War memories shape opinions of 3 students

PORTLAND – Ana Prokic watched NATO bombs fall near her family’s home in Serbia. Smadar Bakovic served in Israel’s occupying forces in the Palestinian territories. Charles Data fled his family’s village to escape Sudan’s long-running civil war.

For the three, now college students in Maine, war is far more personal than for most of their American-born classmates.

But while each has a greater awareness of war’s destructive power, they have come to quite different conclusions about the effort to disarm Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Prokic, a junior at Colby College in Waterville, was a 17-year-old in Belgrade during part of NATO’s 11-week bombing campaign in 1999.

Her family’s apartment building had lost electricity, and regular airstrikes were making her stir-crazy. Prokic recalled that after a succession of candlelit evenings inside, her mother finally allowed her to meet some friends at a nearby playground.

The teens sat on swings and talked while anti-aircraft fire lit up the night sky.

“One moment I looked up and said, ‘Look at that huge orange thing,”‘ Prokic said. “The next thing we know we’re all on the ground.”

Four years later, Prokic is relieved that Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes rather than running Serbia. But she says the aerial bombardment of Belgrade killed civilians and did not cause Milosevic’s ouster.

“It was the people, not the Americans, not NATO, not the western Europeans. No one but the people in the country [ousted Milosevic],” Prokic said.

Her view that real change must begin inside a country helps explain Prokic’s opposition to the Bush administration’s plan to remake Iraq.

“Maybe we should have considered more shades of gray before we decided to get into war,” she said. “No little girl should wake up in the middle of the night wondering where her father is.”

The issue is more complicated for Bakovic, a Bates College senior who enrolled in the Israeli army at age 19.

The 26-year-old acknowledges that as a teenager fulfilling compulsory service in south Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, she did not fully understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Years later, as a Bates student, she spent time in Arab villages inside Israel and came to a better understanding of the everyday hardships suffered under occupation. She recalled meeting a Palestinian teacher who had to sneak past Israeli authorities to attend a wedding.

“She kind of smuggled herself in with her two daughters and her baby,” Bakovic recalled. “We danced together, and I held her baby.”

Bakovic feels the U.S.-led war with Iraq is justified, and from her Israeli perspective many of her anti-war classmates are naive.

“I really feel that Americans in a way are very privileged, because they can claim to be pacifist,” she said. “I wish that the world was like that – where saying that ‘I’m against war because it’s bad’ was enough.”

A different concern about U.S. opinion is voiced by Data, a junior at Colby who moved across the Ugandan border when Sudan’s civil war threatened his village. Back in the mid-1980s, Data’s village in southern Sudan was a recruiting ground for rebels fighting the Muslim-dominated government. He recalls sleeping in the bush some nights because it was safer than staying inside.

In 1988, the 7-year-old Data and his brother were able to move across the border to nearby Uganda, their mother’s native country. Their father stayed behind, surviving intensified fighting, but for the last 10 years he’s lived in a Ugandan refugee camp.

Now 22, Data hasn’t taken a stance for or against this war, and his ambivalence is the product of uncertainty over the war’s effects.

“Maybe it is true that Saddam is as bad as the war,” he offered.

Still, he feels that Americans are paying insufficient attention to the war’s impact on Iraqi civilians.

“We are talking about military casualties, and I think that is important to report. You barely hear about what the civilians are going through,” he said.