to get back his driver’s license, revoked after several drunken-driving and drug charges. Had there been such a support group when he was in school, he said, he may have listened to them. Maybe he could still use some advice, he added.

“It’s always better to have the same-age people,” he said. “They’re living it. You can hear from them and learn. If you’re going to run the wrong path you just find there is nothing there. You’re just going to hit the wall.”

Bosnians in America: A Two-Sided Saga, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29youth.html