BOSNIA:	Colleen London, An Adopted Motherland

Photos and Story By Peter Slavin

Thirty years after she went to live in Sarajevo as the American bride of a Bosnian she met at U-M, Colleen London is calling that city home again. She returned to Bosnia last spring as a single woman, taking an influential position with the Bosnian government. Her first, seven-year stay made London a devotee of things Bosnian and fluent in the language. Going back, even in the aftermath of a vicious war, has only cemented the bond.

She knew Sarajevo when it was, to her eye, a kind of city-state, one lying at the crossroads of East and West and of the Christian and Muslim worlds, and she still finds Sarajevans an especially civil and civilized people. Bosnia's mix of peoples and cultures has led to a "live-and-let-live" approach to life she deeply admires.

Contrasting her former and present countries, she finds Bosnia far more inclined to learning. In her view, American society "barely teaches its children to read and only a small percentage of them ever learn to write English adequately, let alone encouraging them to think differently, and an even smaller number ever get sufficient encouragement or opportunity to learn a foreign language."

On the other hand, she says, Bosnian children learn to read and write in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. "It's as if we have here a culture which has always taught its children to be ambidextrous. Since I happen to have made myself a student of how to go about learning to be ambidextrous and flexible linguistically and in my thinking, I discovered in this Bosnian society a soil much more to my liking." She also finds a special gentleness in Bosnian children, noting poor behavior is rare, which she attributes in part to adults' willingness to chastise children when necessary.

Indeed, London considers herself "a Bosnian who just happened to be born in the United States to non-Bosnian parents."

Not one to stand out in a crowd, London dresses modestly and chooses her words carefully, precisely. She could pass for a college professor or minister's wife. Politeness and a sense of humor, however, mask in her a passionate, no-nonsense approach to life.

London and her dog Tsuko, the shepherd-husky mix she brought from Ann Arbor, share an apartment a few blocks from an area of Sarajevo occupied by Serb forces during the city's siege. The Serbs fired shells into high-rise dwellings in her neighborhood, and the top floors remain burned-out shells. Other reminders of the war remain: in the hills above the city where she and Tsuko like to tramp on weekends, signs warn of land mines, and the border of the hostile Serb mini-state formed during the war, Republika Serbska, is just a few miles from her apartment. But this hardly affects her life. She rides the streetcar to work and takes friends to her favorite neighborhood restaurant. Sarajevo has regained a semblance of normality.

It's tempting to think London discerns more about the world than most people because she has been flying airplanes at thousands of feet for most of her life. When she was 10 or 11, her aunt and uncle started taking her up in their small plane. The first time they handed her a map and said, "Keep track of where we're going." She got her pilot's license at 24.

London grew up in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor and, like her parents, earned her degrees at U-M (a BA in Russian in 1965 and MA in linguistics in 1969). She was working as head secretary of the U-M Slavic department and flying out of Ann Arbor airport, while hoping for a teaching fellowship, when one day Midhat Rijanovic, a visiting linguist from Sarajevo, at U-M on a Fulbright scholarship, walked in the door. They fell in love, married, and moved to Sarajevo in 1969. She bore a son and became so assimilated that acquaintances could not believe she was not a native.

But the marriage failed and London reluctantly left what was then Yugoslavia in 1976. Her former husband went on to become an interpreter for the late Yugoslavian leader, Josip Tito, and, in recent years, a translator for the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Meanwhile, London's life took twists and turns. She went to England and taught at a school for foreign pilots. She marred a Welshman ("a brilliant aircraft mechanic," she says) and they returned to Ann Arbor. But that marriage didn't last, either.

London then moved to Los Angeles and worked in the aerospace industry as a technical writer, taking time out briefly to return to Sarajevo to serve as a translator at the 1984 Winter Olympics. In 1987, she moved back to Ann Arbor, where she completed a book on her technique for learning a foreign language and began a desktop publishing and video production company. She traveled to three continents. In time, she learned a dozen languages, including Danish, Swahili, Arabic and Zulu.

When Serbian forces attacked Bosnia in 1992 after the break-up of Yugoslavia, London did not take up Bosnia's banner right away. She told herself the war would not last ("I was in denial just like everybody else"). But eventually a voice inside her told her to heed what was happening, and she joined the fight.

Alternating between Ann Arbor and Washington, DC, for four years, jobless except for occasional work as a temp, she helped organize activists in both cities and nationally, made a documentary video of the siege of Sarajevo from television footage, translated books and articles on the war into English and befriended numerous Bosnian refugees. To raise money for the famed Sarajavo newspaper Oslobodjenje, she single-handedly translated and published a commemorative English-language edition.

Then fortune intervened. A leading figure in Bosnia, Ejup Ganic, vice president of the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, heard about London from her first husband and offered her a job as an editor and translator. When London returned to Sarajevo, Ganic appointed her as one of his four advisers on domestic and foreign policy matters as well.

London's office, high-ceilinged with yellow washed plaster walls, is in a beautiful 19th-century building erected by the Hapsburgs when they ruled Bosnia. Is she the only American who works for the Bosnian government? London does not know. But rather than fearing that her job might put her citizenship at risk, she thinks that "the fact that the Bosnians trust me to work with them and for them is good p.r. for the US."

One of the projects London is now working on for Ganic is a domestic Peace Corps to rebuild Bosnia. The corps would draw Bosnian volunteers mainly from young refugees in Bosnia and abroad and involve the three main nationalities, Muslims, Croats and Serbs. In the United States alone, 5,000 Bosnian refugees are likely to volunteer, predicts Sven Alkalaj, Bosnia's ambassador to Washington and a key figure in planning the corp's operation. Working together, he adds, would be a way for volunteers to overcome ethnic resentments.

Volunteers will be ready to start work this summer, Alkalaj says. The US Peace Corps backs the project and plans to help the Bosnians, according to spokesman Brendan Daly.

One focus will be helping other refugees after they return to their old communities. London says volunteers, many educated abroad, will teach refugee children and train them in foreign languages and computers. She expects that foreign nationals from Germany, Norway, Sweden and other countries where many Bosnian refugees live will join the Bosnian Peace Corps as well.

When she arrived in Sarajevo, a number of foreigners who were struggling to learn the local language asked London to write a textbook on it. There currently is none. She is still working on it in her spare time. She calls the local language "Bosnian," rejecting the usual name, "Serbo-Croatian," as one arbitrarily imposed by Bosnia's Hapsburg rulers a century ago. Bosnian differs in vocabulary and pronunciation, she says, adding, "It was referred to as Bosnian for hundreds of years." She insists that there are three different languages, not one, in the country-Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. Besides, she asks, why should Bosnians call their language by the name of the very people-Serbs and Croats-who recently committed genocide against them?

However, scholars generally deny Bosnian is a separate language, calling it simply a variant of the standard tongue in the region. According to U-M Prof. John V. A. Fine, who teaches Balkan history, whatever Bosnians may have called their language does not matter. To call Serbo-Croatian "Bosnian," he says, is like saying Americans speak a different language from the British. Croats too have been claiming they have a separate language, Fine notes, purging their vocabulary and firing people "for using the wrong words." Insistence on separate languages is widely seen as a fallout of nationalism.

For London, who believes deeply in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a nation and often refers to Bosnians as "we," championing a distinct language is entirely reasonable. "I could imagine myself taking Bosnian citizenship," she says, "since it is my intention to live here until I die."

Peter Slavin, a freelance writer in the Washington, DC, area, has been to Bosnia twice. He has written for the Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Hour Detroit and other publications.