WAR LEGACY IN BOSNIA

When Fata Orlovic returned home after the devastating three-year war, the elderly Bosnian Muslim was shocked by the scene of a large Serbian orthodox church erected on the garden of her house. Orlovic began her relentless legal fight to regain her land nearly seven years ago. Like many other ethnic Bosnian Muslims, she was ethnically cleansed from her village during the 1992-1995 conflict with Serbs, which has claimed her husband’s life. While Orlovic was in exile, the Serb authorities confiscated her land and built a church for Serbs who had moved to the once Muslim-dominated areas. When the Muslim widow returned home in 2000, she began her fight to get the war implant off her garden. Experts believe that Orlovic’s legal battle is a test-case for postwar Bosnia. Meanwhile, The church now stands empty, waiting for the government to find a way to move it elsewhere. As, in terms of the Dayton peace accords that ended the war by splitting Bosnia into two ethnically-based autonomous regions, the Muslim-Croat federation and the Serb Republic, this area has no worshipper left for the Church.