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From Warfare to Welfare
How the war in Bosnia spawned a movement of kindness to animals
Story by Ted Brewer
Photos by Marc Schneider
When Velimir Ivanisevic remembers his experience of the war in Bosnia, he thinks of a dog, of seeing four men dragging the helpless animal down the street by a makeshift wire leash. The four men, Ivanisevic says, had appointed themselves as dog catchers, hoping their display of "civil service" would excuse them from being drafted into the Bosnian military and fighting in the war. More than likely, the dog had been someone's pet, someone who had either died or had fled the city.
During the siege on Sarajevo, Ivanisevic lived along the front line. Serb forces had surrounded Bosnia's capital and spent three and a half years, from 1992 to 1995, shelling it to smithereens from the mountains above. Some 12,000 people died in the siege, 50,000 were wounded and several thousand more fled the city.
Ivanisevic saw a lot of atrocious things during the war. But the dog and the wire leash stayed with him and were the impetus for his creation of the non-governmental organization Citizens' Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, otherwise known as SOS Sarajevo. Ivanisevic is one of Bosnia - Herzegovina's first advocates for animals, certainly its most outspoken.
Velimir (or Veljo for short) Ivanisevic is in his late 50s. He's known around town as Veljo pas, or Veljo Dog. With a thick gray beard and a web of crow's feet framing glacier-blue eyes, he looks every bit the saint if it weren't for the grease-smeared baseball hat he wears over unkempt hair and the cigarette from which he's usually drawing deeply. But this is Bosnia, and certain roughshod appearances and behaviors come with the territory. Before the war, Ivanisevic worked as a bureaucrat in the state insurance company, spending his leisure time fishing and hunting. The war changed all that.
"War is an elementary part of mankind," he tells me from SOS's cramped office in Sarajevo. "It's nothing new. But for me, the war was a filter through which passed people. It showed me who was human and who was not human. The war also created my attitude to animals. It showed me there are a value and a worth to all living things."
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