When Irma Hodzic found her way to the U, it wasn’t easy for her to comprehend the strange world she would be thrust into. Her homeland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its plush green, mountainous and riverside landscape, dotted with terracotta-pitched roofs atop scintillating architecture, was where she loved to be and would have loved to stay.
Irma’s plight illustrates the triviality of the political focus in the context of the immigration debate, the misplaced rhetoric surrounding immigration policy and the general ignorance and demonization of immigrants.
In 1998 when Irma was 19 years old, her family was forced to flee their beloved country for the protection of their lives. Extreme Christian nationalists were ethnically cleansing the Bosnian Muslim population after the breakup of Yugoslavia, making many of them refugees in other lands. Irma, her sick father, mother and brother ended up in Salt Lake City.
Unlike many other foreigners who want to leave their countries to live in America, Bosnians were happy in their own land before the tide of war turned against them. With little knowledge of American culture or language, the Hodzic family, and many other Bosnians like them, boarded a plane to the unknown — victims not of choice but of circumstance.
Most Bosnian Muslims are bi- or trilingual — the German and French languages being most popular. Irma had not studied English as one of her languages, so emigrating was difficult for her.
After finishing the stack of refugee documents, Irma set out to learn English so she could get a job in this foreign land called Utah. English would be her fifth language. Along with her native tongue Bosnian, she also speaks German, Spanish and Dutch.
Determined to make the best of her family’s situation, Irma went to Salt Lake Community College, where she perfected her English.
After suffering more than four months in a concentration camp in Croatia and surviving by pretending to be Christian, she decided to be an international lawyer to try and prevent holocausts, such as the one in Bosnia-Herzegovina, from ever happening again.
Advisers at SLCC told Irma there was a law program at the U. With a double major in political science and international studies, Irma is setting the foundation for her future endeavors.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Irma saw her world shatter around her as she lost family members and friends to horrific torture and death. Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered by tens of thousands. There are still mass graves to be unearthed.
Systematic slaughter and execution took the innocent lives of at least 7,000 Muslim boys and men in Bosnian Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. Just last summer, yet another mass grave was found, and on the 17th anniversary, 520 more Srebrenica victims were reburied.
It was genocide and gendercide against ethnic Muslims, and it marks modern history as the most civilians ever massacred in one day in one place.
Despite her past, Irma brings light to campus with her infectious smile. Many Bosnian students are energetic, funny and respectful, and we are lucky to share classes with them. They have learned English well, regardless of the obstacles they have faced, and enthusiastically partake in the activities that more traditional U students enjoy.
The best sources for knowledge of the world are the students that emigrate here to study with us.