Nadja Halilbegovich | |
|---|---|
 Speaking in Toronto in 2010 | |
| Born | July 29, 1979 |
| Alma mater | Butler University |
| Occupation(s) | Author, speaker, peace activist |
| Notable work | My Childhood Under Fire (diary of her childhood in the Bosnian War and Siege of Sarajevo) |
| Website | www |
Nadja Halilbegovich (born July 29, 1979) is an author, speaker, peace activist and survivor of the Bosnian War and the Siege of Sarajevo.
Before the war, Halilbegovich sang and played guitar with Palcici, Sarajevo's internationally-known children's choir. The war broke out when she was 12. She was wounded by a bombshell a year later in 1992. Halilbegovich began sharing her diary entries and reading her poems on the National Radio and was hired to host her own show called "The Music Box" that broadcast about the war from the perspective of a 13-year-old.
In 1993 four of her poems were featured in the book "Mom I don't want to go to the basement!" The title referenced all the time that the citizens of Sarajevo spent during the incessant bombings. At age 14, the first half of her diary was published in Bosnia as "Sarajevo's Childhood Wounded By War." In January 1995, National Dutch Television[ clarification needed ] did a documentary of her life.
Near the end of the war, Halilbegovich escaped from Bosnia and became a refugee in the United States. Though she spoke little English when she arrived, she finished three years of high school in two years. Meanwhile, the sequel to her war diary was published in Bosnia. She was on hand to witness the finalizing of the Dayton Agreement in Dayton, Ohio that brought an end to the hostilities in Bosnia.
In 1997 Nadja received a scholarship from Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. She majored in Vocal Performance and Theater. Halilbegovich became a popular speaker and peace activist, balancing her college schedule with speaking engagements at such events as the Global Young Leaders Conference in Washington D.C., the State of the World Forum in San Francisco and The Summit on Youth and Peace in Orlando with Desmond Tutu.
In 1999 her story was told in the book "The Courage To Give" by Jackie Waldman. [1] In 2000 she was featured alongside the Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa in the book "Architects of Peace" by Michael Collopy. [2] In March, 2001 she was honored with the first Woman of Distinction Award from Butler University. On graduating in 2002, she embarked on a 9-month speaking tour throughout the U.S. and Canada on behalf of Free The Children.
In 2006, both parts of her diary were published in the U.S. and Canada as "My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary". The book has won numerous awards and has been translated into French and Indonesian.
On September 9, 2006 Halilbegovich was one of 112 speakers at the dropping knowledge Table of Free Voices. The speakers simultaneously answered 100 questions posed from around the world on the state of the world today. This nine-hour global streaming event was held in Berlin on the site of the first Nazi book burning.
In 2009 Halilbegovich was featured in the textbook "Elements of Literature, Second Course", [3] which compares Halilbegovich's book, "My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary" to "The Diary of a Young Girl" by Anne Frank.
On December 22, 2013 Halilbegovich received an honorary Doctorate from Butler University.
The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, also known as the Dayton Agreement or the Dayton Accords, is the peace agreement reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, United States, on 21 November 1995, and formally signed in Paris, on 14 December 1995. These accords put an end to the three-and-a-half-year-long Bosnian War, which was part of the much larger Yugoslav Wars.
The siege of Sarajevo was a prolonged blockade of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Bosnian War. After it was initially besieged by the forces of the Yugoslav People's Army, the city was then besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska. Lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, it was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad, and was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war is commonly seen as having started on 6 April 1992, following a number of earlier violent incidents. The war ended on 14 December 1995 when the Dayton accords were signed. The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, those of Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and Republika Srpska, proto-states led and supplied by Croatia and Serbia, respectively.
Igman is a mountain plateau in central Bosnia and Herzegovina. Geologically, Igman is part of the Dinaric Alps and formed largely of secondary and tertiary sedimentary rock, mostly Limestone. It is located southwest of Sarajevo, bordering the Bjelašnica range in the south and west, Hadžići and Ilidža in the north, and the river Željeznica in the east. Igman's highest point, Crni vrh, west of the Malo Polje road, at an altitude of 1,510 metres, the homonym highest elevation on the east side of this road reaches an elevation of 1,502 metres. Most of Igman is covered with mixed forest with local pastures. Igman was the location of the lowest recorded temperature in the region, −43 °C (−45 °F). Igman has been the site of extensive combat during the 1992-95 Siege of Sarajevo and certain areas, in particular the surroundings of former front lines, feature a high mine risk.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Janine di Giovanni is an author, journalist, and war correspondent currently serving as the Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. She is a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, a non-resident Fellow at The New America Foundation and the Geneva Center for Security Policy in International Security and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the Blake-Dodd nonfiction prize for her lifetime body of work. She has contributed to The Times, Vanity Fair, Granta, The New York Times, and The Guardian.
Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Sarajevo (ISBN 0-14-024205-8) is a 1992 non-fiction book by Zlata Filipović, who was a young girl living in Sarajevo while it was under siege.
Kemal Kurspahić was a Bosnian journalist. He was managing editor of The Connection Newspapers in Alexandria, Virginia and founder of the media in Democracy Institute, dedicated to promoting higher standards in journalism in post-conflict societies and countries in transition to democracy. He won broad international recognition as the Editor-in-Chief of the Bosnian daily Oslobođenje in Sarajevo, 1989-1994.
Svetlana Broz is a Bosnian author and physician who specializes in cardiology. She is the granddaughter of the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito.
Zlata Filipović is a Bosnian-Irish diarist. She kept a diary from 1991 to 1993 when she was a child helping in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
Bisera Alikadić is a contemporary Bosnian poet and author, best known best for her work Larva and Krug. She mostly writes romance novels as well as children's books. She was one of the first Bosnian women to publish romance novels. Her books Grad hrabrost and Knjiga vremena express the city of Sarajevo's struggle during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.
Ava Lowery is an American peace activist and documentary filmmaker from Alabama who has created over 100 Flash-based animations denouncing the Iraq War, former United States President George W. Bush, policies of the Republican Party and several individual Republican politicians. She has actively demonstrated against the war, and in support of soldiers.
Hasanaginica, also Asanaginica, is a South Slavic folk ballad, created during the period of 1646–49, in the region of Imotski, which at the time was a part of the Bosnia Eyalet of the Ottoman Empire.
Operation Irma was the name applied to a series of airlifts of injured civilians from Bosnia and Herzegovina during the siege of Sarajevo. The airlifts were initiated after the wounding of five-year-old Irma Hadžimuratović attracted international media attention. The programme was reported to have evacuated hundreds of Sarajevans during the second half 1993, but attracted significant controversy concerning its scale, evacuee selection criteria, and the motivations of the western European governments and press that inspired it.
The Perfect Circle is a 1997 Bosnian film by Ademir Kenović set in Sarajevo during the siege of 1992-1996. It was written by Kenović with Pjer Žalica and Abdulah Sidran. The title derives from the ability of "Hamza" to draw perfect circles on paper.
My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary is the Bosnian War diary of the speaker and peace activist Nadja Halilbegovich. The journal was written when Nadja was between ages 12 and 16 and documents the war and Siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995. The diary was originally published in Bosnia by the humanitarian organization Our Children in two parts: Sarajevsko Djetinjstvo Ratom Ranjeno in 1994 and Sarajevsko Djetinjstvo Ratom Ranjeno: Drugi Dio in 1998. The abridged diary was published in English under the current title by Kids Can Press in the U.S. and Canada in 2006. It has also been published in French in 2007 and Indonesian in 2008. The book chronicles four years of war seen through the eyes of a child and teenager.
The Battle of Vrbanja Bridge was an armed confrontation which took place on 27 May 1995, between United Nations (UN) peacekeepers from the French Army and elements of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). The fighting occurred at the Vrbanja Bridge crossing of the Miljacka river in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Bosnian War. The VRS seized the French-manned United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) observation posts on both ends of the bridge, taking hostage 12 French peacekeepers. Ten were taken away, and two were kept at the bridge as human shields.
Merima Ključo is a Bosnian concert accordionist and composer. In 1993 she moved to the Netherlands as a refugee of the Bosnian War. Currently she is a Bosnian-Dutch citizen. After receiving a Genius visa in 2011 she became an American resident and is based in Los Angeles.
The War Childhood Museum is a historical museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina that opened in January 2017. The museum presents the experiences of children who lived through the war in Bosnia, told through objects, video testimonies, and excerpts from oral histories. The 2018 Council of Europe Museum Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the museum industry, was awarded to the War Childhood Museum as part of the 2018 European Museum of the Year Award.
Tatjana "Tanja" Ljujić-Mijatović is a Bosnian politician. By vocation, she is a horticulturist and landscape designer. During the Bosnian War, Ljujić-Mijatović served as member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
