Jasmina Joldić was nine when she found out she was born into a religion.
Her mother, Selma, was trying to explain to little Jasmina and her older sister, Amela, why their father had been taken away by armed men.
“I didn’t know who I was, or what I was, until the war started,” Joldić says of the labels that would – she realised in an instant on that day her Tata was taken away – put a violent end to an idyllic childhood.
Until that moment, Enver and Selma Joldić had been shielding their two young daughters from a state and society that was collapsing around them.
“We knew that things weren’t right when Dad was taken to a concentration camp and Mum couldn’t explain to us what that was,” Joldić says. “And where he was.”
Imagine, Joldić says, being nine and hearing that “they” have taken your father away.
“They are your neighbours,” she says. “They have come in with guns to take him away. And you don’t know where he is. And you don’t know when he will be back.”
Then, for the first time in your life, the conversation goes deeper. You start to talk about religion, she says.
“You’re trying to grapple with big terms,” she says. “And big ideas.”
Joldić learns that she was born, though not raised, Muslim.
Her mother tells her: “You know, twice a year, we go to lunch at our grandparents’ place where our family gathers?”
“And it’s like: ‘Oh, that’s religion?’”
Joldić was born a citizen of Yugoslavia. It is July 1992 and the Balkan socialist federation is crumbling. A three-way conflict has erupted in Bosnia between Orthodox Serbs, Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats. Life for the Joldić family, as for hundreds of thousands more, would be irrevocably upended.
The events of that day 33 years ago forced the Joldićs upon a path, beset by trauma and triumph, that would see them flee their homeland and eventually put down roots in Brisbane’s southern suburbs.
It was a journey that made Joldić, now 43, more determined to achieve. After a distinguished career in the public service, she rose to become the director general of Queensland’s department of justice and attorney general. When the new LNP government put the broom through William Street a year later, Joldić was among those swept out.
She is now the higher education deputy secretary in the federal government, and knows a thing or two about the machinations of government. As she listens to escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric – both in Australia and globally – the “demonising” of the other – Joldić is gripped by what she says as “almost PTSD”.
“That can escalate really quickly,” she says. “I know where that leads – it can destroy a society.”
***
The peace agreement to end the Bosnian war – brokered in Dayton, USA – was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, almost 30 years ago to the day that Joldić sits on the timber veranda of a cafe in Tarragindi, Brisbane.
So much has changed over those intervening three decades for Joldić – including her perspective of those Dayton Accords.
Thrashed out in an air force base in Ohio by the leaders of Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia during Bill Clinton’s administration, Dayton split the nation in two: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, or the Serb Republic.
The result was what some scholars call “an ugly peace” – a complicated patchwork of ethnic blocs stitched together in a complex power-sharing agreement held in check by each side’s power of veto.
From her perch on the deck of the cafe where she is more than a customer – the Turkish owner’s daughter plays soccer with her niece – Joldić looks out and sees a Sikh family taking a dog for a walk through the park. Two young girls squeal as they ride scooters down the concrete embankment of an ephemeral creek. Kookaburras cackle from their perch in black and towering ironbark. A man mows his lawn.
She says there is a German word for the relationship to this place she learned from her years as a child refugee in Berlin – Stammkundin. It means “a regular”.
“As Bosnians,” she says, “We’ve always been quite sceptical about what Dayton has done to our country.
“That scepticism arose from the fact that agreement froze us in time.”
“For me, I think when Gaza happened and when Ukraine happened, I started to shift my views and think: well at least it stopped the war.
“It stopped the killing. It stopped the bloodshed on the Balkans.”
So much blood was shed in the Bosnian war it introduced a chilling euphemism to the English language, a translation of the Serbo-Croatian phrase “etnicko ciscenje” – ethnic cleansing.
At Srebrenica, 30 years ago, more than 8,000 Muslim men were detained and executed by the forces of Republika Srpska. The world watched the first legally recognised genocide in Europe since second world war in horror.
Joldić watched in a one-bedroom apartment for refugees in Berlin when those indelible images of Bosnian Serb forces advancing upon the besieged city came through the TV. She can still picture the scene. Her father, wearing purple tracksuit pants and a singlet – “the central heating was really hot”.
“I remember absolutely everything,” she says.
“I vividly remember Dad saying: ‘Oh my God Selma, they are gonna kill them. They are going to absolutely slaughter them.’”
***
On the other side of the Brisbane river in New Farm, where the poncianas are exploding with in blooms of red, Ian Kemish also vividly recalls the Balkans of the mid 1990s. He and Joldić have struck up a friendship as both try to make sense of the legacy of Srebrenica and Dayton, which they experienced from very different perspectives, 30 years ago.
Back then Kemish was a 30-something mid-level Australian diplomat. He remembers the flight from Zagreb to Sarajevo, strapped into the fuselage of a big Ukrainian Antonov aircraft. Donning a flak jacket and helmet. Driving through “sniper alley”, from airport to capital, the driver positioning the car between trucks – “just in case”. Sarajevo besieged by Serbian secessionists. Its people, so well-dressed and groomed amid the chaos and ruins.
There was a ceasefire at the time but, nonetheless, “one heard shooting in the distance pretty much constantly”.
“Sarajevo was a sombre place,” he recalls. “The minarets everywhere are really striking. But also, at that time, every bit of spare land either had cabbages growing in it or it had graves in it.”
Yugoslavia had been famed for its coexistence of religion, Kemish says. Christians, Orthodox and Catholic, Muslims and Jews living and worshipping alongside one another for centuries. Now, a new brand of politician had stoked the fires of ethnic nationalism. Ancient hatreds erupted, Kemish says. Neighbours turned on neighbours.
Dayton, Kemish says, froze the frontiers where they were, left nationalists in power. Tensions remain and continue to flare. The political framework that is the legacy of the accords is “pretty creaky”, the scepticism of it warranted.
“When I think about various peace agreements, it’s almost always this way,” Kemish says. “While ending the killing is the imperative, the political solution can be elusive.”
But, like Joldić, Kemish believes the achievements of Dayton have only become more impressive with time.
“I keep coming back to one point, which is that, 30 years of peace, in a strict military sense, is a very worthwhile achievement,” he says. “Given the circumstances in which those agreements were struck”.
The retired diplomat and novelist is working on a second book, set after the Bosnian war. It is, he says, about people who carry hidden histories and hidden traumas into peaceful places.
***
Is it the palm trees or the humidity, Joldić wonders? She commutes to work in Canberra now – but there is something in the Brisbane air that tells Joldić she is home the moment she steps out of the plane.
“We are typical migrants, it was the only area that we could afford,” she says, explaining her parents’ decision to settle in Rochedale South on Brisbane’s outer southern fringe two decades ago.
“It was really strange, to be very honest. Imagine this teenage kid growing up in Berlin ... Brisbane about 24 years ago looked very, very different. We came to Australia not speaking the language. It was hot. It was humid. Shops were shutting at 5pm.”
Now, her uncle and aunt “live just around the corner”, her sister got married and moved “three streets away”.
“So we are all in Rochedale South – proper migrants,” she says. “We put our roots down, and that’s home. And, gosh, we love that community.”
Joldić’s was one of the families who founded the city of Bijeljina thousands of years ago. It is part of the Serb Republic – and though she remains connected to and proud of her Bosnian heritage, Joldić has cut ties with her ancestral hometown.
But that is not the story Joldić is here to tell today.
Joldić wants to demonstrate the contribution migrants make to enriching Australia, culturally and economically. And she is here out of a sense of duty, to make that point, in a time of rising rhetoric around immigration and race.
“We have a responsibility, as a nation, not to take social cohesion for granted,” she says. “It can happen quickly and it can escalate and it can escalate horribly wrong. Cohesion is everyone’s responsibility.”
It is a responsibility, Joldić says, to protect the peace and prosperity we enjoy.
“And, God, how lucky are we?,” Joldić says. “How lucky are we?”
