Bosnian family torn apart by war

TALOVICI, Bosnia-Herzegovina — When Serbs overran this tiny farming community in March 1993, the family of Suljo Talovic temporarily split up.

Many Bosnian men joined ragtag resistance units. "These people had no food, they had no right equipment to wage war," said Adi Sokolija, a translator interviewed in Sarajevo.

"Bosnia didn't have an army before the war," explained Nedim Hasic, a journalist from Sarajevo who translated for the Deseret Morning News in Talovici and Sarajevo, "and people get organized, just like this (snapping his fingers), overnight....

"They didn't have weapons or ammunition and everything, but they thought it was better to die during the fight to try to protect their families and villages. That was better than to be killed just like that."

Suljo Talovic, the father, had to leave his family and go into the mountains with other men from Talovici.

Other villagers went to Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia. The town was designated a "safe area" where refugees would be protected by the United Nations.

Among the thousands of refugees in Srebrenica were Suljo's wife, Sabira Talovic, who was about 24 years old and pregnant; their son, Sulejman, 4 at the time; Ajka Omerovic, Suljo's sister, and her son, Safer, 9 months; and the father of Ajka and Suljo, Neho Talovic.

Two other children of Suljo and Sabira Talovic, a boy and a girl, had died earlier. One died before the war while the other's death was blamed on lack of proper medical care during wartime.

"Civilians went to Srebrenica," said Sacir Cumurovic, a cousin of Suljo Talovic, interviewed in Talovici. A Jacksonville, Fla., resident, he went back to Bosnia for the funeral of Sulejman Talovic last month.

"Army was in the forests hiding, trying to find a way out," he said. "But civilian, children and women, went into Srebrenica."

Why did people leave Talovici? "Serbs attack them and everybody go to Srebrenica and Tuzla.... His wife and his kids going to Srebrenica and Suljo going to Tuzla."

Asked why the family split up, Cumurovic replied, "Because he's (Suljo Talovic) in army." He wasn't injured in the war, he added.

Monika — a 17-year-old Bosnian refugee who lives in Amarillo, Texas, and who carried out a telephone romance with Sulejman Talovic in the weeks before he was killed in the police shoot-out at Trolley Square — said he told her his little brother and sister died because of the war.

He may not have known that actually one child's death happened before the fighting. Or he could have exaggerated while talking with Monika.

Sulejman Talovic also told Monika that his grandfather was killed in the war, but did not say how.