This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace

by Swanee Hunt, Bill Clinton (Foreword by)

" Replacing tyranny with justice, healing deep scars, exchanging hatred for hope . . . the women in This Was Not Our War teach us how. "—William Jefferson Clinton This Was Not Our War shares amazing first-person accounts of twenty-six Bosnian women who are reconstructing their society following years of devastating warfare. A university student working to resettle refugees, a paramedic who founded a veterans’ aid group, a fashion designer running two nonprofit organizations, a government minister and professor who survived Auschwitz—these women are advocates, politicians, farmers, journalists, students, doctors, businesswomen, engineers, wives, and mothers. They are from all parts of Bosnia and represent the full range of ethnic traditions and mixed heritages. Their ages spread across sixty years, and their wealth ranges from expensive jewels to a few chickens. For all their differences, they have this much in all survived the war with enough emotional strength to work toward rebuilding their country. Swanee Hunt met these women through her diplomatic and humanitarian work in the 1990s. Over the course of seven years, she conducted multiple interviews with each one. In presenting those interviews here, Hunt provides a narrative framework that connects the women’s stories, allowing them to speak to one another. The women describe what it was like living in a vibrant multicultural community that suddenly imploded in an onslaught of violence. They relate the chaos; the atrocities, including the rapes of many neighbors and friends; the hurried decisions whether to stay or flee; the extraordinary efforts to care for children and elderly parents and to find food and clean drinking water. Reflecting on the causes of the war, they vehemently reject the idea that age-old ethnic hatreds made the war inevitable. The women share their reactions to the Dayton Accords, the end of hostilities, and international relief efforts. While they are candid about the difficulties they face, they are committed to rebuilding Bosnia based on ideals of truth, justice, and a common humanity encompassing those of all faiths and ethnicities. Their wisdom is instructive, their courage and fortitude inspirational.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

344 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Swanee Hunt chairs The Institute for Inclusive Security. During her tenure as U.S. ambassador to Austria (1993–97), she hosted negotiations and international symposia focusing on securing the peace in the neighboring Balkan states. She is a member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and president of the Hunt Alternatives Fund. She has written hundreds of articles for American and international newspapers and professional journals, including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the International Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Denver Post. She is the author of Half-Life of a Zealot and This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, and Worlds Apart: Bosnian Lessons for Global Security.

Reviews

[jolly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Former U.S. ambassador to Austria and founder of Women Waging Peace, Swanee Hunt, wrote This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace. The book is comprised of first account interviews from twenty six Bosnian women about their experiences before, during, and after Serbian forces began attacking ethnic Bosnians and Croatians in their own country of Yugoslavia under the command of Slobodan Milosevic. It was similar to the “ethnic cleanse” German Nazis were enforced upon the Jewish people and other minority groups during the holocaust in WWII.
The forward of this book was written by former U.S. president Bill Clinton. He was president during much of the 1990s and the events discussed in this book and played a huge role in putting a stop to Serbian aggression. The forward helped emphasized the credibility of the author who was the U.S. ambassador in Austria when war in Yugoslavia broke out. As explained in the preface, her leaving Austria to work in Bosnia was more than encouraged by U.S. and Austrian governments considering their relationship did not need much to work on. Swanee Hunt immediately was inspired by the strength and bravery of the women she encountered on her first visit to Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, and began working with them.
Hunt did a great job on choosing women to interview that gave her readers a thorough and diverse account from different perspectives on the experiences of women in that war. The women she interviewed came from all walks of life and geographic locations in Bosnia. They varied in age, education, family life, and occupation so their stories encompassed nearly every possible angle of the war and the recovery from a woman’s viewpoint.
The book is well written and easy to read. The author writes about events in a chronological order and includes excerpts from interviews where they lie on the time line to make this historical account personal and diverse. The book also includes photographs of the wreckage, grave sites, and the women interviewed along with maps and some definitions of key terms, places, people, and a time line to help readers get a full understanding of the context. This is particularly helpful if the reader does not have much background information on politics and history of the Balkan region in Europe and is a good reminder and concrete reference to those who are well acquainted with that part of the world and its history.
The stories recounted by the interviewed women are touching and heartbreaking. Reading about the horrors they and their families, friends, and neighbors went through was quite the emotional experience but nothing compared to experiencing the actual events. Even though the events discussed in the book are rather horrific, the women recalling them were and are so strong to survive tell about it and be a part of rebuilding the Bosnian society. This book could possibly be used as a primary source and a secondary source for historical research on the wars in Bosnia, especially if the researcher is looking for diverse perspectives.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://nhw.livejournal.com/770632.html[return][return]Swanee Hunt was the US ambassador to Austria for the later stages of the Bosnian war and the immediate aftermath, and one senses that as an outsider - a political appointee in the US diplomatic service - she was trying also to bring other outsider voices into the process. But she keeps herself largely in the background, and the book is a collection of interviews with twenty-six Bosnian women of diverse backgrounds, with the interviews edited and assembled by theme, to give a rounded picture of, say, perceptions of history, actual wartime experience, the chance of reconciliation. Moving and thought-provoking.

[Justine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be a deeply moving book. As a woman marrying into an ethnically mixed Bosnian family, my heart ached reading these womens' stories. While Hunt does not hide her bias towards Bosnian Muslims (justifiably so), I feel she fairly portrays all the women in her book. She picked a good variety of women to profile, and all ethnic backgrounds and locales were well represented.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing first hand experiences that put a very human perspective on the war in Bosnia...by Swanee Hunt...