Then They Started Shooting

August 30, 2004
Unlike other adolescents who grew up in war-torn environments, the teenage subjects of child psychiatrist Jones, caught in the crossfire of the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are now more concerned with their personal futures than the memories of war, even though many endured four years of shelling and siege. In this absorbing study, Jones finds that Bosnian children who distanced themselves from the war felt psychologically more comfortable than those who tried to make sense of things—a finding that Jones attributes in part to their lack of direct participation in the conflict. In contrast to years of low-intensity conflicts witnessed by Palestinian and South African kids, she concludes, the war in Bosnia was a "prolonged high-intensity conflict in which children had little opportunity for active participation except in sharing the tasks of basic survival." It is sometimes challenging to keep track of the children's names and story lines (she uses only first-name pseudonyms) through interviews from 1996 and 2003, and anyone looking for a comprehensive history of the war won't find it here, but the book offers new insights into Bosnian Serb–Muslim relations through the eyes of children and addresses perennial issues of war, trauma and prejudice.

August 1, 2013
A British psychiatrist returning to the once-beleaguered Drina Valley within Bosnia and Herzegovina finds young war victims surprisingly adaptive and thriving. In her multicase study of traumatized children then and now, Jones makes some startling and potentially controversial conclusions about children of war. The author worked in humanitarian aid and child psychiatry in the Balkans from 1991 to 1995, through four years of war and siege in Bosnia, and returned intermittently over the subsequent years to the towns of Foca and Gorazde to re-interview her charges and record updates. The two towns were made up of various percentages of Serbs, Croats and Muslims. As the war spread, the citizens were terrorized by paramilitary groups bent on "ethnic cleansing," forcibly expelling people, displacing families, and torturing and killing suspected rivals. The Dayton Agreement of December 1995 arranged an uneasy truce, stipulating the safe return of people to their homes despite the ethnic mishmash and suspicion and indicting some of the war criminals. Jones concentrates on eight children, between 8 and adolescence, she first met in 1998 and records their experiences of displacement, violence and terror during the war years. Curiously, few had any feelings of animosity toward the other ethnic groups before the war, living closely among them in communities, but they were often indoctrinated by adults and the ongoing strife to hate the other side and justify their ill treatment of displaced neighbors. Jones tracks the children's progress, finding that the ones who didn't ask too many questions were the ones who thrived. Avoidance and distancing allowed the children to protect themselves emotionally. Jones' careful, sensitive study offers a deeply intimate look into the emotional makeup of children of war.

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