Then They Started Shooting
Children of the Bosnian War and the Adults They Become
-
- 20,99 €
-
- 20,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
“Remarkable insight and sensitivity . . . deepen[s] our understanding of human resilience and how people rebuild their lives from tragic circumstances.” —KENNETH ROTH, Executive Director, Human Rights Watch
“The stories in this book are eloquently and poignantly recounted, and offer a vital, complex portrait of what the long road to peace looks like.” —DINAW MENGESTU, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air
“Profound . . . Rarely do we get the opportunity to delve into the thoughts of the young caught up in such a tragedy—and meet them not just once in their lives but again years later.” —TIM JUDAH, Europe correspondent for Bloomberg World View, Balkans correspondent for The Economist, and author of The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia
Imagine you are nine years old. Your best friend’s father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. Imagine you are ten years old and have to cross a snow-covered mountain range at night in order to escape the soldiers who are trying to kill you. How would you deal with these memories five, ten, or twenty years later once you are an adult?
Jones, a relief worker and child psychiatrist, interviewed over forty Serb and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian War and now returns, twenty years after the war began, to discover the adults they have become. A must-read for anyone interested in human rights, children’s issues, and the psychological fallout from war, this engaging book addresses the continuing debate about PTSD, the roots of ethnic identity and nationalism, the sources of global conflict, the best paths toward peacemaking and reconciliation, and the resilience of the human spirit.
Lynne Jones was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her work in child psychiatry in conflict-affected areas of Central Europe and has established and directed mental health programs in areas of conflict and natural disaster throughout Latin America, the Balkans, East and West Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Her field diaries have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine and London Review of Books, and her audio diaries have been broadcast on the BBC World Service.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Unlike other adolescents who grew up in war-torn environments, the teenage subjects of child psychiatrist Jones, caught in the crossfire of the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are now more concerned with their personal futures than the memories of war, even though many endured four years of shelling and siege. In this absorbing study, Jones finds that Bosnian children who distanced themselves from the war felt psychologically more comfortable than those who tried to make sense of things a finding that Jones attributes in part to their lack of direct participation in the conflict. In contrast to years of low-intensity conflicts witnessed by Palestinian and South African kids, she concludes, the war in Bosnia was a "prolonged high-intensity conflict in which children had little opportunity for active participation except in sharing the tasks of basic survival." It is sometimes challenging to keep track of the children's names and story lines (she uses only first-name pseudonyms) through interviews from 1996 and 2003, and anyone looking for a comprehensive history of the war won't find it here, but the book offers new insights into Bosnian Serb Muslim relations through the eyes of children and addresses perennial issues of war, trauma and prejudice.
