Jasmina Burdzovic came to Ithaca in 1994 with the help of the local Bosnian Student Project. Denise Weldon/University Photography
For many college seniors, graduation means coping with the real world for the first time. For Bosnian Jasmina Burdzovic, 25, a senior in human development, the real world reared an ugly side early when war began to tear her country -- and her life -- apart in April 1992, while she was a first-year economics student at the University of Sarajevo.
"When the fighting started, we couldn't believe it was really happening," she said, recalling the snipers, masked soldiers and tanks that invaded her neighborhood where Bosnians of different ethnicities had long coexisted peacefully.
Within a couple of months, Jasmina and her younger sister were sent to safer quarters, first to Belgrade, then to Turkey. Her father, a general manager of Bosnia's largest transportation company and a Muslim, and her mother, a Serbian Orthodox, stayed behind. Soon after, her father was taken away and held for ransom by a gang operating in tandem with the Serbian military.
When the ransom couldn't be met, he was beaten, tortured and eventually escaped with the help of an old Serbian friend. With just the clothes they wore and what her mother could carry in one hand when she was expelled from her apartment, Jasmina's parents fled to Turkey to join the girls. Without citizenship, the family faced severe limits in opportunity. When their plight came to the attention of Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a peace group based in Nyack, N.Y., FOR contacted Bryna and Harvey Fireside, an Ithaca couple deeply involved in refugee support work.
In February 1994 Jasmina came to Ithaca where, with help from the Firesides and their recently formed Bosnian Student Project, she was given a free place to live and a scholarship to Tompkins Cortland Community College. With only two years of high school English, Burdzovic immersed herself in English language, composition and literature and now speaks English fluently, as well as Turkish, Serbo-Croatian and some German. Her sister soon joined her in Ithaca and is now at Ithaca College.
Jasmina excelled at TC3 and after a semester transferred to the College of Human Ecology in 1994, where she has made the Dean's List, will graduate with honors and has supported herself with an International Student Scholarship, a President Emeritus Frank H.T. and Rosa Rhodes Award and various work-study positions.
"I was attracted to the interdisciplinary spirit of human ecology and knew I wanted to work with children, focusing on risk and violence since I know how it affected me," said Burdzovic, who was selected for a Frederick Wood fellowship her junior year to study war orphans. Through the Institute for European Studies at Cornell, she spent last summer back in Croatia and Bosnia, comparing a group of Croatian children who were removed from their homes due to severe parental abuse with Bosnian war orphans; both groups lived in children's homes. Burdzovic then focused her honors thesis on the developmental consequences of the two groups of children.
This past winter, she returned to Bosnia again, this time to visit her father, who was critically ill. He died soon thereafter; his death was blamed on head injuries sustained during torture.
As Jasmina looks toward graduation, she's unsure of the new life looming ahead.
"I can't go back to Bosnia, at least not now. Nothing prevents the Serbian Nationists who tortured my father from killing us for our Muslim name. And with my mother being Serbian, we would encounter obstacles even among Bosnians because any Serbian might be blamed for the Serbian war crimes," she said. "Besides, everyone I know is gone, the country is devastated and it doesn't feel like home anymore. I'm job hunting now; ideally, I'd like to get some job experience as a research assistant and then go to graduate school in developmental or maybe even clinical psychology."
Ultimately, she would like to work for an international organization, maybe working with refugee children.
"Unfortunately, in that area," she said, "there will always be lots of work."