PROTEST GIVES WAR A HUMAN FACE
By Pauline Finch-Durichen

August 3, 1995 – (The Record-Waterloo, Ontario) For eight Bosnian refugee children standing on the outdoor stage at Kitchener's City Hall Wednesday, war has been a daily reality for at least half their lives.

The solemn girls and boys, all aged 10 or younger, stood silently under threatening skies, holding cards that spelled out Stop Genocide in stark black capital letters.

Others held up signs filled with the desperate statistics of war or with slogans like Bosnian Children Have No 911 and Stop Talking Start Action.

The children have recently come from Bosnia and lived through the four-year-old conflict that has torn apart the former Yugoslavia and taken an estimated 300,000 lives.

Of that number, at least 10 per cent have been children; another 76,000 youngsters are orphans.

A crowd of about 100, including several dozen women wearing the traditional Muslim clothing of long robes and headscarves, looked on as speakers urged Canadian and western governments to take a just, rather than "neutral," stance toward the war.

"These children here (on stage) are the lucky ones," explained Naila Jusufragic, co-ordinator of the Bosnian Women's Support Group, which organized the hour-long demonstration.

"They have come to Canada with their lives . . . They still have parents, or at least one parent."

The fighting has seen Serbian nationalist forces make overwhelming gains against former Bosnian Muslim "safe areas" in recent days, but it was the loss of Zepa and Srebrenica "that was just the last straw for us," Jusufragic explained.

"We decided we must do something to let people know what is really happening and who the real victims of this war are."

Emina Rizvanbegovic, a former English professor and torture survivor from Banja Luka, denounced the Serb nationalist policy of so-called ethnic cleansing as "simply genocide . . . which means culture-'cide', youth-'cide', mother-'cide' -- everything."