Refugees have a safe harbor after fleeing from turmoil
Nonprofit offers aid, helps find housing for recent emigrés
The call came with a sudden urgency. Armina Husic was told that if she wanted to escape, she had to leave immediately.
Husic, a mother of two children, had just sat down to enjoy a coffee in the living room of her Sarajevo home that morning in 1995. She wasn’t thinking about leaving her life in Bosnia and Herzegovina behind when the call came.
But the Siege of Sarajevo had reached almost four years. It would continue into the next year before the capital city was spared from the atrocities of a civil war that targeted the majority Muslim population.
Husic gathered her children, then 9 and 4 years old, a nephew, 8, and brother, 15, and began a life-altering journey that ultimately ended in the South Bay where she still feels painful stabs of emotion over fleeing her homeland.
“We didn’t plan to leave,” Husic said. “You have to make that decision about what is best for your kids and to save lives.”
Husic, 57, has spent the past quarter-century using the experience of her escape from Sarajevo to help refugees who come to California. She is associate director of the San Jose-based Center for Survivors of Torture that has assisted more than 4,000 refugees from 78 countries adjust to new lives in the Bay Area.
The center is part of the Asian Americans for Community Involvement, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to serve Santa Clara County’s marginalized and ethnic communities.
This summer’s chaotic images of desperate Afghans at Kabul’s airport seeking passage to the United States and elsewhere reinforced the need for such agencies as those who are uprooted try to reestablish their lives in a foreign land.
In September, Santa Clara County government officials announced that they expected to assist about 300 refugees from Afghanistan over the year.
“Refugees need to have a space when they arrive to process their trauma,” Husic said. “Going to uncertainty is trauma itself. If not addressed early their integration is more complex.”
Wish Book donations will help the center’s staff find housing for new arrivals as well as support counselors and case managers working with refugees.
While the basics such as food and housing are important, Husic said the path to assimilation must address the refugees’ emotional needs in culturally sensitive ways.
The mental health component is essential to resettlement, said Nelda David, who runs the refugee clinic for the Santa Clara County Valley Medical Center.
The county clinic in San Jose handles the refugees’ immediate medical needs, including vaccinations, testing for all infectious diseases and general physical examinations.
David said more than 50% of the refugees suffer from anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder by virtue of fleeing everything they’ve ever known.
The county’s 13-year partnership with the center has become a model program for addressing this often overlooked part of integration, David said.
“They are really experts in this field,” she said of Husic and her counselors. “The refugee journey is different. Trust is a big issue. Having an interpreter on the phone is not the same as having that person right in front of you.”
One of the most effective components of the center is the diverse staff that Husic calls “Our little U.N.” They have counselors from Afghanistan, Iran, the Philippines and Syria.
Many speak the language of anguish having crossed a rickety bridge from oppression to survival, having left their histories behind for new histories.
When Husic arrived in San Jose in the mid-’90s, she was told to forget who she was and what she did in Bosnia.
“Here, there are only lowpaying jobs and few types of work,” Husic recalled being told.
The situation didn’t deter a woman who went through hell to make it to California.
Siege of Sarjevo
They called it the Tunnel of Hope. During the Siege of Sarajevo, a half-mile long tunnel gave the blockaded capital a lifeline to the outside world.
For much of the siege, from 1992 to 1996, the narrow tunnel was the way in and out of Sarajevo as Serbian snipers in the hillsides shot indiscriminately at city residents.
According to reports, almost 14,000 people were killed during the siege, including thousands of civilians. By 1995, Sarajevo had become a skeletal city as Serbs and Bosnian Serbs lacerated the churches, mosques, office towers and other buildings with rockets and artillery shells in strategic positions in the surrounding Dinaric Alps.
“People were deprived of all of that normal life to shift into this concentration camp,” Husic said. “If you were not killed by bullets or grenades, many were impacted by not having food, electricity and water.
Husic worked for a major trading company in the Old Town district next to a famous cathedral with its twin spires and rose windows.
Just months after the war began, Husic visited her father-in-law near her office. Ten minutes later, mortar shells struck a market where she had been, killing 22 people waiting in line to buy bread and wounding more than 100.
The carnage occurred just blocks from where a Serbian nationalist had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in 1914, an act that launched World War I.
Husic heard the blast at the bakery just as she entered her office building.
“The sound of it never goes away,” she said three decades later.
Husic eventually decided to flee when her parents and in-laws insisted she get the kids out of the wartorn city. Her sister stayed behind to take care of their parents, who didn’t want to leave.
The journey started shortly after the call. It took hours to safely cross Sarajevo just to reach a meeting place near the camouflaged tunnel opening. Civilians needed to get approval to pass through the tunnel that ran underneath the U.N.-controlled Sarajevo Airport.
Husic’s group had to wait for hours because a battle was ensuing above the city. The Bosnian military used the tunnel, built in 1993, to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals.
Once they got the OK, Husic and her companions crawled through the tunnel that was no more than 5 feet at its highest parts. The 800-meter trek took two hours on average.
Freedom, however, was not on the other side. Civilians fleeing the conflict then had to scale 4,928foot Mount Igman, whose unpaved road had become the main supply route to Sarajevo.
By 1995, Serbian forces knew about the artery, forcing Husic’s group to find a local guide to take them over the mountain, which a decade earlier had served as the site for ski jumping at the 1984 Sarajevo Olympic Games. Husic, then 19, had danced in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in happier times.
Now she clawed her way up the mountain through the mud on a rainy early morning with her youngest child begging to return home.
What is worse, she thought at the time: bullets, rain, mud?
“At some point, you can’t even breathe,” Husic said.
They eventually made it to where buses waited to take them to Croatia. Her sister and two friends had helped Husic get to the departing point. They didn’t have time to say their goodbyes in the scramble to board an overcrowded bus.
Husic and the kids spent a half year in Split, Croatia. An aunt in Cupertino helped her and the children get to the Bay Area through a refugee program.
Husic restarted her life while still learning to speak English fluently and not knowing how to access available services.
She worked on an assembly line in a technology company and then at Santa Clara University as a data processor. All the while, Husic also helped other new arrivals navigate the system as she began to understand it.
“We tried to figure out how we could create a place to help other refugees,” Husic said. “That became my mission.”
She co-founded the South Bay nonprofit Eastern European Service Agency. Husic, who speaks five languages, then spent two years with the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. She has been with the Center for Survivors of Torture since 2001. The work is not just a job to her.
“People are so resilient no matter how hard it is,” Husic said. “Humans find a way to survive, and that is something that gives me hope.”
It is the hope she passes on to the next arrivals.