'PEACE HERO' EXPERIENCED WAR AS TEEN

What do Nelson Mandela, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, Jimmy Carter, Mother Teresa and Nadja Halilbegovich have in common?

They are all "peace heroes," according to the nonprofit Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

You have probably heard of the first five people. But Halilbegovich is not as widely known: A Bosnian Muslim, she grew up in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and was 12 years old when war broke out in her city about 10 years ago.

Despite the war being waged so close to them, she and her family tried to live normal lives, she explained in a recent interview at Butler University, where she is taking more classes after graduating last spring.

"What I did was, I began writing my diary. Both of them were published, one when I was 14 and one when I was 16. And then I read parts of my diary on the radio, and at 13 I had my own radio show, and I sang in the choir. . . . And we had school over the radio or in the basements."

While history tells us that the war was fought between several different ethnic groups, Halilbegovich saw only two forces -- "the aggressor who besieged our city, the capital, and the people who were caught in it."

And while she believed there were only two sides involved, she also believed that a third should have intervened.

"Very many times in my diary I would write, 'Where is the world?' 'Why is everyone just watching?' So when, finally, NATO bombarded the hard weapons and tanks that for 3 1/2 years were besieging the city and killing innocent people, it was definitely for us help and salvation."

But at the same time that NATO was preparing to help Bosnia out of the war, Halilbegovich, then 16, was preparing to get out of Bosnia with a group of students: "I received a letter telling me that I had a host family waiting for me in Ohio. This was through a humanitarian organization in Croatia," she said.

But escaping the besieged city by underground tunnels proved almost impossible.

For three days, her mother tried to get governmental permission to leave. But she was denied all three times. So on the third night, they tried to leave illegally. They used false identification papers to try to pass the guards to the tunnel, but they were still turned back.

"The next day there was a big massacre in my street. A bomb exploded in the middle of the market and killed 68 people, and more than 100 were wounded. It was a busy market, and my mom at that time was at the parliament building again. And when the news of the chaos came in, the official was so annoyed with her, and kind of in haste he signed the permits, and we left that night through the tunnel."

Looking back on the war, she said: "I often say that it feels like a lifetime ago, and I feel sometimes that I've lived far longer than 22 years. It was an experience that definitely made a 12-year-old mature overnight. Emotionally, it was a very meaningful and very deep experience. It was all that I never dreamed of."

But while the war did force her to mature, it did not erase her childhood. "I did not allow the war to steal my childhood. It was a wounded childhood, or changed childhood, or abnormal childhood, in the sense that I lived in the war, but by no means a stolen one," she said.

For Halilbegovich, coming to America meant escaping a war-torn country and entering an invincible haven of peace. "Before September 11th, I very much believed that nothing would ever happen to America. . . . (So) it was a double stab, I guess, for a survivor of war to see an act of war happen on the ground of kind of a salvation country," she said.

The terrorist attacks on the United States were unexpected. So, too, was the war in her homeland. "My parents were well-educated people with college degrees, and we never thought that this could happen to us. It was just kind of like disbelief or denial. You just couldn't imagine the worst. And then when the worst happened, you know, then you had to take it."

Her experiences also have given her insight into how the events of Sept. 11 might affect U.S. children.

"For 12 years of my life, I was just like American kids. I was in a sense ungrateful, or really I would put it rather unknowing or unaware that there is a different kind of life. So I really needed a wake-up call, and that wake-up call was a harsh one. It was war," she said.

"I always believed that America would not have that wake-up call, but September 11th indeed was a bitter taste of that," she added. "So I think ever since, people have started to reflect and re-evaluate what they have and how grateful they should be."

Perhaps more important is not what Halilbegovich experienced during the war, but what she learned from it. "War, in a sense, was also for me a time for me to realize who I am and what I stand for, and what are my morals," she said.

The war caused her to seek greater understanding through religion. "Perhaps it took that to make me realize that indeed there is a higher power," she said.

During the war, she asked her parents if she could take some classes in religion, including Christianity. But she learned something deeper, too. "I really learned from that point on to love God and to communicate in a sense through silence or prayer, and I continue doing that."

The war also made her evaluate her relationships with others. "I realized that I wasn't associating with people because I had the same religion as them, or I was born into the same religion as them, or I had the same ethnicity. Very much back then and now, I associate with people by the nature of their deeds or by their heart."

That way of thinking might be unusual for a person who survived a war in which many people were killed solely because of their ethnicity.

"To me it never made sense to make religious or ethnic divisions," she continued. "My best friend is Sanja, and she's Serbian, and her religion is Eastern Orthodox, and we're still best friends."

Halilbegovich has made peace with her war years. "As a survivor of the war, I could have emerged with certain bitterness, or with certain intolerance. . . . I guess I've just learned to realize that tolerance is the only way really to live happily on this Earth," she said.

"Embracing every religion, every person of every creed, of every denomination, of every country. I think that's the only way that this world can come together and live in prosperity."

ASSISTANT EDITOR: George Watson, 14.