“The Genie Is Out Of The Bottle”: A Warning From A Survivor Of The Bosnian War
Mirsada Burić ran her way out of a civil war. She was twenty-two years old and living in Sarajevo when, in 1992, she was chosen to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Summer Olympics, in Barcelona. It was an awkward time to be training for a three-thousand-meter race. The republics of the former Yugoslavia—among them Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina—were breaking out into war. Bosnia and Herzegovina had voted for independence in March, and, on April 5th, ultra-nationalist Serb militias, with the support of Serbian president Slobodon Milošević, bent on carving out a Greater Serbia from neighboring Bosnia, began the Siege of Sarajevo, which would send the city into a state of terror for more than three years. Snipers, stationed on the hills overlooking Sarajevo, picked off civilians at random. Shells blew apart thousands of homes. On one of Burić’s runs, near the stadium that had been used for the 1984 Winter Olympics, she narrowly avoided being hit when a barrage of shells landed around her. On another occasion, while stretching in a park, she heard a sniper’s bullet slice the air over her head and hit a tree. “It sounded like a whip,” she said.
The unravelling of Bosnia’s peaceful multi-ethnic society felt surreal. The fact that many of her neighbors were Christian Orthodox Serb, whereas Burić was Muslim, had never been an issue; marriage between different ethnicities was not uncommon. (Bosnian Serbs then constituted roughly a third of Bosnia’s populace; Croat and Bosnian Muslims constituted most of the rest.) But many of her Serb neighbors joined the militias, and the sight of them in uniforms and ultra-nationalist insignia stunned her. Her family’s home was shelled, and they spent three days hiding in her uncle’s house, in back rooms that were built into the mountainside, before escaping out a window at night, crawling on the street to avoid sniper fire. Her brother disappeared one morning and was never seen again. Shortly thereafter, less than two months before the Olympics, Burić spent two weeks in a concentration camp. Aside from that time, she still managed to train amid the violence. She resorted to the stairs of apartment buildings and an underground parking garage. By the time she made it to Barcelona, she was determined but tired, grieving for her brother and for her country. In her qualifying heat, she finished last.
BBC featured her in a segment at the time, showing her running through war-torn Sarajevo and speaking out about her city’s plight. It was three years before the international community would wake to the full horror of the violence and ethnic-cleansing. In July 1995, ultra-nationalist Serb forces, backed by Milošević, overran the mountain village of Srebrenica and killed, through the use of firing squads, eight thousand Muslim men and teenage boys in a United Nations Safe Area, a survivor of which I wrote about in 2015. The massacre galvanized the international community, and the U.S. helped negotiate an end to the war later that year. (Milošević died in 2006, awaiting trial in the Hague for his role in the genocide, in addition to other humanitarian crimes.)
Burić’s making the Olympic team changed her life in a way she could not foresee. On a connecting flight home from Barcelona, a journalist offered to help her secure temporary asylum in Slovenia, after which she was granted refugee status in the U.S. She found a new life in Prescott, Arizona, in 1993, and has lived in America ever since. Since the 2016 election, she has felt as if she has been watching a familiar horror unfold. Lies have spread through America as they had once spread through her nation. The morning after the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she posted on Facebook a photo of a pro-Trump rioter wearing a shirt that read “MAGA CIVIL WAR.” “Almost three decades ago I left my homeland and found a new life in this country because of people like this,” she wrote. “I never thought that I would witness similar insurrection in this country.” She added, “If none of the events over the past four years have been a wake up point, this one must be.”
I reached out to Burić a few days later. (We met in 2007, when we were attending Columbia’s journalism school. She briefly worked as a journalist but has worked at a bank for most of the years since.) One memory in particular bubbled up as she pondered her experiences in Bosnia and America. She vividly remembers the day, in 1989, before the possibility of war had ever crossed her mind, that her family gathered around the television and listened to Milošević appeal to Serbian victimization in a nationalistic speech on the six-hundredth anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. “We were like, ‘How are you victims? What is happening? Nobody’s treating you any different than the rest of us,’” she said. She recalls seeing Bosnian Serbs at a pro-Milošević rally, dressed in military fatigues with ultra-nationalist insignia on their arms. “He delivered the speech as if he was not representing all of the people of the former Yugoslavia, but only the Serbs,” she said. “That was the beginning of the end.”
The appeal to victimization, to lost status, to grievance, to fear of the Other—Burić recognized all of these traits on the American right, and describes Trump as “the same garbage as Milošević.” And yet even she has been surprised to see how rapidly America’s leaders have gone from demagoguery to language reminiscent of war crimes. Lin Wood, a lawyer in Georgia who helped litigate on behalf of Trump’s efforts at overturning the results in that state, raged against the failure of Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election results on January 6th. “Get the firing squads ready,” he wrote on Parler. “Pence goes FIRST.”
Many conservatives, of course, have dedicated their lives to helping arrest the right’s slide into an alternate reality. David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, embodied this spirit when, prior to the 2016 election, he implored Republicans to be honest about the threat in their midst. “To vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe; cutting one’s throat to lower one’s blood pressure,” he wrote. But such voices were no match for the impact of Fox News, its daily portrayal of the opposition as an existential threat that, as Trump has put it, “would turn us into Venezuela.” The effort to delegitimize the Democratic Party had long been a central goal of the right; to watch Fox News during the previous two decades was to witness a country growing more tribalized in real time, more vulnerable to an authoritarian demagogue. No matter the news on any day, that evening the pundits would assure their audience that the left was coming to get them—coming to get their guns, their values, their communities, their country. Our senses—our collective good sense—were being overwhelmed. Burić compares this onslaught of disinformation to the efforts to vilify Bosnian Muslims via a campaign of hateful propaganda in the early 1990s. She remembers hearing ultra-nationalist Serbs call into the radio, their language laced with hatred and invective about the threat that Muslims posed, about their plans to “steal” land that was rightfully that of Serbs. America was coming under a similar kind of siege, it seemed to her, where truth was under assault, ethno-nationalist hatreds were being nurtured, scientists were viewed with suspicion, and conspiracies flourished. Moderate policy ideas were being portrayed as “socialism.” Burić has waited for more Americans to stand up for the truth, for leaders to more clearly explain that the likes of Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not representing Americans who are "unheard,” but rather are attacking our Republic with a dangerous lie. They are not defending us from "socialism"—that, too, is a lie told to help delegitimize the opposition, as if slightly higher marginal tax rates and recognizing the dictates of science to mitigate environmental catastrophe or a pandemic will turn us into a Latin American hellhole.
There have been promising signs. Increasing numbers of Republicans have broken with Trump, and ten House members voted for his impeachment. (Some G.O.P. members who voted against impeachment anonymously told the press that they feared for their lives had they not done so.) Forbes magazine, displaying a moral clarity that has been rare in business media in recent years, published an editorial denouncing the January 6th insurrection as being “rooted in lies,” and warning that, if firms hire any of the “fabulists” who have defended Trump, then “Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.” Dozens of major companies have likewise announced that they will stop supporting candidates who voted to overturn the election. This insistence on truth, on higher standards of respect and accountability, will be at the heart of any serious effort to rebuild our civic life. But it will demand a clear-eyed look at the sources of disinformation—a willingness to speak bluntly about and confront, rather than condone, outlets like Fox News Channel, which, even in its twenty-fifth year of existence, is yet to be sufficiently appreciated as the anti-democratic poison that it is. And institutions such as the Wall St. Journal’s editorial page, long a bastion of respectable conservative thought, demand more rigorous questioning for their role in defending conspiratorial, anti-democratic thinking. The imperative is not to oppose conservatism but to save it.
On the evening of November 7th, when Joseph Biden was declared the winner of the U.S. Presidential election, Sarajevo projected onto its historic City Hall an image of him meeting in the 1990s with Alija Izetbegović, the late former president of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “BOSNIA REMEMBERS” appeared above the image, with the Bosnian and American flags providing the backdrop. The sight was genuinely moving, recalling a time when the U.S. was near the peak of its power, more respected in the world, however belated its leadership in helping end the Bosnian war had been. (The Republican Bob Dole, in fact, was among the U.S. leaders lobbying for an earlier and more aggressive response, as Samantha Power documents in “A Problem From Hell,” a history of genocide in the twentieth century.) Bosnia remained deeply grateful to the America it had known. The vast majority of Bosnian refugees supported Biden in his bid for the presidency, Burić told me, though she knows a few who voted for Trump. “I tried to tell them, ‘Your family was persecuted by the same type of people that Trump is. How could you come here and, after thirty years, vote for the same garbage? Just because of your checkbook?’”
While living in Prescott, she felt a shift in the culture during Barack Obama’s presidency. At the bank where she worked, she began to notice customers casually using racial slurs, which her co-workers tended to ignore or laugh off. Prescott is in a relatively conservative county, but, she said, “Republicans weren’t like that when I moved there.” In 2016, she left for California, where she now works at a different bank, and feels safer and happier. But raising two children, working a nine-to-five routine, and watching the fabric of the societies in which she has lived be ripped apart has left her longing for a quieter life. “I would love to find some little house on the prairie, near a forest away from everything,” she told me. “Hiking, going back to running, planting things in my garden, harvesting fresh produce—not worrying about big things, you know?”
Burić fears for America—the growing tribalism; the way too many have looked the other way when their party was being overtaken by authoritarian demagoguery; the refusal to respect truth, science, and the legitimacy of the political opposition. The prospect of worsening violence strikes her as likely. “The genie is out of the bottle,” she said. “It’s not easy to put it back in.” She saw, early in the Trump era, that something like the January 6th attack was likely; the enabling of lies, the condoning of the President’s appeals to ethno-nationalism, the willing and cynical participation in the disrespect for democratic norms and common decency, the pussy-grabbing—all of this had a cost that would come due. She believes that Twitter’s termination of Trump’s account was a promising step toward accountability, but that the real problem lies with cynical leaders who know better, who continue to repeat the lies, and with networks, like Fox News Channel, whose impact on our culture is only beginning to be fully appreciated. “Severe measures” will be needed to save our democracy, she said. Thinking the danger will fade with Trump out of office is naive. “Post-truth is pre-fascism,” the historian Timothy Snyder wrote following the attack on the Capitol, echoing Burić’s worries. Snyder, an expert on twentieth-century Europe, warned Americans that the coordinated effort to deny the legitimacy of the election constituted the kind of “big lie” that has wrecked the lives of millions throughout history. “The lie outlasts the liar,” he wrote, referring to America’s forty-fifth president. “The idea that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish ‘stab in the back’ was 15 years old when Hitler came to power. How will Trump’s myth of victimhood function in American life 15 years from now?”
Burić can hardly believe that almost thirty years have passed since she watched her city come under a deadly siege. For the last four years she has felt a familiar dread, the horror of watching lies overtake a vast swath of the populace—and watching too many condone or actively abet them. “From the first day that I came here, people were interviewing me about my experience, about what happened. The first thing I always told them was, ‘If it could happen to us, it could happen to anyone else,’” she said. “Thirty years later, here we are.”