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Turner says Dayton still has role in Bosnia's future

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By Jessica Wehrman, Staff Writer Updated 10:39 AM Sunday, July 26, 2009

WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner flew overseas to attend the funeral of 534 people he had never met.

They were victims of the July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia. It was a small portion of the more than 7,000 mostly men killed during that massacre. In a scene hard to imagine happening within the last 15 years, male refugees were separated from women, hauled off to vacant buildings, lined up and shot.

The tragedy was more poignant because at the time of the massacre 450 United Nations peacekeepers were standing by, supposedly protecting the very people who were being massacred. The funeral was a celebration of sorts, albeit a solemn one – after 14 years, unidentified remains had been identified with the help of DNA testing done by the United States. For many, the funeral was the resolution of years of not knowing.

Turner watched as widows, mothers and other family members passed coffin after coffin over their heads to their final resting place, rows and rows of graves. Over a nearby hill, unexploded land mines waited, posing a devastating reminder of a war that ended in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995. Turner was mayor of Dayton during the peace talks at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Since July 1996, Turner has been to the region six times. He’s seen the region — primarily Sarajevo, the site of additional bloodshed — change from bombed out and ruined to, finally, something approaching thriving again. He said he was surprised at the lack of bitterness at the funeral.

But he was also moved by what still needed to be resolved. Bosnia now has a three-person presidency, and the three leaders have squabbled enough to effectively keep them from joining the European Union. The Dayton Peace Accords effectively stopped the fighting but left some issues unresolved, even 10 years later.

The country is littered with land mines; a map of unexploded land mines shows up as a mass of red mines dividing the country, a very real symbol of the divisions that still must be resolved. In all, mines contaminate 3.35 percent of the land in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Meanwhile, the war in Iraq has given the United States new technology to dismantle explosive devices; Turner said they’ve not yet transferred that knowledge to Bosnia, and need to.

Still, the country that Dayton helped bring peace to has changed dramatically, he said. The first time he landed at the airport in Sarajevo in 1996, it was a tangle of metal and broken glass, and every house in the area was riddled with bullet holes. This time, “the city is clean and the shops are open,” he said.

He said Dayton, now a sister city to Sarajevo, still has a role to play in Bosnia’s future. It’s been more than 10 years, but we still should care.

“This is a part of our history and the legacy of our community,” he said. “As they continue to move forward, there’s still a role for us to play.”

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