Then They Started Shooting—Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia

What happens to children who grow up with war? How do they live with the daily reality of danger, hunger, and loss—and how does it shape the adults they become?

In Then They Started Shooting (Harvard University Press), child psychiatrist Lynne Jones draws the reader into the compelling stories of Serbian and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian wars of the 1990s. These children endured hardship, loss, family disruption, and constant uncertainty, and yet in a blow to psychiatric orthodoxy, few showed lasting signs of trauma. Thoughts of their personal futures filled their minds, not memories of war.

Nonetheless, Jones suggests in a chilling conclusion, the war affected them deeply. Officially citizens of the same country, the two communities live separate, wary lives. The Muslims hope for reconciliation but cannot believe in it while so many cannot go home and war criminals are still at large. The Serbs resent the outside world, NATO, and fear the return of their Muslim neighbors. Cynical about politics, all of them mistrust their elected leaders. War may end, but the persistence of corruption and injustice keep wounds from healing.

On January 26, OSI sponsored a discussion with Lynne Jones to mark her book's publication. Jones was joined by Mirza Kusljugic, Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the United Nations, and documentary photographer Sara Terry, whose photo project, "Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace" (a book by the same title will be published by Channel Photographics in September 2005), explores the many challenges still confronting Bosnia, more than nine years after the Dayton Peace Accords.

Read a summary of the forum.

View the "Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace" photo gallery.

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