9781422281406

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What Is a Refugee?

M ina is a European refugee now living in the United States. As a teenager, she was forced to flee her home in Bosnia, part of the former Yugoslavia, dur- ing fighting among different ethnic groups. She says: “My name is Mina Kovacevic, and I am a Muslim from Sarajevo, in Bosnia. In May 1992, two months after the war began, I left my home and homeland. Many of my neighbors had been killed. My mother, father, two sis- ters, nephew, and I spent twenty-four hours a day in a bomb shelter. We were among forty people — mostly women and children — hiding in a small, dark room lis- tening to the shooting and shelling. “My sister had been undergoing chemotherapy. But

During the 1990s the country of Yugoslavia, which had been created after World War I, broke apart into many separate countries, accompanied by warfare that targeted civilians. These are a few of the more than 200,000 ethnic Albanians who were displaced during the conflict.

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