Podcasts about Bosniaks

This Day in Legal History: Milošević Stands TrialOn February 12, 2002, the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević began at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. It was the first time a former head of state was tried for war crimes by an international tribunal. Milošević faced 66 charges, including genocide, crimes against humanity, and violations of the laws of war, stemming from conflicts in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo during the 1990s. Prosecutors accused him of orchestrating ethnic cleansing campaigns that led to mass killings, deportations, and atrocities, particularly against Bosniaks, Croats, and Kosovar Albanians. Defiantly refusing to recognize the tribunal's legitimacy, Milošević insisted on representing himself in court. The trial, one of the most complex in modern history, lasted over four years, involving thousands of documents and hundreds of witnesses. His defense centered on denying personal responsibility, blaming NATO, and portraying himself as a protector of Serbs. However, the proceedings never reached a conclusion—Milošević died of a heart attack in his prison cell on March 11, 2006, before a verdict could be issued. His death frustrated victims who sought justice and left legal scholars debating whether the trial had succeeded in advancing international accountability. The case, despite its abrupt end, set a precedent for prosecuting heads of state for war crimes and influenced later trials, including those of Charles Taylor and Omar al-Bashir.The U.S. Justice Department under President Donald Trump has significantly reduced its anti-corruption enforcement, halting prosecutions and weakening key laws. Officials have pulled back on enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans corporate bribery abroad, arguing that American companies should not be penalized for standard international business practices. Prosecutors were also ordered to drop a criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat with ties to Trump, citing his re-election campaign and other priorities. In addition, the department has disbanded efforts to sanction Russian oligarchs and dismissed veteran prosecutors who handled cases against Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi framed these actions as an attempt to root out political bias in the justice system. Ethics officials and independent government watchdogs have been fired or reassigned, including inspectors general and whistleblower protection leaders. Critics, including legal scholars and former officials, warn that these moves align law enforcement with Trump's political agenda and weaken anti-corruption safeguards established after Watergate. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley has expressed concern and vowed to investigate, while some Democrats and former prosecutors see the changes as an effort to dismantle legal mechanisms designed to hold public officials accountable.Trump's Justice Department hits the brakes on anti-corruption enforcement | ReutersGail Slater, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Justice Department's antitrust division, is set to face tough questioning from the Senate during her confirmation hearing. As a former economic adviser to Vice President JD Vance and a veteran antitrust attorney, Slater would oversee major cases against tech giants like Google and Apple if confirmed. Senate Democrats are expected to press her on maintaining enforcement and independence, especially amid concerns that the administration is undermining the DOJ's traditional nonpartisanship. Senator Cory Booker has raised alarms about potential staffing cuts at the DOJ's antitrust division, warning they could weaken protections for consumers. Other Democrats, including Senators Peter Welch and Amy Klobuchar, plan to question Slater on her commitment to continuing efforts to lower prices in healthcare, housing, and agriculture. Meanwhile, Republican Senator Mike Lee has voiced support for Slater, expecting her to carry on Trump's push against Big Tech monopolies. Slater's background includes roles at Fox Corp, Roku, and a now-defunct tech industry lobbying group, raising further concerns about her potential ties to the companies she would regulate. Her confirmation will be a key test of the administration's approach to antitrust enforcement and corporate consolidation.Trump's DOJ antitrust nominee to be grilled on enforcement | ReutersTom Goldstein, co-founder of SCOTUSblog, has asked to be released from jail after prosecutors accused him of violating his release conditions by secretly moving millions in cryptocurrency. Goldstein was arrested after a Maryland federal court found probable cause that he had misled officials about his finances. The government claims he used undisclosed crypto wallets for large transactions while arguing in court that he needed his home's equity to fund his defense.  Goldstein's attorneys argue the government is mistaken, stating that he does not own the wallets in question. They claim text messages cited by prosecutors actually show Goldstein directing funds to a third party to settle a debt, not controlling the wallets himself. Goldstein faces charges of tax evasion, aiding false tax returns, failing to pay taxes, and lying on a loan application, with prosecutors alleging he concealed gambling income and misused his firm's funds. He has pleaded not guilty and maintains he will be exonerated at trial. His legal team, including lawyers from Munger Tolles & Olson LLP, has filed an emergency motion for his release, and he has also been permitted to represent himself in court.Tom Goldstein Seeks Release, Denies Control Over Crypto WalletsNew Jersey's proposed bill, S1756, is a smart adjustment to the state's senior property tax relief system, allowing older homeowners to downsize without losing their eligibility for tax benefits. Right now, seniors who move must restart the tax reimbursement process, which can mean higher property taxes and a financial disincentive to selling. By making these benefits portable, the bill removes an unnecessary barrier to housing mobility, freeing up larger homes for younger families without adding excessive costs to the state budget.  This approach is a model for other states struggling with housing shortages and inefficient tax incentives, but it's not perfect. The bill's $500,000 income cap is too high, providing relief to seniors who may not need it. A more reasonable threshold—like 500% of the federal poverty level—would better target those on fixed incomes. Additionally, a cap on home values would ensure benefits don't go to wealthy homeowners with expensive properties but low taxable income. A reasonable solution would be to apply tax relief only to the first 150% of a state's median home price, preventing subsidies from disproportionately benefiting the wealthy.  Ultimately, this bill corrects a major flaw in New Jersey's tax policy without overhauling the system or eliminating relief for seniors who need it. But states following this example should refine their programs to ensure they help those who truly need assistance, rather than offering broad-based entitlements that distort housing markets.NJ Senior Property Tax Relief Needs Nuance to Be Most Effective This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

After the Second World War Yugoslavia and its six republics were unified under the communist rule of Josip Broz Tito. But by the early 1990s it all came undone. More than 100,000 people were killed in the Yugoslav wars for independence, many through deliberate campaigns of ethnic cleansing. What happened? Why did Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and Croats descend into civil war? And what role exactly did UN peacekeepers have to play during an on-going war? Episode four of "Forgotten War" explores the history of the Yugoslav wars for independence along with guest Sandra Perron. She was Canada's first female infantry officer and deployed to both Bosnia and Croatia. Perron explains the difficulty of being a peacekeeper "when there is no peace to keep," the ethnic tensions that exploded throughout the region, and the personal battle she had within a military that wasn't ready to accept women in combat roles. This video was made in partnership with Canada Company. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our guest is Dr. Muhammed Al-Ahari, an American essayist, historian, teacher, and writer on the topics of American Islam, Black Nationalist groups, heterodox Islamic groups, Bosniaks, and modern occultism. He has edited over 40 publications, and is the sole author of five other publications. Our conversations centers on some of those works, his process, advice for aspiring researcher/scholars, and some of the history specific to muslims in Chicago. Host/Producer- Tariq I. El-Amin Guest- Dr. Muhammed al-Ahari Image- Tariq I. El-Amin See more of Dr. al-Ahari's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Muhammed-Abdullah-Al-Ahari/author/B09XRCCD2F?ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

Today, we're talking with veteran activist and theologian, the one and only, Lisa Sharon Harper! The conversation covers:-        Lisa's journey finding Jesus outside of Whiteness and White evangelicalism-        The centrality of advocating for political and institutional policy change to our faith in Jesus-        How respecting the image of God in all people is the starting point for following Jesus to shalom-        The unavoidable job we have to speak truth, even when it is costly-        Where Lisa finds her hope and motivation to keep going-        And after that, we reflect on the interview and then talk all things Springfield, Ohio and Haitian immigrants.Mentioned on the episode:-            Lisa's website, lisasharonharper.com/-            Lisa's Instagram and Facebook-            The Freedom Road Podcast-            Lisa's books, Fortune and The Very Good Gospel-            Make a donation to The Haitian Community Support and Help Center in Springfield, Ohio via PayPal at haitianhelpcenterspringfield@gmail.com.Credits-            Follow KTF Press on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Subscribe to get our bonus episodes and other benefits at KTFPress.com.-        Follow host Jonathan Walton on Facebook Instagram, and Threads.-        Follow host Sy Hoekstra on Mastodon.-        Our theme song is “Citizens” by Jon Guerra – listen to the whole song on Spotify.-        Our podcast art is by Robyn Burgess – follow her and see her other work on Instagram.-        Editing by Multitude Productions-        Transcripts by Joyce Ambale and Sy Hoekstra.-        Production by Sy Hoekstra and our incredible subscribersTranscript[An acoustic guitar softly plays six notes in a major scale, the first three ascending and the last three descending, with a keyboard pad playing the tonic in the background. Both fade out as Jonathan Walton says “This is a KTF Press podcast.”]Lisa Sharon Harper: I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. Massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire.[The song “Citizens” by Jon Guerra fades in. Lyrics: “I need to know there is justice/ That it will roll in abundance/ And that you're building a city/ Where we arrive as immigrants/ And you call us citizens/ And you welcome us as children home.” The song fades out.]Jonathan Walton: Welcome to Shake the Dust, seeking Jesus, confronting injustice. I'm Jonathan Walton.Sy Hoekstra: And I am Sy Hoekstra. We have a great one for you today. We are talking to veteran organizer and theologian Lisa Sharon Harper, someone who a lot of you probably know and who was pretty big in both of our individual kind of stories and development as people who care about faith and justice when we were younger people, which you will hear about as we talk to her. We are going to be talking to her about the centrality of our voting and policy choices to our witness as Christians, the importance of integrity and respecting the image of God in all people when making difficult decisions about where to spend your resources as an activist, where Lisa gets her hope and motivation and a whole lot more.And then after the interview, hear our reactions to it. And we're also going to be getting into our segment, Which Tab Is Still Open, where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our weekly newsletter that we send out to our subscribers. This week it will be all about Haitian immigrants to America in Springfield, Ohio. You will want to hear that conversation. But before we get started, Jonathan.Jonathan Walton: Please friends, remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber to support this show and get access to everything that we do. We're creating media that centers personal and informed discussions on politics, faith and culture that helps you seek Jesus and confront injustice. We are resisting the idols of the American church by centering and elevating marginalized voices and taking the entirety of Jesus' gospel more seriously than those who narrow it to sin and salvation. The two of us have a lot of experience doing this individually and in community, and we've been friends [laughs] for a good long time. So you can trust it will be honest, sincere, and have some good things to say along the way.If you become a paid subscriber, you'll get access to all of our bonus content, access to our monthly subscriber Zoom chats with me and Sy, and the ability to comment on posts and chat with us. So again, please go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber today.Sy Hoekstra: Our guest today, again, Lisa Sharon Harper, the president and founder of Freedom Road, a groundbreaking consulting group that crafts experiences to bring common understanding and common commitments that lead to common action toward a more just world. Lisa is a public theologian whose writing, speaking, activism and training has sparked and fed the fires of reformation in the church from Ferguson and Charlottesville to South Africa, Brazil, Australia and Ireland. Lisa's book, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World, and How to Repair It All was named one of the best books of 2022 and the book before that, The Very Good Gospel, was named 2016 Book of the Year by The Englewood Review of Books. Lisa is the host of the Freedom Road Podcast, and she also writes for her Substack, The Truth Is…Jonathan Walton: Alright, let's jump into the interview.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us on Shake the Dust.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yay, I'm so excited to be here, and I'm here with a little bit of a Demi Moore rasp to my voice. So I'm hoping it'll be pleasant to the ears for folks who are coming, because I got a little sick, but I'm not like really sick, because I'm on my way, I'm on the rebound.Sy Hoekstra: So you told us you got this at the DNC, is that right?Lisa Sharon Harper: Yes, I literally, literally, that's like what, almost three weeks ago now?Sy Hoekstra: Oh my gosh.Jonathan Walton: You've got a DNC infection. That's what that is.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Lisa Sharon Harper: I have a DNC cough. I have a DNC cough, that's funny.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So before we jump into our questions, I wanted to take a momentary trip down memory lane, because I have no idea if you remember this or not.Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.Sy Hoekstra: But in January of 2008, you led a weekend retreat for a college Christian fellowship that Jonathan and I were both in.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, I do remember.Sy Hoekstra: You do remember this? Okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Lisa Sharon Harper: I remember almost every time I've ever spoken anywhere.Sy Hoekstra: Wow, okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: I really do. And I remember that one, and I do remember you guys being there. Oh my gosh, that's so cool.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Okay.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: You remember that. That's amazing.Sy Hoekstra: No, no, no.Jonathan Walton: Oh yeah.Sy Hoekstra: Hang on. Wait a minute [laughter]. We don't just remember it. Because, so you gave this series of talks that ended up being a big part of your book, The Very Good Gospel.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: And you talked specifically about the difference between genuine and pseudo-community and the need to really address each other's problems that we face, bear each other's burdens, that sort of thing. And you did a session, which I'm sure you've done with other groups, where you split us up into racial groups. So we sat there with White, Black, and Latine, and Asian, and biracial groups, and we had a real discussion about race in a way that the community had absolutely never had before [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: And it actually, it is the opening scene of Jonathan's book. I don't know if you knew that.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God, I didn't know that.Jonathan Walton: It is.Lisa Sharon Harper: Which one?Jonathan Walton: Twelve Lies.Lisa Sharon Harper: Wow, I didn't know that. Oh my gosh, I missed that. Okay.Sy Hoekstra: So it was a… Jonathan put it before, it was a formative moment for everybody and a transformative moment for some of us [laughter] …Lisa Sharon Harper: Oooooo, Oh my goodness.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: …in that we learned a lot about ourselves and what we thought about race, what other people thought about race. I will tell you that in the five minutes after the session broke up, like ended, it was the first time that my now wife ever said to me, “Hey, you said something racist to me that I didn't like.” [laughs] And then, because of all the conversation we just had, I responded miraculously with the words, “I'm sorry.” [laughter].Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my God!Sy Hoekstra: And then we went from there.Lisa Sharon Harper: Miraculously [laughs]. That's funny.Sy Hoekstra: So I have lots of friends that we can talk about this session with to this day, and they still remember it as transformative.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh my Gosh. Wow.Sy Hoekstra: All of that, just to lead into my first question which is this, a lot of people in 2016 started seeing kind of the things about White evangelicalism that indicated to them that they needed to get out. They needed to escape in some way, because of the bad fruit, the bad political fruit that was manifesting. You saw that bad fruit a long time ago.Lisa Sharon Harper: A whole long time ago.Sy Hoekstra: You were deep in the Republican, pro-life political movement for a little bit, for like, a minute as a young woman.Lisa Sharon Harper: I wouldn't… here's the thing. I wouldn't say I was deep in. What I would say is I was in.Sy Hoekstra: Okay.Lisa Sharon Harper: As in I was in because I was Evangelical, and I identified with itbecause I was Evangelical and because my friends identified with it. So I kind of went along, but I always had this sense I was like standing on the margins looking at it going, “I don't know.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: You know what I mean? But I would say literally for like a minute, I was a believer. Maybe for like, a year.Sy Hoekstra: But my question then is, what were the warning signs? And then, separately from what were the warning signs that you needed to get out, who or what were the guiding lights that showed you a better way?Lisa Sharon Harper: My goodness. Wow. Well, I mean, I would say that honestly… Okay, so I had a couple of conversations, and we're talking about 2004 now. So 2004 also, this is right after 2000 where we had the hanging chads in Florida.Sy Hoekstra: Yep.Jonathan Walton: Yep.Lisa Sharon Harper: And we know how important voting is, because literally, I mean, I actually believe to this day that Gore actually won. And it's not just a belief, they actually counted after the fact, and found that he had won hundreds more ballots that were not counted in the actual election, in Florida. And so every single vote counts. Every single vote counts. So then in 2004 and by 2004, I'm the Director of Racial Reconciliation for greater LA in InterVarsity, I had done a summer mission project that wasn't really mission. It was actually more of a, it was a pilgrimage, actually. It was called the pilgrimage for reconciliation. The summer before, I had done the stateside pilgrimage. And then that summer, I led students on a pilgrimage through Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia asking the question, “How is shalom broken? And how is shalom built? How is it made?”And through both of those successive summer experiences, it became so clear to me, policy matters, and it matters with regard to Christian ethics. We can't say we are Christian and be, in other words, Christ-like if we are not concerned with how our neighbor is faring under the policies coming down from our government. We just can't. And as Christians in a democracy, specifically in America, in the US where we have a democracy, we actually have the expectation that as citizens, we will help shape the way that we live together. And our vote is what does that our vote when we vote for particular people, we're not just voting for who we like. We're voting for the policies they will pass or block. We're voting for the way we want to live together in the world.So in 2004 when I come back from Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, I'm talking with some of my fellow staff workers, and I'm saying to them, “We have to have a conversation with our folks about voting. I mean, this election really matters. It's important. ”Because we had just come through the first few years of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Like Iraq had just erupted a couple years before that, Afghanistan the year before that. And we were seeing young men coming back in body bags and this war, which had no plan to end, was sending especially young Black men to die because they were the ones…and I know, because I was in those schools when I was younger, and I alsohad been reading up on this.They're the ones who are recruited by the Marines and the Army and the Navy and the Air Force, especially the army, which is the cannon fodder. They're the ones who are on the front lines. They are recruited by them more than anybody else, at a higher degree than anybody else, a higher percentage ratio. So I was saying we have to have a conversation. And their response to me in 2004 was, “Oh, well, we can't do that, because we can't be political.” I said, “Well, wait, we are political beings. We live in a democracy.” To be a citizen is to help shape the way we live together in the world, and that's all politics is. It's the conversations we have and the decisions that we make about how we are going to live together.And so if we as Christians who have an ethic passed down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, and we have the 10 Commandments, which is like the grand ethic of humanity, at least of the Abrahamic tradition. Then, if we don't have something to say about how we should be living together and the decisions we make about that every four years, every two years, even in off year elections, then what are we doing here?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: Who are we? Like, what is this faith? What is this Christian faith? So that was my first real rub, because I had experienced the pilgrimage to reconciliation. I had seen, I had rolled through. I had walked on the land where the decisions that the polis, the people had made, had killed people. It had led to the death of millions of people. Thousands of people in some case. Hundreds of people in other cases. But when coming back from Bosnia, it was millions. And so I was just very much aware of the reality that for Christians, politics matters because politics is simply the public exercise of our ethics, of our Christian ethic. And if we don't have one, then we're… honest, I just, I think that we are actually turning our backs on Jesus who spent his life telling us how to live.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And so that was, for me, literally that conversation with that staff worker was kind of my first, “Aha! I'm in the wrong place.” I needed to learn more about how this public work works. How do systems and structures and policies and laws work? So that's what actually brought me, ended up bringing me a year later, to Columbia University and getting my master's in human rights. And I knew, having had the background in the two pilgrimages and the work that we did on the biblical concept of shalom at the time, which was nascent. I mean, it was for me, it was, I barely, really barely, understood it. I just knew it wasn't what I had been taught. So I started digging into shalom at that time, and then learning about international law and human rights and how that works within the international systems.I came out of that with a much clearer view, and then continued to work for the next 13 years to really get at how our Christian ethics intersect with and can help, and have helped shape public policy. And that has led me to understand very clearly that we are complicit in the evil, and we also, as Christians, other streams of our faith are responsible for the redemption, particularly in America and South Africa and other places in the world.Jonathan Walton: Yeah. So I think I'm placing myself in your story. So I think we intersected in that 2005, 2008 moment. So I've traveled with you.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, we had a good time. It was so much fun.Jonathan Walton: We did. It was very good. So getting to follow, watch, learn, just for me, has been a huge blessing. First with the book, with New York Faith and Justice, reading stuff with Sojourners, grabbing your books, gleaning different wisdom things for… it's something that I've wondered as I'm a little bit younger in the journey, like as you've operated in this world, in the White Evangelical world, and then still White Evangelical adjacent, operating in these faith spaces. And now with the platform that you have, you've had to exercise a lot of wisdom, a lot of patience and deciding to manage where you show up and when, how you use your time, how you manage these relationships and keep relationships along the way. Because you didn't drop people.Lisa Sharon Harper: I have. I have dropped a few [laughter]. I want to make that really clear, there is an appropriate space to literally shake the dust.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: I think what I have not seen you do is dehumanize the people in the places that you left.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, thank you. Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And that's hard to do, because most people, particularly my generation, we see the bridge we just walked across, and we throw Molotov cocktails at that thing [laughter].Lisa Sharon Harper: Y'all do. Your generation is like, “I'm out! And you're never gonna breathe again!” Like, “You're going down!” I'm like, “Oh my God…” [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It's quite strong with us [laughs]. And so could you give any pieces of wisdom or things you've learned from God about navigating in that way. Things that we can and folks that are listening can hold on to as things shift, because they will shift and are shifting.Lisa Sharon Harper: They always shift, yeah, because we are not living on a book page. We're living in a world that moves and is fluid, and people change, and all the things. So I think that the best advice that I got, I actually got from Miroslav Volf. Dr. Miroslav Volf, who is a professor at Yale University, and he wrote the book that really kind of got me into, it was my first book that I ever read that was a book of theology, Exclusion&Embrace. And when we went to Croatia, we met with him. We met with him in the city of Zadar on the beach [laughs], literally over lunch. It was just an incredible privilege to sit down with him. And I've had many opportunities to connect with him since, which has been a privilege again, and just a joy.But he said to our group, our little InterVarsity group. And that's not at all to minimize InterVarsity, but we had a real inflated sense of who we were in the world. We thought we were everything, and we thought we were right about everything. And so here we are going through Croatia, which had just experienced a decade and a little bit before, this civil war. And it wasn't really a civil war, it was actually a war of aggression from Serbia into Croatia, and it was horrible. And it turned neighbor against neighbor in the same way that our civil war turned neighbor against neighbor. So literally, these towns, you literally had neighbors killing each other, you just were not safe.So basically, think Rwanda. The same thing that happened in Rwanda, around the same time had happened in Croatia. And so Miroslav is Croatian, and the lines by which things were drawn in Croatia was not race, because everybody was White. So the lines that they drew their hierarchy on was along the lines of religion. It was the Croats, which were mostly Catholic, mostly Christian. Some not Catholic, they might have been Evangelical, but they were Christian. And then you had the Bosniaks, which were Muslim, and the Serbs, which were Orthodox. So that was the hierarchy. And when you had Milošević, who was the president of Yugoslavia, who was trying to keep that Federation together, Yugoslavia was like an amalgamation of what we now understand to be Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.So he was trying to keep all of that together, and when he then crossed the lines, the boundary between Serbia and Croatia and invaded and just began to kill everybody, and the Serbs then went to his side, and the Croats went over here, and the Bosniaks were caught in the middle, and people just died. And they chose sides and they killed each other. And so we sat down to do lunch with Miroslav Volf, and in that context, interfaith conversation was critical. It was and is, it continues to be. One of the main markers of where you find healing, it's where you find interfaith conversation in Croatia and also Bosnia and Serbia. And so we, in our little Evangelical selves, we're not used to this interfaith thing.We think of that as compromising. We think of that as, “How can you talk to people and gain relationship with and actually sit down and…?” And he was challenging us to study this scripture with other people of other faiths, and study their scriptures. He was like, “Do that.” And so our people were like, “How can you do that and not compromise your faith?” And here's what he said. He said, “It's easy. Respect. It's respect, respecting the image of God in the other, the one who is not like me. That I, when I sit down and I read their scriptures with them, allowing them to tell me what their scriptures mean.” Not sitting in a classroom in my Evangelical church to learn what the Muslim scriptures say, but sitting down with Imams to understand what the Muslim scriptures say and how it's understood within the context of that culture.That's called respect for the image of God. And there's no way, no way for us to knit ourselves together in a society, to live together in the world without respect. That's baseline. That's baseline.Jonathan Walton: As I'm listening, I'm thinking, “Okay, Lisa made choices.” She was like, “We are gonna not just do a trip. We're gonna do a trip in Croatia.” And so as you're going on these trips, as you were having these conversations, you're making choices. There's decisions being made around you, and then you get to the decision making seat. And how that discernment around where to place your energy happens. So something that's at the top of mind for me and many people listening is Palestine.Lisa Sharon Harper: Oh, yeah.Jonathan Walton: So how did you decide at this moment that, “Hey,this is where my energy and time is coming. I'm going to Christ at the Checkpoint. I'm going to talk with Munther. I'm going to be there.”How did that rise to the surface for you?Lisa Sharon Harper: It's funny, because I have, really have been advised, and in the very first days of the conflict, I was advised by some African American leaders, “Don't touch this. Don't do it. You're going to be blacklisted.”Jonathan Walton: I heard the same thing, yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: “Don't do it. You're gonna find you're not invited to speak anywhere.” Da da da da. Sometimes these decisions are just made to say, “I am going to act in the world as if I don't know what the repercussions are, and I'm just going to do the thing, because my focus is not focused on the repercussions.” I mean, in some ways, in that way, I do think that my constitution is the constitution of a warrior. Warriors go to battle knowing that bullets are flying all around them, and they just choose to go forward anyway. Somebody who cared, and not just cared, but I think there's a moment where you begin to understand it's that moment of no turning back. It's the moment when you stand at the freshly buried graves of 5000 Muslim boys and men who were killed all in one day by bullet fire in Srebrenica.It's the moment that you drive through Bosnia and you see all of the graves everywhere. Everywhere, especially in Sarajevo, which experienced a siege, a multiyear siege by Serbia. And they turned the soccer field, which at one point was the focal point of the Sarajevo Olympic Games, they turned that into a graveyard because they ran out of space for the graves. When you roll through Georgia, and you go to Dahlonega, Georgia, and you go to the Mining Museum, which marks the very first gold rush in America, which was not in California, but was in Dahlonega, Georgia, on Cherokee land, and you hear the repercussions of people's silence and also complicity.When they came and they settled, they made a decision about how we should live together, and it did not include, it included the erasure of Cherokee people and Choctaw people and Chickasaw people, Seminole people, Creek people. And you walk that land, and the land tells you. It's so traumatic that the land still tells the story. The land itself tells the story. The land bears witness. When you stand on that land and the land tells you the story, there's a moment that just happens where there's no turning back and you have to bear witness to the truth, even with bullets flying around you. So with regard to Palestine, having done what now goodness, 20 years of research on this biblical concept called shalom, and written the book, The Very Good Gospel, which really lays it out in a systematic way.I would lose my integrity if I was silent in the face of the breaking of shalom, which I learned in Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia, is built on earth through structures. It doesn't just come because people know Jesus. Two thirds of the people in the Bosnian war knew Jesus. Two thirds. The Croats were Christian and the Serbs were Orthodox Christian, and yet they killed each other. I mean, massacred each other. Unfortunately, knowing Jesus is not enough if you have shaped your understanding of Jesus according to the rules and norms of empire. So we actually need international law. We need the instruments of international law. That's what stopped the war there. And they failed there too, but they also have been an intrinsic part of keeping the peace and also prosecuting Milošević. Solike making sure that some measure of justice on this earth happens, some shadow of it.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And what are we told in scripture in Micah 6:8, walk humbly with God. Do justice. Embrace the truth. So I think that when I saw on October 7, the breach of the wall, the breach of the gate and then the massacre at the festival, I grieved. I really grieved. And I was scared, really scared for the nation of Israel, for the people who were there. And I began to ask questions, because I've learned the discipline of not dehumanizing. Because to dehumanize is to break shalom. It's one of the first things that happens in the breaking of shalom and the eradication of it. And so part of what I had to do if I was going to consider Palestinian people human was to ask what has happened to them that would cause them to take such violent and radical action. How did we get here? Is the question.And the narrative that I heard from Israel, from the state of Israel, from the leaders of the state of Israel, which had been marched against by their own people just the week before that, and weeks for like a month or two before that, they were trying to depose the leadership of Israel because they were trying to turn their state into a fascist state. I was watching that as well. Trying to take the power of the judiciary away so that they could increase the power of the Prime Minister. So what does it mean then? What does it mean that this happened? And I was listening to the way that the narrative that Netanyahu was giving and his generals and the narrative they were giving is, “These are monsters. They are terrorists. They are evil. They are intrinsically, they are not human.”And I knew when I saw that, when I heard that, I thought Bosnia. I thought Rwanda, where they called the other cockroaches. I thought South Africa, where they called Black people not human, monsters, who need to be controlled. I thought Native Americans, who were called savages in order to be controlled, in order to have the justification of genocide. I thought of people of African descent who were brought in death ships across the Atlantic to South America and Central America and Mexico and North America in order to be used to build European wealth and they were called non-human. And even according to our own laws, our constitution declared three fifths of a human being.So when I heard Netanyahu and his generals dehumanizing the Palestinians, I knew, that for me was like the first signal, and it happened on the first day. It was the first signal that we are about to witness a genocide. They are preparing us. They are grooming us to participate in genocide. And I, as a theologian, as an ethicist, as a Christian, would lose my credibility if I remained silent and became complicit in that genocide through my silence. Because having studied the genocides that I mentioned earlier and the oppressions that I mentioned earlier, I know that most of those spaces were Christian spaces.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And they happened, those genocides and those oppressions were able to happen because Christians were silent.Jonathan Walton: Gathering all that up, I think… I mean, we've had Munther on this podcast, we've talked with him throughout the years. When he said, “The role of Christians is to be prophetic, to speak prophetic truth to power,” something clicked for me in that as you're talking about our witness being compromised, as you are saying, “Hey, let's ask this question, who does this benefit? What is happening?”Lisa Sharon Harper: That's right.Jonathan Walton: The reality that he said, “All of us are Nathan when it comes to empire. We are supposed to be the ones who say this is wrong.” And that resonates with what you said, like how can I have integrity and be silent? Genocide necessitates silence and complicity in that way from people.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah. And here's the thing. How are you gonna go to church and sing worship songs to Jesus on Sunday and be silent Monday through Saturday witnessing the slaying of the image of God on earth. You hear what I'm saying?Sy Hoekstra: Yes.Lisa Sharon Harper: Like my understanding of shalom now is not just we do these things in order to be nice and so we live together. It is that shalom is intricately connected with the flourishing of the kingdom of God.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Lisa Sharon Harper: It is the flourishing of the kingdom of God.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Lisa Sharon Harper: And the kingdom of God flourishes wherever the image of God flourishes. And the image of God is born by every single human being. And part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that humans who are made in the image of God exercise agency, stewardship of the world. And the most drastic example or practice of warfare against the image of God is war.Jonathan Walton: Yes [laughs]. Absolutely.Lisa Sharon Harper: War annihilates the image of God on earth. It is a declaration of war, not only on Palestinians or Gazans or even Israel or the empire anywhere. It is a declaration of war against God. It is a declaration of war against God.Sy Hoekstra: A phrase that has stuck in my head about you was from one of the endorsements to your last book Fortune. Jemar Tisby described you as a long-distance runner for justice.Jonathan Walton: [laughs] That's awesome.Sy Hoekstra: That always struck me as accurate.Jonathan Walton: That is great.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs] Not a sprinter.Jonathan Walton: No.Sy Hoekstra: Not a sprinter.Lisa Sharon Harper: That was really pretty cool. I was like, “Oh Jemar, thank you.” [laughter]Jonathan Walton: I need that. We just in here. That's great [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: So here's the question then, where does your hope and sustenance, how do you get that? Where does it come from?Lisa Sharon Harper: Honestly, it comes from focusing on the kingdom. Focusing on Jesus. Focusing on doing the kingdom of God. And when you do it you witness it. And when you witness it, you get hope. I mean, I've learned, even in the last year, an actual life lesson for me was hope comes in the doing. Hope comes in the doing. So as we do the kingdom, we gain hope. As we show up for the protests so that we confront the powers that are slaying the image of God on earth, we gain hope. As we speak out against it and form our words in ways that do battle with the thinking that lays the groundwork for ethics of erasure, we gain hope because we're doing it. We see the power.The kingdom of God exists wherever there are people who actually bow to the ethic of God. Who do it. Who do the ethic of God. You can't say you believe in Jesus and not actually do his ethic. You don't believe in him. What do you believe? He never said, “Believe stuff about me.” He said, “Follow me.” He literally never said, “Believe stuff about me.”Sy Hoekstra: Yeah [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Lisa Sharon Harper: He said, “Follow me. Do what I do. ”And that's ethics. That's the question of, how do we live together in the world?? So we do and we gain hope.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: I like that. That reminds me of Romans 5: There'll be glory in our suffering. Suffering produces perseverance, character, and character hope. It's like, it's not an intuitive thing necessarily, if you haven't done it before. But that's great, and that's a really, I like that a lot as a place for us to end [laughs]. To get out there and do it, and you will find the hope as you go.Jonathan Walton: Amen.Sy Hoekstra: Can you tell us where people can find you or work that you would want people to see of yours?Lisa Sharon Harper: Absolutely. Well, hey, first of all, thank you guys so much for having me on, and it's been really a joy to start my day in conversation with you. Y'all can follow what I'm up to at Lisasharonharper.com. I live on Instagram, and so you can [laughter], you can definitely follow on Instagram and Facebook. And Freedom Road Podcast is a place where a lot of people have found the conversation and are tracking with it. And I'm always trying to have guests on that are pushing me and causing me to ask deeper questions. And so I really, I welcome you to join us on Freedom Road.Sy Hoekstra: Yes. I wholeheartedly second that.Lisa Sharon Harper: And of course, the books [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And of course, the books.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Fortune, Very Good Gospel, all the rest.Lisa Sharon Harper: Yeah, exactly.Sy Hoekstra: Lisa Sharon Harper, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a delight.Jonathan Walton: Thank you so much.Lisa Sharon Harper: Thank you Sy. Thank you, Jonathan.[The intro piano music from “Citizens” by Jon Guerra plays briefly and then fades out.]Sy Hoekstra: Jonathan, that was a fantastic discussion. Tell me what you are thinking about coming out of it?Jonathan Walton: Yeah, I think one, is just it's just really helpful to talk with someone who's been around for a while. I think most of us… I'm 38 years old, but let's just say millennials and younger, we don't consume or receive a lot of long form content.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: And we don't also engage with people who are willing and able to mentor us through difficult situations. We're getting sound bites from TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, and we don't get the whole of knowledge or experiences. So listening to Lisa talk about, “I grabbed this bit from L.A., I grabbed this bit from Palestine, I grabbed this bit from Croatia, I grabbed this bit.” We cannot microwave transformation. We cannot have instant growth. There is no, let me go through the side door of growing to maturity in my faithfulness and walk with Jesus.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: There is just doing it. And so when she said, “I find the hope in the doing,” you don't learn that unless you have done stuff. That's a big takeaway. I also appreciated just her take on the genocide in Palestine. And because she was mentored and has talked with Miroslav Volf, she knows what it smells like, because she's done the work in her own history of her own background. If you have not read Fortune, go read the book. The reason Black folks cannot find who we [laughs] come from is because they were enslaved and killed. The reason we cannot find the indigenous and native folks we were related to is because there was genocide. So there's these things.And she goes through that in her book, and to talk about how to wield our stories when we don't have one, or how to wield a story of tragedy to turn it into something transformative, is something I admire, appreciate and hope that I can embody if and when the time comes for myself, when I have collected and grown and have asked similar questions. I'm appreciative of what she had to say. And you know, I know I asked her the question about not burning things down, and so I appreciated that [laughs] answer as well. Like, there's just a lot of wisdom, and I hope that folks listening were able to glean as well.Sy Hoekstra: I totally agree with all that. I think all that was very powerful. And there isn't it… kind of reminds me of when her book we've mentioned a few times, The Very Good Gospel, came out. It came out in 2016, but like I said, when we were talking to her, the stuff that was in that book she had been thinking about for more than a decade at that point. And it was very clear. When I was reading it, I was like, “Oh, this is Lisa's bag—this is what she was talking to us about when we were in college in 2008.”Jonathan Walton: Yeah.Sy Hoekstra: At that camp, but she'd been thinking about it for even longer than that. It was just like, you can tell when something isn't like, “Oh, I had to research this because I was gonna write a book about it, so I had to learn about it.” You know what I mean? You can tell when someone does that versus when someone's been soaking in a subject. It's like marinating in it for 12, 15, years, or whatever it was. She just has a lot of that stuff [laughs]. You know what? I just used the image of marinating and marinating and microwaving are very different things [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Yes, that is true.Sy Hoekstra: One takes a lot longer.Jonathan Walton: Put a steak in a microwave, see if you enjoy it [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, so I totally agree with all that. I came out of it thinking a lot about how the things that she said thematically kind of connected to some thoughts that I've had, but also just in terms of historical events. Because I told her this after the interview, when I moved to Switzerland in 2001 I was 13, my family moved over there. It was just at the end of the Yugoslavian Civil War, which was what she was talking about Bosnia and Croatia and Serbia. And Switzerland took in a ton of refugees from that war.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So my neighborhood, there was a big apartment complex. I mean, big for Swiss standards, kind of small honestly for American standards. But there's an apartment complex around the corner from my house that they had put a bunch of Bosnian refugees in. And their school was right down the road, the public school. And so my neighborhood in high school was like the kids playing around in the streets and in the playground or whatever were Bosnian refugees. And the combination of the three countries, Serbian, Croatia and Bosnia, used to be one big thing called Yugoslavia, right.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And the first two syllables of the word Yugoslavia were in Switzerland, a slur for anyone who was from that country. And there was just a ton of bigotry toward them, basically because they displayed poverty [laughter]. Like they were one of the most visible groups of poor people in Zurich. And again, like Lisa said, this wasn't about racism. Everybody's White. But you're talking about like there were ethnic differences and there was class differences. And people dismissed them for their criminality, or for how the young men would get in fights in bars and on the streets or whatever, and all that kind of stuff. And then, you know how a lot of refugees from the Somalian war ended up in Minneapolis and St Paul, just like where a lot of them were placed in the US, and then a lot of them moved into North Dakota.It's like, a lot of… which is where my family's from. I've been there a lot. I hear a lot of people talking about the politics in that region. And you would hear similar stuff about them, except that it was about race. That it was, “Oh, we have crime now because we have Black people and we haven't before.” I mean, obviously Minneapolis, they did, but not really in the parts of North Dakota that my family's from. And so it was this lesson for me about the thing that Lisa was talking about, respect for the image of God in all people and how when you bring people who are somehow differentiable [laughter] from you, somebody who's from another grid, you can call them a different class, a different race, whatever, we will find any excuse to just say, “Oh, these are just bad people,” instead of taking responsibility for them, loving our neighbor, doing any of the stuff that we were commanded to do by Jesus, to the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant in our midst.We will find whatever dividing lines we can to write people off. It can be race, it can be poverty, it can be, it doesn't matter. It's not what we should actually be saying about poverty or violence, or the fact that people are getting mugged or whatever. What we should be saying is we have a bunch of people who just got here from a war torn society. They were cut off from education and job skills and opportunities and all kinds of other things. And this is, when you just stick them in a society that treats them like garbage, this is what happens every single time, without fail. And so what we need to do is [laughter] be good neighbors.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Treat people well and forgive when people wrong us and that sort of thing. And we just will find any excuse in the world not to do that. And it's because we are not starting from that place that Miroslav Volf, who I love by the way, said to Lisa, is the place where you have to start everything when it comes to these kinds of conflicts, which is respect for the image of God in other people. The fact that they didn't do that in Yugoslavia led to slaughter en masse, but it still happens when you leave and you put yourself in a different context. There's still that lack of respect, and it's still harming people, even when there's quote- unquote, peace.Jonathan Walton: This opens up another can of worms. But I thought to myself…Sy Hoekstra: Go for it.Jonathan Walton: …it's much easier to say, “I just don't want to help,” than it is to say, “This person's evil,” or, “These people are bad.” Because I think at the core of it, someone says, “Is this your neighbor?” Jesus says, “Is this your neighbor?” And the Jewish leader of the day does not want to help the Samaritan, whatever the reasoning is. Right?Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: We're trying to justify our innate desire to not help our neighbor. As opposed to just dealing with the reality that many of us, when we see people who are broken and messed up, quote- unquote broken, quote- unquote messed up, quote- unquote on the opposite side of whatever power dynamic or oppressive structure that is set up or has just made, quote- unquote poor choices, some of us, our gut reaction is, I don't want to help them. And if we would just, I think just stop there, be like, “My first inclination is, I'm not interested in helping them.” And paused it there and reflected on why we don't want to do that internally, as opposed to turning towards them and making them the reason. Because they were just sitting there.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: The person on the street who's experiencing homelessness was just sitting there. The one in 10 students in New York City that is homeless is just sitting there. They're just there. And so if we were able to slow down for a second and say, “Why don't I want this person to live in my neighborhood, in my own stuff? Well, I don't like change. I'm afraid of this being different. I'm uncomfortable with different foods. I'm afraid of my favorite coffee shop or restaurant being taken away. I'm uncomfortable around people of different faiths. I feel weird when I don't hear my language being spoken.” If we were able to turn those reflections inward before we had uncomfortable feelings, turned them into actions, and then justified those actions with theology that has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus, then I wonder what would be different. But that that slowing down is really hard, because it's easier to feel the feeling, react, and then justify my reaction with a divine mandate.Sy Hoekstra: Or just plug those feelings into stereotypes and all of the existing ways of thinking about people that we provide for each other so that we can avoid doing that very reflection.Jonathan Walton: That's all that I thought about there [laughs]. I'm going to be thinking about that for a while actually. So Sy, which tab is still open for you? We're going to talk about a segment where we dive a little bit deeper into one of the recommendations from our newsletter. And remember, you can get this newsletter for free just by signing up for our mailing list at KTFPress.com. You'll get recommendations on articles, podcasts and other media that both of us have found that will help you in your political education and discipleship. Plus you'll get reflections to keep us grounded, from me and Sy that help keep us grounded every week as we engage in just this challenging work and together in the news about what's happening and all that.You can get everything I'm just talking about at KTFPress.com and more. So go get that free subscription at KTFPress.com. So Sy, want to summarize that main story point for us?Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. I mean, this is interesting, because when I wrote about this, which is the story about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, it was two days after the debate, and the story has only exploded since then, and I think a lot of people kind of probably have the gist of it already. But some completely unfounded rumors based on fourth hand nonsense and some blurry pictures of people that have nothing whatsoever to do with Haitian immigrants started spreading online among right wing conspiracy theorists saying, for some reason, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating pets.Jonathan Walton: [laughs].Sy Hoekstra: Stealing, kidnapping and eating the resident's pets.Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: And the absurdity of this story was immediately apparent to me being someone who married into a Haitian immigrant family, Haitians do not eat cats and dogs [laughs]. It's a ridiculous thing to have to say, but I say it because I understand, maybe you have no, maybe you know nothing whatsoever about Haiti and you think, “Well, I don't know. There are some cultures around the world where they eat animals that we think of as pets or that we don't think of as food or whatever.” And like, okay, fine, that's true. It's not Haiti, though.Jonathan Walton: Right [laughter].Sy Hoekstra: The idea of eating a cat or a dog to a Haitian is as weird to them as it is to us. I promise you, I've had so much Haitian food [laughter]. So basically this rumor spread, Donald Trump mentions that the debates and now there are Proud Boys in Springfield, Ohio, marching around with cat posters and memes. There are people calling in bomb threats to schools and to government buildings, to all other institutions in Springfield. The Haitian population is very afraid of Donald Trump. At this point, we're recording this on Friday, September 20, he has said that he will travel to Springfield, and basically everyone there has said, “Please do not do that. You're only going to stoke more problems.”And every last piece of evidence that has been offered as evidence, which was always pretty weak in the first place, has been debunked at this point. There was one, the Vance campaign just recent, the past couple days, gave a police report to the Washington Post and said, “See, we found it. Here's a woman who actually filed a police report that says that my Haitian neighbors took my cat and ate my cat.” And the Washington Post did what, for some reason Republicans never expect journalists to do, and actually did their job and called up the woman who said, “Oh, yeah, I filed that report, and then I found my cat in my basement, and they were fine.” [laughs]Jonathan Walton: Yes. In her house.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. And so I don't know, there have been a couple of blips like that where somebody is like, “See, I found evidence,” and then someone was immediately like, “That's not actually evidence.” There have been rumors of other rallies or whatever. It's basically just becoming a focal point and a meme for all of Trump and his supporters, immigration resentment.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: There was a story today about people in Alabama being concerned about, some small town in Alabama being concerned about becoming the next Springfield because they had 60 Haitian immigrants in their town of 12,000 people [laughs]. I don't know. It's all just bizarre. The main actual point though, around the actual immigration policy stuff, Gabrielle and a few other people, my wife's name is Gabrielle, and a few other Haitians that I've seen comment on this, keep bringing up the Toni Morrison quote about how racism is a distraction from actual issues.Jonathan Walton: That is literally what I was gonna read.Sy Hoekstra: There you go. Okay [laughs]. So the actual issue here is that there's this community of about 60,000 people in Ohio that has had an influx of about 15,000 Haitian immigrants, and so it's a lot of strain on the schools and housing and stuff like that, which those are real questions. But also, the Haitian immigrants are there because the local economy revitalization efforts led to a bunch of manufacturers coming into Springfield and having more jobs than laborers, and explicitly saying, “We need you to bring in more laborers.” And so they were Haitian immigrants who are legally in the country [laughs], who have social security numbers and temporary protected status at the very least if not green cards or whatever, have been filling these jobs, and not remotely even a majority of these jobs.They're just filling in the extra 10, 15 percent or whatever the workforce that these manufacturers thought they needed. And the story has become, “Haitians are taking our jobs,” which is absolute nonsense.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: So those are the main points of the story. Sorry, I talked a while. I have a lot of feelings about this one [laughs].Jonathan Walton: No, I mean…Sy Hoekstra: But Jonathan, what are your thoughts?Jonathan Walton: For a good reason. Let me just say this quote by Toni Morrison, “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, and you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” So along with that Toni Morrison quote, I want to put that side by side with this quote from Robert Jones Jr.'s National Book of the Year, The Prophets.“To survive this place, you had to want to die. That was the way of the world as remade by the Toubab.” Toubab is a Western and Central African word for colonizer, European. “They push people into the mud and then call them filthy. They forbade people from accessing knowledge of the world, and then called them simple. They worked people until their empty hands were twisted and bleeding and can do no more, than they called them lazy. They forced people to eat innards from troughs, and then called them uncivilized. They kidnapped babies and shattered families and then called them incapable of love. They raped and lynched and cut up people into parts and called the pieces savages. They stepped on people's throats with all of their might and asked why the people couldn't breathe.”“And then when people made an attempt to break the foot or cut it off one they screamed, “Chaos,” and claimed that mass murder was the only way to restore order. They praised every daisy and then called every blackberry a stain. They bled the color from God's face, gave it a dangle between its legs, and called it holy. Then when they were done breaking things, they pointed to the sky and called the color of the universe itself a sin, [black]. And then the whole world believed them, even some of Samuel's [or Black] people. Especially some of Samuel's people. This was untoward and made it hard to open your heart to feel a sense of loyalty that wasn't a strategy. It was easier to just seal yourself up and rock yourself to sleep.”That to me, like those two quotes together. So the Son of Baldwin, Robert Jones Jr, great follow on Substack and that quote from Toni Morrison, an iconic Black female writer, wrote Beloved, The Bluest Eye, those two things together, like what racism does to a person. The giving up, the I just, “What can I do?” and the distraction for the people who do have effort, are just two roads that I wish we just didn't have to go down. But most people will spend our energy either resigned because we've spent too much or pushing against the lie as the powers that be continue to carry out genocide, continue to extract limestone from Haiti, continues to extract resources from Haiti, continue to destroy African economies through extraction in the Congo and Benin and all the places.And so my prayer and longing is that the resilience of the Haitian people and the legacy of Toussaint and all of that would be present in the people that are there and the diaspora. And I believe that is true. And I pray for safety for all of the people that still have to live in this, what is fastly becoming a sundown town.Sy Hoekstra: Right.Jonathan Walton: It's a very real thing. And I talked to someone else. Oh, actually [laughs], it was a DM on Instagram that I sent to Brandy, and she agreed that there's a lot of PTSD from when Trump was president, because things like this got said every day.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: All the time. And downstream of rhetoric are real actions, like lawyers and taxi drivers being mobilized to go to the airport to try and get the, quote- unquote, Muslim banned people now representation and get them to their destinations. You had very real terrible child separation that happened, that children are still separated from their families right now. And so downstream of all this stuff, are real, real concrete actions. And I am praying that… my daughter asked me this morning, Maya, she said, “Do I want Trump to win, or do I want Harris to win?” And I said, “Maya, I hope that Trump does not win.” She goes “Well, if Harris wins, will it be better?”I said, “It depends on who you ask, but I think there will be a better chance for us to move towards something more helpful if Trump does not win.” And then she said she knew some people who are supportive of Trump, and I told her things that her eight year old brain cannot handle.Sy Hoekstra: But wait, what does that mean? [laughs]Jonathan Walton: I just started breaking down why that is because I couldn't help myself.Sy Hoekstra: Oh, why people support him.Jonathan Walton: Why people would support him.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah, okay.Jonathan Walton: And then she quickly pivoted back to Story Pirates, which is a wonderful podcast about professional improvisational actors telling kid stories like Cecily Strong and things like that. It's hilarious. But all that to say, I think this is a prime example of the type of chaos and environment that is created when someone like Trump is president and the cameras are on him at all times. And I hope that is not the reality, because he absolutely does not have any meaningful policy positions besides Project 2025. I don't know if you saw… I'm talking a lot. He was in a town hall in Michigan, and someone asked him what his child care policies were. Like what actionable policy does he have? And he said a word salad and a buffet of dictionaries that you don't know what he was talking about.Sy Hoekstra: [laughs].Jonathan Walton: It was nonsense that somehow ended up with immigration being a problem.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And so I think that the worst factions of our country will have a vehicle to live out their worst fantasies about deportations and violence and racism, White supremacy and patriarchy and all those things, if he becomes president. And that's really sad to me, and I think it's a preview of that is what's happening in Springfield right now.Sy Hoekstra: Here's another angle on this. And it fits into everything you just said, but it's just from a different angle, bringing a little bit of Haitian history here. The Haitian Revolution is probably, I can't say that I've read everything to guarantee this, is probably the greatest act of defiance against White supremacy that the world has ever seen. For those who don't know, it happened right after the American Revolution, it was just the enslaved people of the island of Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti in the Dominican Republic, rising up and overthrowing the French and taking the island for themselves and establishing, like writing the world's second written constitution and establishing basically the world's second democracy.Really the world's first actual democracy [laughs] if you think about how American democracy was restricted to a very small group of people. If you read things that people in colonial governments or slave owners throughout the Western Hemisphere wrote and like when they spoke to each other about their fears over the next decades before slavery is abolished, Haiti is constantly on their minds.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: They never stop talking about it. It's actually mentioned in some of the declarations of secession before the Civil War. When the states wrote why they were seceding, it was like, “Because the Union wants Haiti to happen to us.” For the plantation owners to be killed. It was an obsession, and so the colonial powers in Europe, you may have read some of the work that the New York Times did in the New York Times Magazine last year, maybe it was two years ago, about this. But the amount of energy from European powers that went into making sure that Haiti as a country never had access to global markets or the global economy, that they were constantly impoverished.They were still finding ways to extract money from Haiti, even though it was an independent country. The fact that the US colonized Haiti for almost 20 years in the early 20th century, like the ways that we have controlled who is in power in their government from afar. We've propped up some of the most brutal dictators in the history of the world, honestly. We have been punishing and making sure that everybody knows that the defiance of white supremacy that Haiti showed will never be tolerated.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And so it is so easy for Haitians at every stage to become a scapegoat for whatever anxiety we have about the world becoming less White, the world becoming less of like under our control. Haitian immigrants were the reason that we started using Guantanamo Bay as a prison. They were the first people that we ever imprisoned there. We changed our policies, we like… Do you know for a long time, they wouldn't let Haitian people donate blood in America?Jonathan Walton: Yes.Sy Hoekstra: Because we said they'd had HIV. They had dirty blood, is what we said about them for years. Haiti is not at the bottom because of its choice. That's what we're constantly telling ourselves. Pat Robertson went on his show after the earthquake in 2010, and said the reason that these things still happen to Haiti is because they did Voodoo before their revolution, because they're pagans or whatever. We will make up any reason to not just take responsibility. Again, like with the Bosnians, the Somalis, we make up any reason to not just take responsibility for our actions.Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And this is just a continuation of that. And I don't know that I have a further point beyond that, other than to say, everything that Trump and Vance and the Proud Boys and all of them are doing in Springfield right now is just a continuation of that. “You're immigrants that we will call illegal, even though you're not right and you are Black. Your whole pride in your culture and your history is about the way that you defied White supremacy, and you're foreign to us, and you are strange. And we will say that you do things like eat cats that you don't do, and we will just believe it, because we don't actually want to know anything about you other than that you are a monster who defies the way that the world should be ordered.”Jonathan Walton: Yep.Sy Hoekstra: I'm trying to stop myself from tearing up right now, and I don't know that I have points beyond this. Do you know what I mean? I'm just angry because this is like people, this is my wife and my daughter. I'm probably just taking time now to do what I should have done earlier in this process, which is just feel all the sadness and the anger. But that is what I feel. The Trump and Vance and the people that are a part of his movement are just horrifying. The fruit of their way of seeing the world is just evil, and I think that's where I'm leaving it for now [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. And the very thing that Haitian people are called, evil, voodoo all those things, is what White supremacy is.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: That is evil, and that is wicked, and it has been at work for centuries. And in Jesus name, as Connie Anderson would pray in the work she does with White people around White supremacy and leaving that behind, and she says she just prays that it would be overthrown. That demonic power would be overthrown, and people would be disobedient to that leaning.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah.Jonathan Walton: And I pray the same would be true for many, many people before and after the polls close on November the 5th.Sy Hoekstra: Yeah. So in the newsletter, I put an email address where you could send a PayPal donation to the local Haitian community center. We'll have a link to that in the show notes too. The Haitians on the ground, especially some of the pastors and the churches there, are doing some incredible work to try and keep the peace. I think people have been overlooking that. There was a decent Christianity Today article on kind of what's going on the ground in Ohio, but it really focused on what the local White churches are doing to help [laughs].Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: And I really need people to focus on the Haitians, like what is actually happening there, and the fact that there are White supremacists marching around the town. And how terrifying that has to be for them, and how the people who are doing the work to keep the peace there are heroic, and they should not have to be. And they deserve all of our support and all our prayers. So I appreciate anything that you can, any intercession that you can do, any money that you can give. Any support that you can be. Any help that you can be just spreading the truth to people who may not be wanting to hear it or who might not be hearing it from their news sources right now,Jonathan Walton: Right.Sy Hoekstra: We're gonna end there, then. Thank you so much for listening. Please remember to go to KTFPress.com and become a paid subscriber and support everything we're doing, the media that we're making here. Get the bonus episodes to this show, come to our monthly Zoom calls to have a chat with me and Jonathan about everything that's going on in the election. Bring us your questions, get access to comments on our posts and more pl

*) Israel kills 25 Palestinians, including 10+ minors, in Gaza https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/live-blog-israel-kills-25-palestinians-including-10-minors-in-gaza-18165361 Israeli strikes have killed 17 Palestinians, including over 10 children, and injured dozens in Gaza City and Rafah. In Gaza City's Al-Daraj neighbourhood, 16 Palestinians died in an Israeli air strike on a house. One Palestinian was killed in Rafah when Israeli forces targeted a house belonging to the Al-Sha'er family. Earlier, Israeli forces hit a house in Al-Nuseirat camp, killing eight Palestinians. *) ‘New war crime': Israel bars scores in Gaza from Hajj amid Rafah invasion https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/new-war-crime-israel-bars-scores-in-gaza-from-hajj-amid-rafah-invasion-18165328 Thousands of Palestinians have been barred from performing the Hajj pilgrimage due to Israel's occupation of the Rafah crossing, the Ministry of Awqaf and Religious Affairs said. In a statement, the ministry said that “preventing thousands in Gaza from performing the Hajj is a clear violation of freedom of worship and international humanitarian law.” Hajj, the pilgrimage to Islam's holiest site Kaaba in Mecca, is one of the five pillars of Islam. Muslims are required to perform it at least once in life if they have the means to do so. *) UN set to vote on commemorating the 1995 Srebrenica genocide annually https://www.trtworld.com/europe/un-set-to-vote-on-commemorating-the-1995-srebrenica-genocide-annually-18165406 The UN will vote on creating an annual day to commemorate the 1995 genocide of over 8,000 Bosniaks by Bosnian Serbs. This proposal has faced strong opposition from Serbs, who fear it will label them all as supporters of the genocide. The resolution, sponsored by Germany and Rwanda, doesn't blame Serbia directly. Despite this, Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik and Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic have campaigned against it. The 193-member General Assembly is set to vote on designating July 11 as the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica,” to be observed annually starting in two months. *) Türkiye applauds Spain, Ireland, Norway's recognition of Palestinian state https://www.trtworld.com/turkiye/turkiye-applauds-spain-ireland-norways-recognition-of-palestinian-state-18165045 The Turkish foreign ministry said Türkiye is pleased by announcements from Spain, Ireland, and Norway that they will recognise the state of Palestine. The Ministry said in a statement that the “recognition of Palestine is a requirement of international law, justice, and conscience.” *) Macron faces crucial showdown as he lands in restive New Caledonia https://www.trtworld.com/australia/macron-faces-crucial-showdown-as-he-lands-in-restive-new-caledonia-18165370 French President Emmanuel Macron has landed in the Pacific island of New Caledonia for a series of talks during which he will aim to turn the page on riots triggered by a contested electoral reform. Any attempt to convince the rioters to get off the streets will be a challenge, as will trying to persuade the French-ruled territory's pro-independence parties who blame Macron and his government for the riots.

Dragan Čović is one of the most powerful politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia's political system, the most complicated anywhere in the World, is designed to give the country's three ethnic groups- Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats- equal representation in government. This sounds reasonable- until one considers that Croats only make up 15% of the population. Čović is the man who has, for over twenty years, manipulated the political system to extract benefits for the Croats. My guest today would wager that the Bosnian Croats, who are Catholic, are much more powerful than the Muslim Bosniaks, who represent half of the country's population. Worse still, he sees Čović, and the Bosnian Croats, as an instrument by which the Western powers keep Christians in charge of one of the only Muslim majority countries in Europe. My guest today is Reuf Bajrović. Reuf is the Vice President of the US-Europe Alliance in Washington D.C, and a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was also the Bosnian Minister for Energy, Mining and Industry in 2015. 

Some 3.3 million people in Bosnia and Herzegovina headed to the polls to choose legislators as well as the three members of the presidential council.But after polls closed, the country's peace overseer, High Representative Christian Schmidt, announced changes to the election law.Schmidt says the changes will create a more effective government, working between the country's two entities: Republika Srpska, made up of predominantly Bosnian Serbs, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, made up of mainly Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats.Find out what this means for the country as Christian Schmidt talks to Al Jazeera.Subscribe to our channel http://bit.ly/AJSubscribeFollow us on Twitter https://twitter.com/AJEnglishFind us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/aljazeeraCheck our website: http://www.aljazeera.com/Check out our Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/aljazeeraenglish/@AljazeeraEnglish#Aljazeeraenglish#News

In Bosnia and Herzegovina a dispute over a proposed new elections law has led to protests and concerns about the stability of the country. For more than 25 years since the Bosnian War ended in 1995 the country has been governed through a complex federal system intended to strike a balance between the three main ethnic groups: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. Many Bosnian Croats, however, now want changes that would, they say, give them better representation.Alix Kroeger speaks to Gerald Knaus, the chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a think tank focusing on south-eastern Europe and the enlargement of the European Union. He's been researching the two big European peace agreements of the 1990s: the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia and the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. They discussed the parallels between the two, the role of the international community in Bosnia and the lessons for the war in Ukraine.Further reading:Jeremy Cliffe on Bosnia and the weakness of the West. Alix on the echoes of Bosnia in Ukraine.Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard on the end of peace in Europe. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

July '92: Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia | Omarska camp | The fracture between Croats of Bosnia and Bosniaks

This time Gaz and Mel dive into the true story behind the heartbreaking and brilliant film Quo Vadis, Aida? Mel takes us back to Bosnia, 1995 where learn about the context behind this this vital and important history, which is now more relevant than ever. Who were the Bosniaks, and how did they fall victim to troops lead by General Ratko Mladić? We tackle big questions, such as how did Mladić manipulate the negotiations, and could the UN have done more to stop this tragedy? Don't forget you can always stop by our website www.realmoviesfakehistory.com You can also subscribe to us on social media to keep up to date on future episodes Instagram  (https://www.instagram.com/realmoviesfakehistory/)

In Season 2 of Untold Killing, we explore the story of Prijedor - one Bosnian municipality's descent from a peaceful, multi-ethnic society into a collection of burning towns and torture-filled concentration camps. Over six episodes, this season will cover the camps' political, international, and ideological implications, the personal stories of the Bosniaks held there, and the long-lasting effects on the camp survivors and their families, who now live scattered across the world. For more information and resources visit: https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bosnia and Herzegovina was created in 1992 from the remains of the former Yugoslavia, setting off a sectarian war in which Serb forces committed genocide against Muslims, known as Bosniaks. While the war ended 30 years ago, as Special Correspondent Kira Kay reports, ominous sectarian tensions remain. The story is part of our ongoing initiative, 'Exploring Hate: antisemitism, racism and extremism,' and is produced in partnership with New York University's Global Beat program. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

Bosnia and Herzegovina was created in 1992 from the remains of the former Yugoslavia, setting off a sectarian war in which Serb forces committed genocide against Muslims, known as Bosniaks. While the war ended 30 years ago, as Special Correspondent Kira Kay reports, ominous sectarian tensions remain. The story is part of our ongoing initiative, 'Exploring Hate: antisemitism, racism and extremism,' and is produced in partnership with New York University's Global Beat program. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

As the war intensifies in late 1992, the Bosniaks are faced with a new enemy: their former Croatian allies.

Welcome to Episode Three of Peace at Risk in Bosnia, a three-part podcast by the Aegis Trust exploring the present crisis which threatens a return to violence 26 years after the Dayton Peace Accords ended war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this third and final episode, we consider what the solutions might be; both for preventing an immediate explosion of violence, and for defusing the fear, hostility and unresolved wounds of the past which make conflict possible in the first place.Narrated by Aegis founder and CEO James Smith, with contributors Emir Suljagić (Director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Center), Tatjana Milovanović  (Program Director for the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo), Hikmet Karčić (Genocide Scholar and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks in Sarajevo) and Jasmin Mujanović (political scientist and analyst of southeast European and international affairs).Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/aegistrust )

Welcome to Episode Two of Peace at Risk in Bosnia, a three-part podcast by the Aegis Trust exploring the present crisis which threatens a return to violence 26 years after the Dayton Peace Accords ended war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this episode we find out how Bosnia's complex constitution, formed by the Dayton Peace Accords, has become an obstacle to the country's development. We also explore the wider geopolitical context for Bosnia's problems being ignored or exploited by politicians and governments, both in the region and around the World. Narrated by Aegis founder and CEO James Smith, with contributors Emir Suljagić (Director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Center), Tatjana Milovanović  (Program Director for the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo), Hikmet Karčić (Genocide Scholar and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks in Sarajevo) and Jasmin Mujanović (political scientist and analyst of southeast European and international affairs).Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/aegistrust )

Welcome to Episode One of Peace at Risk in Bosnia, a three-part podcast by the Aegis Trust exploring the present crisis which threatens a return to violence 26 years after the Dayton Peace Accords ended war and genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina.In this episode, we learn how Bosnia faces a heightened risk of return to armed conflict following an intent expressed by Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik to break the Dayton Peace Accords by re-establishing the Army of Republika Srpska. We also learn about the roots of the crisis in the conflict and genocide of the 1990s, and find out about some of its effects on the series contributors themselves.Narrated by Aegis founder and CEO James Smith, with contributors Emir Suljagić (Director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Center), Tatjana Milovanović (Program Director for the Post-Conflict Research Center in Sarajevo), Hikmet Karčić (Genocide Scholar and Senior Researcher at the Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks in Sarajevo), and Jasmin Mujanović (political scientist and analyst of southeast European and international affairs).Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/aegistrust )

Over 130,000 people were killed in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, with most deaths concentrated in Bosnia. But 26 years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, nationalist tensions are re-emerging between Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik and Bosniak President Bakir Izetbegovic. So are we on the brink of another war in the Balkans - and did it ever end in the first place? Jelena Sofronijevic talks to journalist Una Hajdari and Professor James Ker-Lindsay about what we get wrong on ethnicity, peacekeeping, and Serbia's “strongman” siblingship with Vladimir Putin.  “The ethnic differences that are taken into account by Bosnia's constitution are the same ones that will cause its downfall.” – Una Hajdari “Russia is playing a spoiling tactic in the Balkans.” - James Ker-Lindsay  “Dodik is clever enough to know an overt declaration of independence would fail. He'd need to rely on Serbia - but they'd avoid supporting him outright.” - James Ker-Lindsay “This is Bosnia's curse - all levels of its government have an ethnic quota, so it's hard to stray from any politics outside of that path.” - Una Hajdari “Both Bosnian Serbs and Bosniaks see each other as a fundamental threat to each other's existence.” - James Ker-Lindsay Written and presented by Jelena Sofronijevic. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bosnia faces what the current international High Representative to the country, Christian Schmidt, calls “its greatest existential threat of the post-war period”. It is grappling with dual crises that could upend the fragile status quo that has endured since the 1995 Dayton Accords ended Bosnia's brutal civil war. In October, Milorad Dodik, the de facto leader of the autonomous Serb-dominated region, Republika Srpska, vowed to pull out of state institutions, paving the way for independence or union with neighbouring Serbia. Meanwhile, Bosniaks and Croats have yet to resolve a longstanding electoral dispute and, divided, cannot join together to counter Dodik's secessionist threats. Both Serbs and Croats threaten to boycott elections planned for 2022. This week on Hold Your Fire!, Naz Modirzadeh and Richard Atwood are joined by Crisis Group Balkans expert Marko Prelec to talk about the crises. They discuss the motives for the Serbian drive for secession, the ongoing electoral dispute that has left Croats feeling disenfranchised, and the High Representative's role. They look at quick fixes to calm both crises, the necessity but challenges of constitutional reform and revisiting the framework established at Dayton, and what international actors can do to help. For more information, explore Crisis Group's analysis on our Bosnia And Herzegovina page and make sure to read our recent Q&A ‘Grappling with Bosnia's Dual Crises'. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Bosnia was the site of Europe's worst conflict Europe since the Second World War ended. Fighting there in the 1990s ended up killing around a hundred thousand people. Bosnian Serbs were pitted against Croats, and Muslim so-called Bosniaks. This was an old-fashioned battle for territory, and it only ended when a compromise was reached – that Bosnia would remain one country, but with two regions each having a certain degree of autonomy. There would be one, predominantly Serb region, and another joint Croat and Muslim. This was always a fragile solution, a fudge, some said, to ease the country away from bloodshed. But now, bits of that peace deal are beginning to look rather frayed, and some have even spoken of a return to fighting. While few predict war any time soon, Guy Delauney say this is still highly dangerous talk. You can understand why Poles are just a little sensitive about being told what to do by outsiders. Their country has suffered repeated invasion and occupation, and at times, has vanished off the map altogether. There were wild celebrations when Poland was accepted for membership of the European Union back in 2003. This was seen first of all as a mark of respectability, recognition that it had become a modern, free market democracy. But many Poles believed membership of the EU also took the country another step further away from the embrace of Russia to the east, while leaving it closer knit with friendly countries to the west. Today, EU membership remains popular in Poland, but not so the EU itself. The Polish government has promised to defy instructions emanating from Brussels, and indeed is currently facing a fine of one million Euros a day imposed by the European Court of Justice, for refusing to abide by previous rulings. Adam Easton has been looking at what is one of Europe's most intense love-hate relationships. The COP summit on climate change chalked up an achievement this week. Delegates in Glasgow signed an agreement to stop deforestation by 2030, promising they would make attempts to reverse it. This follows decades in which vast swathes of forest have been chopped down, to provide wood, and to open up tracts land for growing crops on, often to feed animals which are then raised to provide meat. But the axe and the chainsaw are not the only threat which trees face. Climate change is already altering the conditions in which they grow, and sometimes with terrible consequences for individual trees and indeed, for the very landscape in which they flourish, as Jenny Hill discovered in Germany. The effects of climate change may be slow and initially barely visible, but sometimes they are all too clear. This summer just past saw record temperatures in parts of Europe, and out of control fires as a consequence. Trees in Greece were burned to a cinder, as one part of the country after another succumbed to the flames. Bethany Bell reported on those fires, and now she has been back to watch people picking up the pieces after this devastation, and also talking to those trying to figure out how to stop it happening again. The Europe of today is very much shaped by its experience of war and political upheaval. Bosnia's conflict was born out of the collapse of Yugoslavia, a nation which itself was created out of the ashes of World War One. The EU was formed as an attempt to ensure that such a Europe-wide conflict would never happen again, and that democracy would become the rule. Even the natural landscape was shaped in part by war, with the need for food security high in people's minds. And yet it remains an open question whether the lessons of this turbulent past have really been learned. A few thousand miles away from his original home in Vienna, Hilary Andersson spoke to a man who witnessed perhaps the worst of Europe's modern history. Lying in hospital, just days from death, he shared his memories of the Nazis, and his fear that the value and fragility of democracy risks being forgotten.

Welcome to 10:02 with Mike Baker. Today we will pray for the Bosniaks of Turkey and hear from Numbers 6:24-26.

People Group Summary https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/10953 Listen to the "Gateway to the Unreached" with Greg Kelley, produced by the Alliance for the Unreached: https://alliancefortheunreached.org/podcast/

15,000 Bosniaks fled the Bosnian Serb Army through the forests of Eastern Bosnia after the fall of Srebrenica. They spent days and nights wandering through the woods as they were hunted down, tortured and many of them executed. This episode tells the story of the Death March from two men who survived it. For more information and resources visit: https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/podcast/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

See pictures here. DOBRO DOŠLI U MOSTAR Again, I go by bus to my next Balkan destination. This time north from Kotor in Montenegro to Mostar in the southern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was one of the other guests at the hostel in Kosovo – an English guy called Edward, that recommended Mostar and Rooms Deny to me. There's a river that runs through Mostar from the north to the south and cuts the city in two halves. Deny, the owner of ‘Rooms Deny', the hostel I'd booked, came to pick me up at the bus station, and even though both the bus station and the hostel are on the eastern side, we're taking a bit of a detour into the western side because cars are not allowed in the old town. That gives Deny time to do his ‘tour guide introduction' to Mostar. DENY IS THE PERFECT TOUR GUIDE My host Deny Kadric is a very open young man and has an impressive knowledge about his country and especially Mostar. As we see the iconic Stari Most Bridge (the Old Bridge) for the first time, Deny asks me what I know about Mostar other than the bridge. But no, I didn't even know about the bridge, and since that's the most iconic thing about Mostar, I didn't know much. Or anything – other than what Edward told me. That it's a quaint little city with a lot of history. We'll get back to this bridge and why it's so important later on in this episode. SMALL COUNTRY WITH TWO NAMES Bosnia and Herzegovina is home to 3.8 million people – and it's important that you say both names. Basically, it's too regions with Bosnia in the north and Herzegovina in the south. In fact, I'm not even in Bosnia. Mostar is in Herzegovina and has a population of 113,000 and is Bosnia and Herzegovina's most divided city. Nowhere is this more evident than in Mostar, where Bosnian Croatians live on the western side of the Neretva River, and Bosniaks on the eastern side. Even to this day, more than 25 years after the war, this is still the case. They rarely go to the other side and interact with the people on the other side. Both sides have their own national theatre, post office, and other separate public services. Deny tells me that he does have friends on both sides, but he's more the exception to the rule. THE SCARS OF THE WAR IN MOSTAR Deny recommended that I took 45 minutes to see a documentary called Unfinished Business in Mostar before I walked out to explore. It's a BBC documentary presented by Jeremy Bowen, filmed in 1993 in and around Mostar at the height of the Bosniak-Croat conflict during the Bosnian War. And I did, and already one minute in we see some guys come running with a wheelbarrow to get an old man that had just been shot. They wanted to rush him to the hospital. He'd just stepped out of his house to get some water when it happened. At the hospital, a doctor gives him CPR in an attempt to revive him. But there was nothing he could do – he was dead on arrival and his old wife breaks down. These first few minutes of the documentary sets the tone for the rest of it. It's heartbreaking but I suggest you see it. We should all see it and learn from it. It's surreal to walk around in the streets of Mostar after seeing them as a war zone. You can still see the scars of the war. Many of the buildings are still in ruins and you see bullet-holes on the walls everywhere. STARI MOST BRIDGE WAS DESTROYED The Siege of Mostar was fought during the Bosnian War first in 1992 and then again later in 93-94. As a result of the first siege around 90,000 residents of Mostar fled … and many religious buildings, cultural institutions, and bridges were damaged or destroyed. Between June 93 and April 94, the besieged Bosniak-concentrated East Mostar, resulting in the deaths of many civilians, a cut off of humanitarian aid, damage or destruction of ten mosques, and then the blowing up of the historic Stari Most bridge on November 9, 1993. Croatian general Slobodan Praljak was deemed the main responsible for the destruction of the bridge and sentenced to twenty years. He was the one who declared that "those stones" (meaning the bridge) had no value. Stari Most Bridge, also known as The Old Bridge and Mostar Bridge, connects the two parts of the city. It was a 16th-century Ottoman bridge and stood for 427 years, until that day in ‘93. After the war, a project was set in motion to reconstruct it; the rebuilt bridge – that looks like the old one opened on 23 July 2004. It's now an iconic tourist attraction. It stands 20 meters over the river and often you can see people jumping of it into the water. MUSEUM OF WAR AND GENOCIDE VICTIMS I decide to spend a few hours at the ‘Museum of War and Genocide Victims 1992-1995'. It's a small but interesting and very moving museum about the events leading up to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.  The way the history of the war is explained is very moving and extremely touching. What the people of Bosnia and especially Mostar have been through is unimaginable. The personal stories of those who lived through these times are as always, the most moving.  It's an important part of the history of Bosnia Herzegovina and Mostar and anyone visiting it must go to the Museum out of respect for the victims and locals who suffered through this. There are some very graphic shocking photos on display. Also, three TVs each showing different stories about the war and the concentration camps. There is quite a bit to read as each display and picture has a story behind it. On the lower floor this is where the more graphic photos are displayed so if your easily upset – or if you're bringing your kids, I would skip this part.  All in all, it's horrific to see what happened, but I feel it's an important visit to get a clearer view of what happened and why it should never happen again. There's a part of the museum talking about war crimes – with so many pictures of people doing something against the Hague and Geneva Conventions. And that's what bothers me the most. How could this happen – with the second World War in recent memory. Didn't we learn anything? As it says on the wall in the museum: “The terror of forgetting is greater than the terror of having too much to remember” That's why I feel it's important to visit places like this, even though it's not an upbeat uplifting experience. 6 FUN FACTS ABOUT BOSNIA HERZEGOVINA Bosnia Herzegovina is nicknamed the “Heart-Shaped Land” due to the country's slight heart shape. When you look at a map, you would think that Bosnia Herzegovina is landlocked but if you look very closely you will notice that they have the smallest little panhandle which touches the Adriatic Sea for only about 25 kilometres or 15 miles. One of Europe's last jungles can be found here. Situated on the border of Montenegro, Perućica is one of two remaining jungles forests in Europe. Some of the trees here are 300 years old, and the undisturbed forest vintage dates back 20,000 years.  Bosnia has three official languages: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. They are pretty similar and they all understand each other. Kinda like Danish Norwegian and Swedish… or American, Irish and Australian… I think. The name “Bosnia” comes from an Indo-European word Bosana, which means water. Herzegovina stems from the Serbo-Croatian term borrowed from German, Hercegovina, a land ruled by a Herzog – the German term for a duke. They like coffee here… Bosnia Herzegovina has the tenth highest coffee consumption per capita in the world.   HERZEGOVINA TOUR SOUTH OF MOSTAR With a group of other guests from the hostel, I go on a day-trip in beautiful Herzegovina with Deny as the tour guide. He takes us about 30 kilometers (19 mi) south of Mostar. After a local breakfast, we go on a hike in some astonishing landscapes to the waterfalls in Kravica and then to Počitelj – the historic village and an open-air museum with a fortress in the mountains. In the middle ages, it was the administrative center and center of governance of the county, and its westernmost point, which gave it major strategic importance. It is supposed that the fortified walled town was built in 1383 and well worth a visit. BRUCE LEE STATUE IN MOSTAR For some reason here in Mostar there's a statue of kong-fu expert Bruce Lee. The statue was the first public monument to Bruce Lee anywhere in the world and was unveiled in November 2005. Why you may ask: The idea came from a youth group called Mostar Urban Movement, and they saw the statue as “a symbol of "loyalty, skill, friendship and justice." In a city that had been torn in war by ethnic divisions, they see the dynamic movie star as a part of their idea of universal justice – that the good guys can win. They feel that Bruce Lee represented one thing that could bridge the divides between Mostar residents: "One thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee" they said. Shortly afterwards the sculpture was vandalized, removed for repairs and brought back at the end of May 2013. Both Bosnians and Croats had complained that the statue was a provocation because they thought it was pointed towards their area in a fighting stance, so its creators rotated the statue to face a neutral direction.   HIT THE ROAD JACK Back in Mostar we go walk across the Old Bridge to the west side, for dinner and drinks at the iconic Black Dog Pub, and we all sing along to Hit the Road Jack. And then it's time for me to hit the road myself, and my next stop is Croatia. My name is Palle Bo and I gotta keep moving.     I WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU First, I want to mention that I would love to hear from you and now there's a new and simple way for you to send me a voice message. It's a cool little web-based app called Tellbee and all you have to do is here: TALK TO ME and talk. Tell me where you are and what you're doing when you listen to this. It's super simple and one of the cool things is that you can listen to it and redo it if you're not happy with it – before you click send. I get a small soundbite I can play on the show and it's always wonderful to hear from you guys. You can off course also just fill out the form under contact on the website. SPONSOR This episode is supported in part by Hotels25.com where you always can find the best prices on hotels, guesthouses and hostels – like Rooms Deny, that I stayed at here in Mostar.

Son of a Croatian mother and Muslim Bosnian (or Bosniak) father, A conversation with Demir Mahmutcehajic, a prominent Bosniak human rights activist Demir Mahmutcehajic (44) is a prominent Bosniak (or Muslim Bosnian) human rights activist and politician based in the old town of Stolac, Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a teenager in 1992, he and his family fled hthe Serbian-controlled Bosnia to his mother’s Croatian hometown named Vela Luka. From Croatia they had to leave in a year for safety first in Kuwait and subsequently to Slovenia when Croatian troops began their attacks on Bosnia and Herzegovina. After drifting as a refugee in Kuwait, Slovenia and later Italy for several years, Demir was resettled in UK where he resumed his high school education, and completed BSc in internet engineering at Southbank University in London. In UK, he began his human rights activism and went on to become a founding member of the Islamic Human Rights Commission. In 2005, with a group of other human rights-minded Bosniaks. He started a civil rights movement DOSTA! (Enough) in Bosnia, and Demir and his family returned to Stolac in 2011. He has been active in local electoral politics in Stolac, campaigning against corruption and electoral frauds and conducts genocide educational programs in Srebrenica, Prijedor, and other places of mass killings. The conversation covers: - The dangerous myth of racial and ethnic purity - The historical dynamics among ethnic and religious communities in the former Yugoslavia, founded as an anti-Fascist bloc of six different ethnic nations in the Balkans - The International Court of Justice ruling in 2007 that the State of Serbia did not commit genocide, and that only the mass-killing of nearly 8000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica constituted an act of genocide - The phenomenon of formerly persecuted ethnic and religious groups turning murderous towards other minorities in their midst - Some lessons for Rohingya people

In a number of already completed actions, Bosniaks living in Australia have helped with money and goods.The ongoing actions in Sydney and Melbourne are the start of a lengthy relief process to area affected by catastrophic bushfires. - U nekoliko, već zaokruženih akcija Bošnjaci koji žive u Australiji su pomogli novcem i robom. Akcije u Sydney-u i Melbourne-u koje i dalje traju su početak jednog dužeg procesa pomoći, područjima koja su pogođena katastrofalnim požarima.

The guests in our program included the delegates of reisu-l-ulema, Mensur ef Karadža - director of the legal department of Riyadh and Mensur ef Pašalić - head of the Office for Diaspora of Riyadh.They spoke to us in more detail about the reasons for their visit to Australia and the concept of a significant reorganisation of the Bosniak Islamic community in the diaspora. - Izaslanici reisu-l-uleme, Mensur ef. Karadža - direktor pravne službe Rijaseta i Mensur ef. Pašalić- šef Ureda za dijasporu Rijaseta detaljnije govore o razlozima njihove posjete Australiji i konceptu značajne reorganizacije bošnjačke Islamske zajednice u dijaspori.

Mufti of Bosniaks in Australia, Jasmin Bekric talks about the importance and tradition of celebrating one of the major Islamic holidays - Bošnjački muftija za Australiju, Jasmin ef. Bekrić je za naš radio program govorio o značaju i tradiciji obilježavanja jednog od najvećih islamskih praznika.

Time moves everything including ourselves, whether we like it or not. But change brings us hope, new energy, and opens new doors in our lives. Our spiritual journeys fly above our lives like birds. Some birds fly high, and some fly low. My spiritual journey is similar to that of a Falcon because he insists on fly high in the sky above many other varieties of birds; he enjoys freedom instead of being enslaved; he knows where to go and finds food without anybody’s help. Speaker Bio Imam Abdulah Polovina was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before the war In Bosnia and Herzegovina he attended the Gazi Husrevbegova madrasa to be Imam, Khatib and Muallim. He completed and graduated the madrasa in 1992. After the war he was appointed by the Islamic Community to work as an Imam in one mosque in Sarajevo. Here he stayed for the next five years, when he moved to the United States, to the City of Seattle, the State of Washington, where he worked as an Imam for 12 years at the local Islamic Community and the congregation of Bosniaks. Imam Abdulah got a BA in Islamic Studies at the Cloverdale College in Indiana, and BA in Comparative Religions at the University George Washington in Seattle, WA. He earned a masters degree at Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry in transformational leadership. Imam Abdulah got a BA in Islamic Studies at the Cloverdale College in Indiana, and BA in Comparative Religions at the University George Washington in Seattle, WA. He earned a masters degree at Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry in transformational leadership. Currently, Abdulah is the Imam of the Bosniak congregation and organization in Portland, Oregon.

Bosnia was the former Yugoslavia's cultural crossroads, home to its three major ethnic groups: Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks. Each group adopted a different religion, brought to Yugoslavia by various emperors, missionaries, and sultans. Sadly, these differences led to the region's violent conflict in the 1990s. More info about travel to Bosnia: https://www.ricksteves.com/europe/bosnia-herzegovina

Bosnia was the former Yugoslavia's cultural crossroads, home to its three major ethnic groups: Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks. Each group adopted a different religion, brought to Yugoslavia by various emperors, missionaries, and sultans. Sadly, these differences led to the region's violent conflict in the 1990s. More info about travel to Bosnia: https://www.ricksteves.com/europe/bosnia-herzegovina

On July 11, many Bosnian-Herzegovinian organizations and centers in Australia will mark the days when more than 8,000 Bosniaks were killed in the Srebrenica 24 years ago - U nekoliko australskih gradova, u prostorijama bosanskohercegovačkih centara i organizacija će u četvrtak biti održani programi sjećanja i pomena na žrtve genocida počinjenog u Srebrenici 1995. godine. U sklopu imanja ABHCA-Leppington u NSW, aktivisti ne samog ovog centra će pripremiti prigodan program o čemu nam govori jedan od članova organizacionog odbora, Mirsad Kadić

In this episode, Jasmine talks to Irina Souchtchenko the founder of the Slavic Folk Museum, which houses the largest private collection of Slavic costume, textiles and art in the United States. Slavic peoples include East Slavs (chiefly Belarusians, Russians, Rusyns, and Ukrainians), West Slavs (chiefly Czechs, Kashubs, Moravians, Poles, Silesians, Slovaks and Sorbs), and South Slavs (chiefly Bosniaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Serbs and Slovenes). In the interview they talk about the layered and meaning within Slavic textiles, winter solstice traditions, and the importance of preserving traditional textile and costumes. Image: @slavicfolkmuseum To learn more about Slavic Folk Museum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slavicfolkmuseum/ Donate to the Slavic Folk Museum Paypal: slavicfolkmuseum.com Visit museum store: https://slavicfolkmuseum.com/ Website: www.unravelpodcast.com Patreon: www.patreon.com/unravelpodcast PayPal: www.paypal.me/unravelpodcast Instagram: @unravelpodcast Twitter: @unravelpodcast Facebook: www.facebook.com/unravelpodcast/ Pinterest: Unravel: A Fashion Podcast www.pinterest.com/afashionpodcast/ Stitcher: www.stitcher.com/podcast/unravel-podcast Waller Gallery Website www.wallergallery.com/ Waller Gallery Instagram: @wallergallery Jasmine's Nicaragua Instagram: @recuerdosdenicaragua

By the time of the Bosnian War, Yugoslavia was a mortally wounded mass refusing to admit its time had come. Desperate to hold on, JNA forces moved into Bosnia to support the Bosnian-Serb population, many of whom had joined the various paramilitaries in the new country. Meanwhile, Bosniaks and Bosnian-Croats formed a rocky alliance out of self preservations for their respective groups, and their shared hatred of the Serb dominated remains of Yugoslavia. Bosnia became a battleground for the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, causing the citizens to suffer greatly from the constant shelling and sniper fire landing indiscriminately, regardless of who was within sight. Worse yet, it became the location of the worst act of genocide committed in Post-World War II Europe to date, as UN personnel could do nothing but watch helplessly. Bosnia was a failure of humanity, and the wounds from the horror have yet to heal.   Intro: Searching by Wayve Outro: Bosnia by The Cranberries

Despite all the buzz about the reconstruction of Mostar’s beautiful Old Bridge, Mostar remains a largely divided city, with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other. In Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), anthropologist Azra Hromadžić takes the reader into the halls (and into the bathroom) of Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first integrated high school. Through ethnographic details about the possibilities for and limitations of inter-ethnic socializing within the school, Hromadžić draws much broader insights about the complicated relationship between internationally-sponsored reunification initiatives and the ethnic segregation that is built into the very framework of the post-war state. Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite all the buzz about the reconstruction of Mostar’s beautiful Old Bridge, Mostar remains a largely divided city, with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other. In Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), anthropologist Azra Hromadžić takes the reader into the halls (and into the bathroom) of Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first integrated high school. Through ethnographic details about the possibilities for and limitations of inter-ethnic socializing within the school, Hromadžić draws much broader insights about the complicated relationship between internationally-sponsored reunification initiatives and the ethnic segregation that is built into the very framework of the post-war state. Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite all the buzz about the reconstruction of Mostar’s beautiful Old Bridge, Mostar remains a largely divided city, with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other. In Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), anthropologist Azra Hromadžić takes the reader into the halls (and into the bathroom) of Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first integrated high school. Through ethnographic details about the possibilities for and limitations of inter-ethnic socializing within the school, Hromadžić draws much broader insights about the complicated relationship between internationally-sponsored reunification initiatives and the ethnic segregation that is built into the very framework of the post-war state. Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite all the buzz about the reconstruction of Mostar’s beautiful Old Bridge, Mostar remains a largely divided city, with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other. In Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), anthropologist Azra Hromadžić takes the reader into the halls (and into the bathroom) of Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first integrated high school. Through ethnographic details about the possibilities for and limitations of inter-ethnic socializing within the school, Hromadžić draws much broader insights about the complicated relationship between internationally-sponsored reunification initiatives and the ethnic segregation that is built into the very framework of the post-war state. Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite all the buzz about the reconstruction of Mostar’s beautiful Old Bridge, Mostar remains a largely divided city, with Bosniaks on one side and Croats on the other. In Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), anthropologist Azra Hromadžić takes the reader into the halls (and into the bathroom) of Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia-Herzegovina’s first integrated high school. Through ethnographic details about the possibilities for and limitations of inter-ethnic socializing within the school, Hromadžić draws much broader insights about the complicated relationship between internationally-sponsored reunification initiatives and the ethnic segregation that is built into the very framework of the post-war state. Jelena Golubovic is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea Thiis-Evensen talks to Dr Eleanor Gordon, who has worked with peace and security for 10 years, making a huge difference to the lives of hundreds of women. Her work has included building state security and justice institutions, working with demobilised guerrilla groups, addressing war crimes and human rights violations, promoting gender equality and inclusive approaches to peacebuilding, and addressing issues related to organised crime and terrorism. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT [Introduction audio] Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Hey, my name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen. Welcome back to Peace and Gender. In this podcast I'm trying to highlight the issues around gendered inequalities by meeting the people who are actually seeking solutions. I'm trying to get to know not only their research, but also their personal story. In this episode I'm going to be talking to Eleanor Gordon, who worked for the UN with Peace and Security for 10 years. Eleanor Gordon: A large group of women wanted to return to Srebrenica. They didn't have any homes. The homes had been completely destroyed. Their husbands and their children had been killed. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Eleanor is, in many ways, a living proof that you can make a difference if you just put your mind to it. Eleanor has worked with building state security and justice institutions. She's worked with demobilising guerrilla groups, addressing war crimes and human right violations, promoting gender equality and inclusive approaches to peacebuilding and she's addressed issues relating to organised crime and terrorism. This is Eleanor's story. Eleanor Gordon: Whilst I was writing up my PhD I decided to do some voluntary work for a peacekeeping training centre because I felt that I had exposure to lots of aspects of what I was interested in and where I wanted to work. All bar the military and I felt that that was a gap in my knowledge and understanding so I decided to do some voluntary work. I was an intern at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in Canada for eight months and I completed my doctorate while I was there and it happened also to coincide with an opportunity with UNHCR. There was a UN volunteer's position within UNHCR in Bosnia that I found out about and I was recommended for it. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Eleanor was working for the UNHCR, which is the UN refugee agency. She was head of a small satellite office in eastern Republic Srpska, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of her responsibilities was to facilitate the return of displaced people. Eleanor Gordon: So basically Bosniaks returning to their pre-war homes who had been forcibly displaced. I was responsible for facilitating the first return, minority return to Srebrenica. Yeah that experience probably has - yeah, has framed the way I've seen my subsequent engagement. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: When Eleanor was working in Bosnia she wasn't just sitting around in an office. Eleanor Gordon: If you're right down at the municipal level you're generally working in the field and that's the most - for me, that's the most enjoyable work, when you're in direct contact with the people that you're ostensibly there to help. So yeah we would have an office but every day we would be out. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: I wanted to know if there was a particular moment in Eleanor's career that still stays with her today. Eleanor was working for the UN in Srebrenica. In 1995 Serbian forces separated the Bosnian civilians at Srebrenica, putting women and girls on buses sending them to Bosnian-held territory. The men and boys who were left behind were murdered and it has been estimated that over 7000 Bosniaks were killed. Eleanor Gordon: I was reflecting on this and I just couldn't get away from this particular event, so I found it really difficult to - because it, yeah it's quite a long time ago and my memory is failing. So when I was head of the UNHCR satellite office covering Srebrenica, I was responsible for facilitating the first minority return to Srebrenica and as you probably know there was a genocide committed in Srebrenica during the war. Thousands of men and boys, particularly, were killed. So when I was working there with my colleagues in the international community and principally my colleague who was head of the Higher Representative satellite office in Srebrenica, we coordinated and facilitated their return. I guess it stays with me for many reasons, firstly, the amazing courage that people who have suffered such trauma, beyond what you can imagine. When people are talking about conflict and war, often times we might reflect upon how you become desensitised to violence or how you can be very traumatised and that leads to a cycle of conflict happening. But we rarely talk about those who have the courage to continue with their lives, those who have the courage to fight peacefully against what they believe is wrong. So these - predominately women, a large group of women, wanted to return to Srebrenica, they didn't have any homes, their homes had been completely destroyed, their husbands and their children had been killed. They wanted to return, even though they knew they'd be sleeping under sheeting, there were no schools, there was no water, electricity, because it was their homes. They wanted - that was where, where they felt was home. But they also wanted to reclaim that - not accept what has happened. So there was a strength behind their decision to wanting to return, even though at that stage those who were responsible for the crimes, the horrific war crimes that had happened in Srebrenica were still in positions of power in the municipality. They were exposing themselves to serious threat and there had been a number of returns in my area of responsibility to that stage - until that stage, that had gone wrong. There had been security incidents, and one in particular in the neighbouring municipality and a teenager had lost their leg because the day before they were going to return home, someone had placed a landmine in the villages. During the time that I was there, eighteen months, thousands of people were returned to their pre-war homes. They were often completely destroyed and they would put up sheeting. UNHCR would be able to help with basic sheeting and basic essentials, nothing else. Then we would facilitate the response of the NGOs and other organisations, and to respond to their other needs, but of course there wasn't sufficient resources to respond to everyone's needs. We would also ensure that the responsible authorities and the local authority, the police, and the municipal authorities, responded to their security needs. We would work alongside [S4] which was NATO, NATO forces who would address the security side of things. So I was saying why Srebrenica stood out, many people believed that people wouldn't want to return to Srebrenica after everything that had happened to them. They were returning to a village that was very remote, as I said, there were no houses, they were completely destroyed. There were still people who had - we believed, had been responsible for the crimes in positions of authority, so there were many people who didn't think that these returns would be sustainable, that people would stay there because UNHCR had a mandate to facilitate the safe and sustainable return of refugees and displaced people. If you didn't think it was going to be sustainable it wasn't our responsibility as UNHCR to facilitate that return. My gut knew that - and so did, fortunately I also had a colleague, as I said, in the Office of the Higher Representative. We knew that we were there to respond to the needs of those who wanted to return home, we weren't there to cause an obstruction to it, and my gut knew this was the right thing for me to do. At the time I was a UN volunteer I was relatively young and relatively new to the job. I had all my supervisors at headquarters and it went to New York, many people saying this - you're exposing these people to security threats, you're not being responsible, you need to stop this now. I knew it was and - I'm pretty stubborn anyway but sometimes when you know things are right you have to stick to that, and we facilitated their return, it went very well. They didn't overnight but that was not the intention and eventually they have returned, that - it's a sustainable return, NGOs have responded to the education needs, providing hospitals and building the houses and roads, water, infrastructure and so on. It just - taught me a lot that when you know something is right you have to stick to it, even if you've got everyone, a thousand people, saying this can't happen. If you know something can happen and it should happen, it's your responsibility, you have to reflect upon why you're working in these environments. It's not to get a pay check, get a promotion, be a yes man, it's to respond to those who have suffered. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Did it make any difference that you were saying no it is and I want to - you know what I mean, or was it you and a lot of other people, just to kind of understand your role in the whole thing? Eleanor Gordon: Yeah, because UNHCR was the lead agency responsible for facilitating the return of refugees and displaced people, our organisation could make those decisions. So my role, even though I was a volunteer, was pretty significant because I was head of the satellite office of UNHCR, however, elsewhere in UNHCR and other organisations - so those on the ground knew differently. We were quite near the border with the Federation, those across the Federation I think in many - conflicts, post-conflict environments; there are many sides to a conflict. You can have neighbours who have very different perspectives, so those in the Federation that only - that rarely travelled to the Republic of Srpska would consider that it was much too dangerous to set foot in and that anyone who expects people to return there's got to be crazy. So I would get a lot of - particularly from my most senior boss, my direct supervisor, a lot of criticism that I was exposing these people to danger, I was being irresponsible. But he could not, in order for him to stop what I was facilitating, he would need to take quite a bold step in stopping the return of refugees and displaced people to their pre-war homes. In Srebrenica, because it was Srebrenica in the first return it had global attention so any move that anyone made would have - would've generated a lot of publicity, but it - so they were in a difficult position in that they couldn't stop the return but because I could've done, and I could've postponed it. With the colleagues that I was working with, so with NATO and with the Office of the Higher Representative, there were other UN representatives there in - who also didn't agree that this return was sustainable, they thought it was politicised, they thought it was dangerous. So it - the pressure got quite significant and on the actual day we were travelling up the hill and I - I and I think some of my colleagues were really worried thinking shit. Have we done the right thing? We knew we had, we'd gone - we'd - you have to, in those circumstances, there is always a security risk and you have to plan, prepare and just make sure you've addressed every potential outcome. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: When did you know you'd made the right choice? You said you were like travelling up the hill and you were worried? Eleanor Gordon: Yeah, when they got to the top and none of the cars had crashed or fallen off the cliff. It was a long way. It was a - the return was longer than that because there could've been attacks, at a later stage. But it - there were no roads and you were in trucks - I can't even recall how long the journey took, but a long time. Up the edge of a really steep, I wouldn't call it a hill, like a mountain] so - little bit nerve-wracking. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: After spending five years in Bosnia, Eleanor moved to Kosovo. She was the political advisor to the Kosovo Protection Corps coordinator, reporting to the United Nations. Eleanor Gordon: The Kosovo Protection Corps, they are - they no longer exist, they were comprised primarily of demobilised Kosovo Liberation Army personnel. They were basically the guerrilla fighters during the conflict. They were a civil emergency organisation as the Kosovo Protection Corps, with aspirations to be the future army of Kosovo and now exist - the Kosovo Security Force. So my role as political advisor was to liaise with prospective donors, the media, to address gender issues, ethnic minority issues. To facilitate the further development of the Kosovo Protection Corps as it aspired to further professionalise and develop into the Kosovo Security Force. But the two are quite different organisations for political reasons, but it's a complicated history. There was a mandate, the UN had a mandate to facilitate the implementation of the peace agreement, and part of that peace agreement was to insure that the establishment of the Kosovo Protection Corps and it's further development. The UN was obliged to insure that this organisation adhered to various standards, that it recruited a number of ethnic minorities, that it responded to the needs of everyone on its territory. That it was transparent and accountable, and there were policies developed and practices developed that enabled its further professionalization. Depending on who you spoke with, that was to lead the way to it becoming a future defence force, and at least that's how the Kosovo Protection Corps saw it and some external actors as well. But it was a civilian emergency organisation and when you have any conflict you have to demobilise the combatants. You can't simply take away their guns and get rid of their internal structures, you have to find a way in which they can coexist with those they might've been fighting against. There needs to be some reintegration program. Oftentimes, you might have a program whereby former combatants of non-state armed groups would be recruited or join the army, the state armed forces. Or there might be other programs that will enable them to socially, economically, politically participate and address their psychosocial needs. Unless you do that, there is always a risk that you're going to return to conflict because you have a large number of former combatants whose grievances might not have been addressed, who don't have any jobs, don't have any income to support their families. These are the people that you need to attend to if you don't want further conflict. I would argue that you also need to attend to those who don't pose a threat to peace. Those who are - those are often ignored. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Who are these people who are ignored? Eleanor Gordon: Generally speaking, those who aren't seen as what is called a spoiler to the peace process. Those who aren't seen as potentially destabilising, those who might not take up arms. Those who might not challenge the legitimacy of the government, who might protest or disrupt what those who are trying to establish a sustainable peace are trying to do. Often there's quite a narrow interpretation of what a spoiler is, who they are, and people generally assume that spoilers are simply those who might take up arms and cause an escalation or an outbreak of conflict. But of course if you have the majority of the population who don't accept the legitimacy of the government, or who don't have faith or confidence in the police process. You're not going to have a sustainable or meaningful peace, even though they might not take up arms. So you do need to respond to the needs of those who have been marginalised, those who continue to be marginalised and - ignored ethnic minorities, women, disabled people, young people, children, elderly people, they're often ignored. It tends to be young, fit men, stereotype who are considered to be those who might be potential spoilers. Their agency isn't recognised and it's not that people might consider that young, fit men, to stereotype and generalise, need to be fixed, but they need to either be controlled or prevented from destabilising a fragile peace. Former combatants, those who have access to arms, those who've been fighting and are trained, and those who may have grievances, those who may not have attachments or who have been desensitised to violence or traumatised they are likely - more likely than others to take up arms again so you need to address that threat. I'm generalising quite a lot so of course there are many organisations that do attend to the needs of women and children and marginalised groups, and this is going from experience 10 years ago so things have moved on. Even if you do stop armed conflict, if you're not addressing the security and justice needs of women, of children, of the marginalised groups for whatever reason, you can't consider that the security and justice is meaningful, that peace is being enjoyed by everyone. Therefore, in my opinion, there's no meaningful peace, if only a small minority are able to enjoy the dividends of peace. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: As I said in the beginning of this podcast, Eleanor is in many ways, a living example of how we can actually make a difference in the world. But what began her journey to work with social justice issues? Eleanor Gordon: I guess when I was younger, what began my interest or passion in social justice issues and - it's something that drives many people inside and there may not have been an incident that ignited that desire to respond to what you see as injustices. But I remember being very young and wanting to do something positive. I lived in a bit of a rubbish town, you were lucky if you got out, a lot of drug and drink problems. A lot of people, even in the school, would say don't be silly you can't change anything, who do you think are. It's just never - I think it's important for students to know that you can change things, just the way we treat each other on a day-to-day basis, you change people's lives. If people say no, do not ever let it stop you, you can make a positive difference. We have a responsibility if we're lucky enough to have a good life we have a responsibility to respond to those who haven't been as fortunate. It could just as easily be us who is in a conflict affected environment, who've been forced to leave that country, who've become an asylum seeker, who are living in conflict or living in a household and suffering violence or insecurity. We can do something about it, and we know these things are going on and we can change things for the better. If we're told no, just - we know that we can do things. Andrea Thiis-Evensen: Eleanor has spent eighteen years working in the field of international development, after leaving the UN Eleanor's worked with a number of universities and she's now a lecturer at Monash University. So the last years Eleanor has used her past experience in her academic work. Eleanor Gordon: My research - I decided to reflect upon my experience in order to inform my research and hopefully use my experience to potentially inform policy and thereby practice. Because I saw that there was a significant disconnect between those engaged at the state level in peace     building and those engaged at the ground level. International NGOs tended to focus on communities, I'm generalising greatly but in the security and justice sector, that's my experience. International organisations focused on building institutions, policies, processes and structures. My research was looking at ways in which to build sustainable peace, focusing particularly on the security and justice sector. By bridging those two endeavours so that the people who are affected by conflict, people at the ground level, were able to inform the security and justice structures and policies and legislation that was being developed at the state level. Too often, what happened was, you would build a state security institution or draft a piece of legislation or policy and thereafter you might consult with the people who the institution was there to respond to their needs. Or you might tell them about it, but there wasn't comprehensive engagement by local communities at the early stages of the reform process. So my research was looking at ways in which this could be done, ways in which the two approaches to building security and justice after peace could be integrated. As part of that, it's led on to further research which is looking at ways in which peacebuilding in the security and justice sector can be more inclusive. Ways in which it can involve women, ways in which poor people tend to be marginalised and why they need to - their needs need to be addressed. Andrea Thiis-Evensen:  That was Eleanor, thank you so much for listening to this episode of Peace and Gender. My name is Andrea Thiis-Evensen and this podcast was produced for Monash Gender Peace and Security, and MOJO news. Music: "Solitude" by Broke for free –  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License Artwork: Shayla Rance

Last year, Alex Cruikshanks came on the show to talk about Belgrade, a really detailed and wide-ranging episode. And we had such a great time, he's back again to talk about more recent history in Yugoslavia, specifically the brutal massacre at Srebrenica. Yugoslavia, as anyone who was alive in the 1990s knows, was falling apart in the early part of the decade. The Bosnian War was raging, and in 1995, some 8,000 Bosniaks, mostly men and boys, were killed. What led up to this genocide, how could something like this happen in our recent history, and what has been the fallout since? Alex is the perfect person to about this, not just because of his podcast, but he just made a trip to participate in a peace march in the region. How the massacre began As Alex told me this episode, in the late 1980s, a sort of coalition-by-default formed as Yugoslavia held elections, as the parties that represented the various ethnic factions of the country won a majority. But they soon realized that all that was holding them together was an anti-Communist stance, so the coalition immediately began dissolving. In a referendum in 1992, Bosnians voted for independence, and in the Spring and Summer of 1992, Serbian nationalists begin staging coups throughout the country, placing Serbs in power, and begin massacring non-Serb populations. Srebrenica stronghold But while all of this was going on, there were pockets where Bosniaks were able to hold off the Serbian nationalists from taking over. One such stronghold was the small town of Srebrenica, which was able to maintain its autonomy for three years. As Alex says, it only had about 6,000 people before the war, but because so many have been killed or expelled throughout the region, it swells to an unsustainable population of 40,000. In 1993 a militia forms in Srebrenica to try to fight back, and the Serbian army takes notice, planning an invasion. But just as that was heating up, UN peacekeepers visited the town, and ended up putting a small force there, keeping the violence at bay for two years. How the UN peacekeepers couldn't keep the peace But in 1995, Slobodan Milosevic decides it's time to try to shut down the enclaves, and he issues what becomes known as Directive 7, which orders the separation of Srebrenica from the other enclaves and “by planned and well-thought-out combat operations, create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica.” That's about as grim and awful as it gets, but as Alex says, it's likely Milosevic was not thinking of massacre, but rather starving the residents until they give up. The Serb national army then takes UN peacekeepers as hostages to ward off UN airstrikes, and in July they begin their combat operations in earnest. Unfortunately, the Bosnian militia were not well-trained fighters, and they ended up falling back. How the massacre happened, and what happened after As the Serbian army advanced, many hoped the UN would step in and be able to save the Bosniaks. But many men and boys had a feeling that if they stayed, they would be killed. So they fled, but unfortunately, the Serbs were able to ambush them. It's a truly horrific story of ethnic cleansing that happened not that long ago. But as Alex and I discuss in this week's episode, the Bosnian people are actually some of the most liberal and optimistic people we've met. It's an incredible story, and it's important that we never forget it. Outline of This Episode [1:30] The beginnings of war [7:17] Bosniaks able to hold off Serbs [12:45] The difference between Croats and Serbs [21:09] How the massacre happened [35:00] Conditions during the war [40:45] How the conflict resolves [43:33] The war crimes tribunal [51:40] Alex's trip to Bosnia Resources Mentioned The History of Yugoslavia Podcast Belgrade: The Rise of the White City Connect With Stephanie stephanie@historyfangirl.com https://historyfangirl.com Support Stephanie on Patreon Featuring the song “Places Unseen” by Lee Rosevere. More info and photographs for this episode at: https://historyfangirl.com/the-massacre-at-srebrenica/

As a shy child in communist Yugoslavia, Amir Salihovic never pictured himself leading prayers as an Imam, especially since his teachers taught that there was no such thing as God. But as civil war broke out, he found himself driven by persecution to study more deeply the religion he was being persecuted for being a part of. Now he leads an Islamic Society of Bosniaks, where he appreciates religious freedom and teaches his community to treasure their past while becoming proud, productive Americans.(p/c KUED)

As a shy child in communist Yugoslavia, Amir Salihovic never pictured himself leading prayers as an Imam, but as civil war broke out, he found himself driven by persecution to study more deeply the religion he was being persecuted for being a part of. Now he leads an Islamic Society of Bosniaks, where he appreciates religious freedom and teaches his community to treasure their past while becoming proud, productive Americans.

A mosque that was demolished by Serb forces in Bosnia's civil war has been re-opened in Banja Luka. Banja Luka's historical Ferhadija Mosque has been re-built and re-consecrated. Serb forces had demolished the house of worship in 1993 during Bosnia's civil war. Kemal Gunić spent years lobbying for the reconstruction, collecting donations and helping to organize the construction work. Again and again, Serb nationalists opposed to the mosque staged protests that often turned violent. When the cornerstone was laid in 2001, Kemal Gunić witnessed the stoning of a fellow Bosniak. He was determined that there be no rioting at the mosque's re-opening. A peaceful ceremony would send a vital signal to, among others, all those Muslims who still don't trust the peace process between Serbs and Bosniaks.