Running with a dream

Bosnian recalls how she escaped to compete on country’s first Olympic team

Bosnian Muslim men pray near the coffins of victims exhumed from mass graves during a funeral ceremony in the Bosnian town of Vlasenica, 50 kilometers northeast of Sarajevo, in 2006.

By David Crary - The Associated Press

NEW YORK – For her master’s thesis at Columbia University’s journalism school, where she graduates today, Mirsada Buric wrote an article about herself.

More specifically, it was about four months of her life in 1992, when her village in Bosnia was overrun by ethnic-cleansing militiamen. She spent 13 days in a prison camp, resumed long-distance running in the sniper-targeted streets of Sarajevo, and then – like a dream – was able to fly out of the besieged city to compete on Bosnia’s first-ever Olympic team.

“It still doesn’t make any sense,” she said, reflecting back on the war that wracked her homeland. “I still cannot see how my neighbors could turn on me.” Now 38, and a resident of Arizona, she hopes her degree from one of America’s top journalism schools will help her become a foreign correspondent, ideally back in the Balkans where her remarkable saga unfolded.

Buric was 22 in the spring of 1992 when war broke out in Bosnia. Bosnian Serb nationalists responded to a declaration of independence from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia by encircling multiethnic Sarajevo and killing or chasing out Bosnian Muslims from scores of villages and towns.

A journalism student and budding track star at the time, Buric was taken prisoner along with 13 relatives by Bosnian Serb militiamen who swept through her village near Sarajevo. Her brother, she learned later, was killed.

She was released from a prison camp two weeks later, but her equipment, including running shoes, were confiscated.

With borrowed shoes, she resumed training in Sarajevo. She ran past buildings ruined by Serb bombardments and twice was shot at by snipers, and she clung to her hopes of competing at the Olympics in Barcelona that July despite seemingly impossible odds.

“That dream kept me going – that was my survival mode,” she said in an interview this week. “Even when I was out in the streets all by myself, I didn’t feel that much fear because of it.” With little time to spare before the Games, UN peacekeepers arranged for a flight out of Sarajevo’s embattled airport, and the International Olympic Committee agreed to allow the Bosnians to compete under their own flag.

Finishing last in her heat of the 3,000 meters was no defeat. She still remembers the ovation from the crowd, cheering her on.

Among the many people around the world moved by Buric’s story was Eric Adam, an audiovisual specialist from Prescott, Arizona. Through letters, telephone calls and eventually Adam’s visit to the Balkans, the two fell in love, moved together to Prescott and got married on December 31, 1993.

Buric competed in cross-country at a two-year college and later in track at Adams State University, for which she won the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division II national title in the 5,000 meters in 1995.

After completing her studies, Buric became a reporter, winning several journalism awards during seven years with the Daily Courier in Prescott.

Buric got divorced a few years ago, but she and Adam remain on good terms. They have two children, 9 and 7, who stayed with him while she was at Columbia for the past nine months.

She has visited Bosnia five times since 1993, most recently in January to interview past acquaintances and associates for her master’s thesis.

The city has long since rebuilt itself from the devastation of the siege; the most visible reminder, Buric said, is a cemetery for the war dead in what had once been a soccer field.

But she was struck by the lingering ethnic divisions in a city that before the war had prided itself on its cosmopolitan tolerance.

“There’s still a lot of pain from what happened – still a process of healing that’s taking place, even 16 years later,” she said.

She hopes her thesis can be expanded into a book, then she hopes to land a job reporting from overseas – from the Balkans if possible, or perhaps from Russia.

“When I was running through Sarajevo, politics affected every aspect of my life – I didn’t have a choice,” Buric said. “In Barcelona, I felt it was right to speak out against the atrocities that were happening.”

“If athletes feel that way,” she added, “I say they should follow their hearts.”