Nawraz Alan (left) and Sanja Unsanovic tell their stories of war survival.

March 31, 2003

By Matt Kelly

Five University students bore witness Thursday night to the impact of armed conflict on civilian populations, especially the young.

Two Kurds, a Colombian, a Bosnian and an American student who lived through a terrorist campaign in Spain participated in the third annual Children of War program, presenting their stories of surviving wars to a packed house in the Wilson Hall Auditorium.

"Some of us get anxious whenever we hear a helicopter," said Rebeen Pasha, one of the event’s organizers and a panelist in previous events. "We know how a building trembles and shakes after a bomb blast, and some of us saw family members shot before our eyes."

Started with two student war survivors telling their stories in Michael Smith’s "World Order" class in summer 2000, the program has expanded to annual panels.

After Thursday’s program, Pasha said it is sometimes difficult to get the message of the personal impact of war on children and families across, especially to students who have no frame of reference, but he said the Children of War panelists pour human emotions over the cold facts of war. Several times during their presentations panelists Adriana Navarro and Sanja Unsanovic stopped and fought back tears. Pasha was halting in his retelling of the tragedies his family endured.

An advocate of out-of-the-classroom learning, Pasha said the response of the students has kept the panel alive over the years. He said the students can make a difference by understanding that there are real people caught up in the wars they see on television.

Pasha, who lived in Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, lived through the Iran/Iraq war, the invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War that followed, the Kurdish revolution and then the Kurdish civil wars. His own father was gunned down in front of him after answering a knock on the door that interrupted the family’s dinner, leaving Pasha the man of the house at the age of 10. Every day, he said, people in war face threats and darkness and fear.

Nawraz Alan, also from Kurdistan, was 8 at the end of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein turned his forces on the Kurds. He saw Iraqi helicopter gunships massacre thousands of civilians at the Iraq/Iran border. Alan’s family survived because they were hidden on the other side of a small hill.

Left to right: Dustin Batson, Adriana Navarro, Nawraz Alan and Sanja Unsanovic.

As they walked back to their home from the border, a five-day journey, he saw what became his most vivid childhood memory. He said they passed a child of about 5 years old, holding a doll, covered with blood, standing next to the corpses of her parents, yelling at them to wake up because she wanted to go home.

In 1994 he was shopping with his brother at a crowded outdoor market in Kurdistan when a firefight broke out between police and a fundamentalist group. Alan said he held his head in his hand and prayed to be spared while bullets flew within inches of him. When the shooting was over, he said, people resumed shopping. Alan found his brother and they were walking away when Alan realized his hand was covered in blood. At first he feared he had been shot, but had not felt it because of the adrenaline. Then he found his head had been cut by something and had not been aware of it. He still bears the scar.

"It was just a scratch," he said. "I’ll take a scratch over a bullet any day of the week."

Sanja Unsanovic lived in the suburbs of Sarajevo, Bosnia, and watched bombs fall on the city.

When the bombing reached them, her family stayed in the cellar for protection. The cellars had to be double-walled, with no windows, to keep her family safe from shrapnel, she said. They only went outside for brief periods in the air and sun. She was 12 at the time, confused, not understanding what was happening around her.

The family eventually drove to Croatia to escape.

"We changed our name with each area we went though, because if we weren’t from that area, they wouldn’t have let us in and they probably would have shot us," she said.

They reached Croatia, but were still not safe and eventually fled to Germany, then to the United States.

Constant terrorism is also a form of war. Navarro, born in Pereria, Colombia to an American mother and Colombian father, and Dustin Batson, who lived in Madrid, Spain, with his parents, explained how terrorism can affect the lives of the innocent.

Navarro said Colombia’s 50-year-old, Cuban-inspired revolutionary movement had linked itself with the country’s illegal narcotics industry to terrorize the Colombian people.

"When I was 5 years old, my best friend’s father was killed by drug dealers," she said. "I was too young to know what was happening, but I knew something was wrong."

Later the Palace of Justice was attacked and all the judges were killed, then a presidential candidate was assassinated. The family moved to the capital, Bogata, when she was 12, but then the city was besieged with a bombing campaign. If people saw a car parked on the street in front of their house for more than a few minutes, they called the police. A bomb once went off near her school and shook the glass dome of the library while she was studying.

The family moved to the United States after there were threats against Americans. But she still misses her country.

"I can’t go back for a visit, because my parents are afraid that something will happen to me," she said. "It’s my country, war or no war, and I love it. Seventy percent of me is in Colombia. My heart is still in Colombia."

Batson, while not having the emotional ties to Madrid that Navarro has to Colombia, said he witnessed armed conflict in a major western city, where armed police patrolled every street. His best friend in school returned from the lunch break with a bleeding head wound; a city bus blew up in crowded marketplace.

"My high school infirmary had 10 beds," he said. "It was a mini-hospital attached to a school for 300 students."

The bus bombing happened on a warm Saturday in April, while he and his mother were shopping. They got off at the wrong bus stop near the crowded market. Moments later, they felt the ground shake and saw an explosion and smoke, realizing only later that a bus had blown up at the bus stop they had intended to use.

They went about their shopping. "In our numbness, we couldn’t comprehend what we had seen," he said.

Batson was highly critical of using terrorism to advance a political cause.

"Terrorism is a practice, it is not an ideology," he said. "Fourteen-year-olds have nothing to do with your political agenda."

He said the intent of terrorism is to break apart the community with fear and render society ungovernable and unlivable.

"The price people pay for freedom is very high," Pasha said, as he reminded the students of their daily concerns about classes and money. "When you talk about your rights, think about your privileges."

The students also talked about how their ordeals affected them, how they have a greater appreciation for life.

"It made me stronger," Unsanovic said. "I focus on school and I want to prove to myself and my country that we can become smarter. I put 100 percent into everything I do."

Alan and Pasha both aspire to attend medical school. Alan says he wants to help poor people and Pasha wants to return to help a free Kurdistan.

Navarro, an architecture student, said she wants to return and help her country in any way she can, and Batson wants to work for human rights within an international system.

The panelists stressed that there is so much freedom and privilege in the United States that people here cannot understand what happens in many parts of the world.

"We were fighting to be free," Alan said. "Things are so incredible here. You ought to be breaking a law if you take it for granted."