The hard work of getting along

"I didn't want to go, because I had been to other so-called peace-building workshops put on by international organizations, and I was fed up," he says. "The internationals always told us to forget what happened here, but Paula Green said we can't pretend everything is fine, or else tomorrow we will have another bloody war. That was the first time I heard any outsider say that, and I was hooked. I was lucky I met her, because she changed my life completely."

Across the table, Ms. Marinkovic's face is haggard. She has heard plenty of harrowing stories from her Muslim colleagues over the past few days, and she is angry at the Serb authorities who pumped nationalist propaganda into her town and hid the truth of the war from the Serb population.

"I need to know the truth about what happened," she says. "The secrets about war crimes are a burden we are all carrying."

For the Serbs of Prijedor, the war was a long and terrifying ordeal. The city, swelled by tens of thousands of refugees, had no electricity and was desperately short of food.

Today, teachers are among the few people with jobs in the city, and even they haven't been paid in three months.

"When I first came to the seminars, I was still in shock," Marinkovic says. "I knew I wanted to somehow rebuild relationships with my colleagues on the other side. Only later did I realize I needed to work on reconciliation with my own emotions in order to do that."

Project DiaCom, which emphasizes personal healing within a theoretical curriculum of non-violent conflict resolution, began four years ago, when a group of Muslim women in Sanski Most asked Ms. Green to help them make contact with Serb women in Prijedor.

"There were still tanks in the road between the two cities," Green says. "We decided to work with teachers because teachers have a lot of power to transmit values in the community.

"If teachers have values that express tolerance, it will be much easier for returning refugees to enroll their children in the schools," she continues. "If teachers maintain hatred, Bosnia doesn't stand a chance."

Almost 400 educators from Sanski Most and Prijedor have attended DiaCom workshops since 1998. Dhanovic is among 10 long-time participants who are now training to lead their own workshops on the DiaCom model.

"Our goal is to saturate the entire school system," Green says. She has also received a request from educators in Sri Lanka for help in creating a similar project in that country.

"I haven't seen any other program like [DiaCom]," says Paul Roeders, team leader of the European Commission education reform project in Sarajevo. "It is very effective, but more programs like it are needed. The schools here are still segregated and the curriculum is divided."

Since the war, school curricula have become heavily polarized and steeped in religion. Pictures of Eastern Orthodox saints now hang in most Serb classrooms, where teachers give history lessons on the oppression of Serbs by Muslim Turks. Muslim classes usually open with an Arabic religious greeting and have their own version of historical abuses from the Serb side.

"The legacy of the war has made it very difficult to make schools a place of openness and joy," says Milka Paden, who is a Serb refugee working as a school counselor in Prijedor.

"It is particularly hard for minority students, but I introduced the workshop style in some classes, and it helped," she continues. "It is surprising what a difference it can make just to have the children sit in a circle, where they are all equal."

The effects of the DiaCom seminars are already being felt in Prijedor and Sanski Most. Ferida Kurtovic, a Muslim teacher, says she did away with the Arabic religious greeting in her classroom and has her students celebrate both Muslim and Christian holidays.

"This is a start, but it isn't enough," she says. "If we are to be one country, we will need a unified curriculum for history and language, and that is a lot easier said than done."

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