Reported by Bill Ganzel, STATEWIDE Correspondent

For over five years now, Bosnia has been at the top of the international agenda. Three ethnic groups have been killing each other while the world tried to stop the conflict. Now, after intense negotiations, a fragile peace seems to be holding. It's being enforced by heavily armed units from a multinational, NATO force. Some of those units have come from Nebraska's Air National Guard. Nebraska natives are serving in other units as well. And just two weeks ago, two reporters from the UNL Daily Nebraskan student newspaper followed the troops to Bosnia. Bill Ganzel talked with them. Bill?
   Jana, on Thursday of this week, the Bosnian government declared the siege of Sarajevo over. The Muslim peace force -- or police force moved into the suburb that was formerly occupied by Serbian inhabitants. Most of the Serbians left fearing reprisals. This is a new version of an old story in this Balkan country. What's different now is that American and European soldiers are there to try and keep the groups from killing each other. But as anyone who visits Bosnia knows, the pain is deep and goes back centuries. We talked with two young reporters who got a chance that few of us get -- to witness history in the making.

[Bill Ganzel:] "What did you know about Bosnia before?"
   [Matt Waite:] "Not a whole lot. I knew it was not a nice place. It may have been at one time. I remember watching the Olympics in what was it '84? I would have been 9 years old. I remember watching the Olympics then and thinking wow, it's a really pretty place. It's not anymore.
   For Matt Waite, as for most of us, Bosnia exists on a 19-inch scale. We know it through television and what we've been seeing recently are American soldiers trying to enforce a peace process there after centuries of war.
   [Matt:] "I knew it was a civil war between ethnic groups, the Serbs and Muslims. I knew the Croats were somehow involved. I didn't know to what extent. I knew there had been a lot of war crimes. It was the biggest conflict since World War II. There were a lot of Muslims that had been killed, and now I know there were a lot of Serbs that were killed in retaliatory ethnic cleansing."
   Matt is a senior editor of the Daily Nebraskan student newspaper. In early February he found out that he was about to have the experience of a lifetime when he talked with the chief photographer for the Nebraskan, Staci McKee.
[Matt:] "Staci, who is a security policeman in the Guard, heard that a couple of media people were going over to Bosnia. She talked to the lieutenant colonel at the base and we got a spot on the plane."
   Then the problem was money. The Daily Nebraskan doesn't have much. So Matt talked with the UNL College of Journalism who have a fund to support in-depth student reporting projects. Matt and Staci were on their way to Bosnia.
   [Matt:] "We left seven days later so it was kind of a nightmare getting packed, getting schoolwork and everything taken care of before we left, getting my job done here as a newsdesk editor and getting it all processed in my brain that, yes, I'm going to Bosnia and I'm only 20 years old. (Laughing)..."
   A couple of flights, a layover, and a mid-air refueling operation later, they were in the middle of ancient Europe.
   [Matt:] "I found a beautiful city in a beautiful land with some of the most generous people you'll ever meet. Tuzla is about 160,000. It's about the same size as Lincoln. And really it's a lot like Lincoln. It was absolutely amazing."
   [Ganzel:] "And this was in the middle of a war zone."
   [Matt:] "In the middle of a war zone. Tuzla was without water and electricity for almost three years while the Serbs surrounded it and shelled it. Shells fell on the hour. One fell in a market square killing 81 people in just one fell swoop."
   The Muslims in Tuzla have put up the pictures of all 81 residents killed in that shell attack. It's a place that Ardo, one of the Bosnian students Matt and Staci befriended, visits often.
   [Matt:] "He was in some near miss shell attacks in Tuzla. Spent no time on the front lines. But he was a political creature. He had a nationalist speech ready to go from the moment I met him. His language is powerful. His message is clear. He has no problem expressing his opinions.
"These are the two that are featured in the Friday story. The one in the front here, that is our guide and translator, Mehmed Atic. It was really interesting because these two were like night and day but they're best of friends. That's why I'm calling them The Two Sons of Tuzla. He spent two years on the front lines. Thanks to the International Arms Embargo, he didn't have a weapon hauling wounded men from where they fell to a check point about 200 yards behind the front lines. I mean, you can kind of see by his eyes there, he was ashamed of it. He doesn't want to talk about the war. People in Tuzla consider him a war hero. And he rejects that. He says, no, I am not a hero. That is for kids -- that's what he said -- that's for kids, that hero stuff.

[Matt:] "This man's name is Emin Smajlovic. And he has a whole two teeth. This man could tell a story. He would just talk and talk and talk. And his hands were just going. He had three things in the world -- a pack of cigarettes, his hat, and his radio. Round the clock, that radio was on. It was playing -- it was a little tape player. It was playing traditional Muslim songs. Some of the songs would make him cry. I mean, he loved music so much that at a certain passage of music, he'd start to cry. He couldn't walk. He had never been able to walk. He'd tell the whole room that he was going to Germany or to Austria and he's not coming back. He'll send them pictures, he'll send them postcards. And after he would do that, he would say, I'm never going to leave this hospital, I'm going to die here."
   [Matt:] "This photo was taken at a U.S. forward position in a small town. It's right on the zone of separation which is a four kilometer strip between the Muslims and the Serbs. This thing changed hands three or four times during the war, including the town. The town looked like this wall, just destroyed. I mean, a lot of them didn't really want to be there. I mean, they're in a cold, muddy, snowy, miserable place that they can't leave the base. They can't do anything to entertain themselves except go back to their tents. And they're away from their families so, I mean, they're human. There is a very big potential for danger. Most of the people pretty well understood their mission in a general sense as they were there to enforce the peace accords. The Nebraska folk that I talked to understood that it was needed. When I told them that people I talked to in the town were just overjoyed that they were here, that they were thanking me for sending the soldiers as if I had something to do with it, that really helped, They really -- that kind of warmed their heart, I think. Nebraska people are really funny because a lot of them just want to talk football."
[Matt:] "I like this photo. This is taken in one of the hard structures that they have on the base where they have people living. This big sign here -- I don't know if you can read it -- it says "airborne only". Airborne is airborne and they want to be with airborne. They had these areas walled off and you walk inside there and there's just rows of cots where people have their homes set up. But right here there's this big box and this little 25-inch T.V. And every day we came in there about -- I guess it would have been 3:00, 4:00 in the afternoon, Good Morning, America was on and we would just sit there and watch that like T.V. from home. This is heaven.

[Matt:] "I felt in no danger anywhere in Tuzla. Everywhere that there could have been mines was marked quite well. There was barbed wire and these little red triangles that say "mines". You didn't go there. It was that simple, you just did not go there. Outside of Tuzla if we would have been walking around, I would have been a little nervous but the town has little grid systems where people's foot tracks go. That's basically how you know there's no mines there. You just walk on that little grid."
   For Matt and Staci, Bosnia was, at least in part, an adventure. As Matt puts it, "the land between entertainment and panic". But it was a visit to a camp for older Muslim refugees that was the most moving experience.
This is Halid Hudsig. This is his mother, Deshira. Halid survived ethnic cleansing. He was taken captive when his area fell under U.N. control, the good old safe areas. The Serbs took him. They put firecrackers in his eyes. The eye that he's covering there, he's blinded in. He's crying now, but he's blind in that eye. They took him into a room where they had 43 young men lined up. One of them was his son-in-law. 43 Serbian soldiers stood behind them and took knives and just cut their throats right in front of him. In the middle of him crying he said, I remember the blood. That was all he could say. He repeated it. He just kept whispering it.

"After he survived his ordeal, he was released in a prisoner exchange. He found out that his mother had been moved to Tuzla to this camp and he came here to find her. And he said he just wanted three things in the world -- see his mother, smoke a cigar, and have a cup of coffee. That's all he wanted. And he got all three of his wishes. And he said to me, you can't imagine that feeling. Then after we did this story, we came back. We found Halid in his room with his friend and we've got a photo of his friend who plays a Bosnian guitar and he was so happy to see us. He hugged us. He kissed us and he showed us pictures of his daughters who survived. They both survived. Both their husbands did not. He thanked us endlessly for coming to listen to his story. He begged us to tell the world his story because the world needed to hear it -- and they do.
   "The world needs to know Halid Hudsig's story so they will care about Bosnia and about the Balkans' conflict. In my opinion -- and I suppose I'd get argument over this -- this is the Holocaust relived -- revisited. It's the same basic principle. It's one group persecuting another."