Two Worlds, One Journey: Bosnian Genocide Brings Husband, Wife to Wethersfield
WETHERSFIELD - Merhan Cecunjanin was 16 years old when he lost his best friend.

       Irfan Ljaljic had just turned 18-the age of mandatory military enlistment in Yugoslavia. It was 1991, and he shipped out just six months after the start of the war that would soon come to be none as the Bosnian genocide.

       Merhan remembers the day Irfan’s father received a letter from his son. It would be the last.

       â€"That same day, his brother gets a letter saying he [Irfan] was killed,” Merhan says. â€"Shot by his own military.”

       Merhan says that his friend was killed because he was Muslim-the Bosnian population targeted by Serbian troops in a campaign of massacres, torture, and concentration camp-style detention.

       Merhan knew he had to leave.

       â€"I said I will never be part of a military that oppresses a minority,” he says. â€"If you support an oppressive government like that, you are responsible for what they do.”

       So a year later, Merhan took his passport, boarded a bus, rode 12 hours to Poland, and hopped a boat to Sweden from there.

       He would spend a year in a refugee camp before being told that he was ineligible for asylum in Sweden.

       But the United States had a program for refugees seeking political asylum. His brother had landed here a year before. He now lives in Rocky Hill.

       So Merhan applied, and after a battery of background checks and questioning, he was approved.

       State side, he faced a new slew of challenges: the struggle to start over in a new country. That’s a journey that would stretch his travels to upstate New York, Florida, and eventually Connecticut.

       â€"There were times when I was homeless,” Merhan recalls. â€"I used to sleep in my car.”

       But he’ll swear he had it easy.

       Compared to Edvina-who he met and married here-he probably did.

       Her story begins in Bosnia, where 100,000 people were killed during the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing.

       Edvina-who was 13 when the war started-doesn’t like to talk about it.

       â€"It’s hard for me to share,” she says. â€"I wish I could forget everything.”

       But from Merhan’s barbershop on the Silas Deane Highway, she describes fleeing her home and hiding with her family in the frigid mountain wilderness.

       â€"[We had] no food. No drink,” Edvina says.

       So they lived off of grass and leaves while listening for the roar of planes and scrambling for the care packages they might drop.

       â€"If you caught one of those things, you’d have like two days of food,” she says.

       Then there was the issue of shelter. To survive the brutal winter, they dug into the snow to create makeshift igloos, but it was far from being a foolproof fix.

       â€"You would get up in the morning, and see people frozen,” Edvina says.

       One of her cousins lost his wife that way. She was nine months pregnant.

       One time, her brother woke up half frozen. They had to run a fire to defrost him.

       Edvina came to the U.S. in 1999. The genocide had claimed her father and three of her uncles.

       She and Merhan met right here in Wethersfield. Merhan says he never told her much about his journey to America. He prefers to focus on hers-a constant reminder of why he made that decision so many years ago.

       â€"When she tells me the things they went through-living off grass and trees and waiting in the snow for U.N. care packages-it’s too much to think about,” Merhan says. â€"It made me glad that I didn’t have to be a part of that war-that I didn’t serve a country that oppressed other people.”

      
STORY BY MARK DIPAOLA   |  Aug 10 2016  |  COMMENTS?