While fighting continued Sunday in the streets of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the streets of Chicago, the city of immigrants, Croatians and Serbians held peaceful events but testified to the level of animosity borne of a war being fought afar.
In the 5700 block of North Redwood Drive, Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Cathedral held its annual Serbfest.
On the streets surrounding Holy Trinity Church in the Pilsen neighborhood, Croatian-Americans walked in a solemn procession, with Croatian hymns blaring from a car in observance of Bastrica Day.
To hear the feelings expressed at the two ethnic gatherings was to hear two seemingly different wars, lived in some senses here and abroad.
In a recent conversation over grocery produce, Stojanka Kovacevic confronted the burden that being a Serbian-American has become.
She and another woman had been chatting pleasantly, discussing how best to tell which fruits and vegetables were ripe. After a little while, the woman, noticing Kovacevic`s accent, asked, ”Are you Italian?”
”No, I am Serbian,” Kovacevic replied.
The conversation ended there, as Kovacevic knew it might. The woman walked away.
”We are looked upon as barbarians,” Kovacevic, a 60-year-old Chicago resident, said Sunday, her voice breaking with emotion. ”That`s what hurts so much. That feeling, like I am a piece of dirt over here, not a person.”
In Pilsen, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory spoke at the Croatian mass, appealing for ”the violence and bloodshed to come to an immediate end” and condemning ”the aggression that has taken place among hundreds of thousands of innocent people whose lives are in jeopardy.”
”There is not a heart in this church this morning that is not filled with a fervent prayer for the safety, security and protection of the people of your homeland of Croatia,” he said.
Daniel Bakovich spoke for many of the Croatian-Americans when he talked bitterly about the ”aggressive Serbs.” On a trip to his Croatian homeland with six other U.S. military veterans not long ago, he saw the starving people and the poorly armed Croatian soldiers.
”If there is (animosity between the cultures), it`s on their part for denying what`s really going on over there,” he said.
He and hundreds of other Croatian-Americans at Holy Trinity gathered to observe Bastrica Day, a traditional Croation holiday in honor of the Virgin Mary. They closed the mass by singing ”God Bless America” with the fervor of a hymn.
”This is America, not Europe. This is a wonderful country,” said Mat Cljkusic, clearly glad to be in Chicago, where disagreements over his homeland are debated with words, not fought with weapons.
Meanwhile, Serbian-Americans talked of the dark and angry days they face. War defiles their homeland. News accounts of alleged atrocities by Serbian soldiers defile their culture.
They went ahead with their annual Serbfest, determined in no small measure to demonstrate to outsiders and reaffirm for themselves a sense of the worth in the Serbian culture.
They reminded themselves of this in little ways. In the crepes called palcinkas. In the orange bumper stickers that said, ”Proud to be Serbian.”
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”We are a gentle people,” Zora Rupich said as she surveyed the gathering with satisfaction. ”We are a religious people. We are not barbarians.”
Mirko Dobrijevic, director of Christian education at the Serbian church, spoke of death threats he and the members of the church had received.
”It seems that everyone has predetermined that the Serbs are the guilty factor,” he said. ”There is no side exempted from guilt in this war.”
The war brings back painful memories for Kovacevic, who remembers the atrocities of World War II. She and other members of her family avoided a concentration camp only because a fire broke out on a box car taking them to the camp. The family was able to escape.
But one tale of kindness remains from that war. Kovacevic said she remembers that her father escaped execution because a neighbor risked his life to tell him that Croatian forces were taking all the Serbian men from her village to be killed. The neighbor, she recalled, was a Croatian.