--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: This coming Sunday, a friend of Vladimir Putin's will be on the ballot in Bosnia's national elections. Putin doesn't have many chums, but with Milorad Dodik, one of Bosnia's three presidents, he has things in common. They both like soccer, they're both into authoritarianism, and they both have a passion for writing. Sorry, rewriting history.
--:-- Noel King: The Bosnian Serb leader has gained popularity by saying a thing that definitely happened, never happened. A genocide that ripped his country apart 30 years ago during a civil war.
--:-- Noel King: The fighting in Bosnia was severe in a number of fronts today. The United Nations and NATO are watching for now. A war the U.S. helped end. The warring factions in Bosnia reached a peace agreement as a result of our efforts in Dayton, Ohio. A war that Dodik may be on the brink of starting again.
--:-- Noel King: It's coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again.
--:-- Noel King: With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style. Like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Noel King: This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coated. Gucci loafers. Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see.
--:-- Noel King: They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- Noel King: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Noel King: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? or never wanted in the first place?
--:-- Noel King: Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck.
--:-- Noel King: Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.
--:-- Halima Shah: Today Explained senior reporter and producer, I've been reporting on the Bosnian Serb politician Milorad Dodik. He says that the Bosnian genocide never happened. It did, in fact, happen.
--:-- Halima Shah: I was 10 or 11 when it happened. It was all over the newspapers.
--:-- Halima Shah: What is this man's deal? Milorad Dodik makes absurd claims.
--:-- Halima Shah: There are so many people who remember the Bosnian genocide, and I actually spoke to someone who remembers it and barely survived it.
--:-- Halima Shah: His name is Elvedin Pasek. He settled in St. Louis, which is home to the largest Bosnian-American community in the country.
--:-- Halima Shah: And he's a Bosniak or a Bosnian Muslim. And he's shared his story both at The Hague during a war criminals trial, and he's also shared it with me.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: The village that I grew up was just a wonderful, wonderful place to live in.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: I was going to school. I am a Muslim. I had lots of friends, Serbs and Croats.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And that detail about having lots of friends who were Serbs and Croats is really important here.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: Because for most of the 20th century, Bosnia was part of a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And for years under one dictator, Muslim Bosniaks, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs lived together.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: In my community, kids from different ethnic groups hung out, played in each other's villages.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: But even that exchange had its limits.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: So as kids, we were going, you know, visiting each other and going through, you know, playing soccer together.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And I remember my dad clearly telling me, don't go there at late night because we're not welcomed.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And I never understood why.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: This is going way before the war started.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And we now know it was going that way because Yugoslavia was ruled by a dictator, Joseph Tito, and he'd essentially told this melange of people, as long as I am alive, you're all going to get along.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: Essentially.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And when this dictator dies, there is a power vacuum.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: So by the early 1990s, we start seeing new nation states emerge from these different groups.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: One is Croatia. One is Bosnia. They start to declare their independence.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: But there's another group here, the Serbs, who have started to dominate the former Yugoslav army.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And they have very different interests.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: They want to create a region called a Greater Serbia.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And these nation states like Croatia and Bosnia that are splintering off are in direct conflict with their goals.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: The Yugoslav Air Force dropped bombs and rockets and cannon at militia targets throughout the day.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: So in the spring of 1992, I'm 14 years old.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: Bosnia has just declared independence, and this independence is actually recognized by the United States and by Europe.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: But it wasn't recognized by Serb nationalists, who were rallying behind this guy named Slobodan Milosevic.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: In the aftermath of the war, Milosevic would be accused of trying to engineer this greater Serbia by forcibly removing non-Serbs from Serb populated areas.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: So we're talking about Bosniaks and Croats in particular.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: And that would basically set up a genocide that killed over 100,000 people.
--:-- Elvedin Pasek: This is the man whose embrace of nationalism is blamed for all the wars in Yugoslavia today.
--:-- Halima Shah: Okay, so you have Slobodan Milosevic, who wants a greater Serbia.
--:-- Halima Shah: You have the Bosnians who want their own country.
--:-- Halima Shah: The U.S. is like, cool, we'll recognize your own country.
--:-- Halima Shah: Elvedin is Bosnian.
--:-- Halima Shah: When does this start to affect him?
--:-- Halima Shah: In 1992, so pretty soon after Bosnia declares its independence.
--:-- Halima Shah: On the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr, El starts to notice shelling.
--:-- Halima Shah: A bunch of things happen at this point.
--:-- Halima Shah: El-Vadine's family hides in a basement for a while.
--:-- Halima Shah: His dad takes off to defend the village and eventually becomes a fighter in the war.
--:-- Halima Shah: It becomes pretty clear that the rest of the family can't stay at home.
--:-- Halima Shah: So Elvedin and his mom, as well as some other relatives, run to another village.
--:-- Halima Shah: At the time when we were leaving, they were entering the northern part of the village.
--:-- Halima Shah: So you can see the smoke coming out of the houses that they were burning.
--:-- Halima Shah: And that's when the people broke down in tears and crying and couldn't believe that it is actually here.
--:-- Halima Shah: We've seen it on TV, but actually now it's on our doorstep and we're leaving.
--:-- Halima Shah: Over the next seven months, Elvedin's family is on the move.
--:-- Halima Shah: The war is raging on and Elvedin's dad has been away fighting in it.
--:-- Halima Shah: But one day his dad comes back to Elvedin and his mom.
--:-- Halima Shah: He finds them in a village called Vichichi, which was kind of the last pocket of Muslim Croat resistance in the area.
--:-- Halima Shah: When dad came over and says, we are going to surrender tomorrow.
--:-- Halima Shah: All the males are leaving tonight.
--:-- Halima Shah: And all the civilians tomorrow morning, you will raise your flag and everyone is going to go towards the safe territory of Bosnia.
--:-- Halima Shah: There was a deal.
--:-- Halima Shah: Civilians could basically take buses and they would be safe from attack.
--:-- Halima Shah: But at the same time, there had been many reports of men and boys being pulled off these convoys and taken to prison camps.
--:-- Halima Shah: So Elvedin and his dad decide to join a group that was taking a different route to Bosnian territory.
--:-- Halima Shah: They were going through the woods.
--:-- Halima Shah: 700 plus men.
--:-- Halima Shah: And there were some women too.
--:-- Halima Shah: And some children as well.
--:-- Halima Shah: But mainly men.
--:-- Halima Shah: In the woods, the group stumbles into a Serb ambush.
--:-- Halima Shah: That's when we heard the Serb forces calling us balias.
--:-- Halima Shah: It's over.
--:-- Halima Shah: There were hand grenades thrown.
--:-- Halima Shah: People were running.
--:-- Halima Shah: They were captured immediately.
--:-- Halima Shah: They said you have to surrender.
--:-- Halima Shah: And so they do.
--:-- Halima Shah: The soldiers take Elvedin and his dad and the rest of the men and boys to a nearby village called Grabovica.
--:-- Halima Shah: They're told to surrender all their weapons, all their valuables, and lie down on the ground.
--:-- Halima Shah: Like sardines in the three rows, we were face down.
--:-- Halima Shah: At this time, it started raining.
--:-- Halima Shah: It was very muddy.
--:-- Halima Shah: I was laying on my left-hand side.
--:-- Halima Shah: It was my uncle on my right-hand side.
--:-- Halima Shah: It was my dad.
--:-- Halima Shah: That's when the Serbs started interrogating and asking questions.
--:-- Halima Shah: They were celebrating firing.
--:-- Halima Shah: You can feel the bullets going over your head.
--:-- Halima Shah: I don't know what the tactic was there.
--:-- Halima Shah: But I remember my uncle screaming and saying they're going to kill us.
--:-- Halima Shah: Also they were saying at this moment if there's any children and if there was any women to get up.
--:-- Halima Shah: I didn't want to get up because I didn't want to leave my dad.
--:-- Halima Shah: I didn't want to go and I was very nervous.
--:-- Halima Shah: I waited until last moment until my uncle told me to you're going to live.
--:-- Halima Shah: Get up.
--:-- Halima Shah: Women and children like Elvedine were taken into a school and told to wait there.
--:-- Halima Shah: There was a soldier approaching to us with a light on his head.
--:-- Halima Shah: I assume he was some kind of a ranking officer.
--:-- Halima Shah: He assured us to stay there and that no one is going to be hurt.
--:-- Halima Shah: You're going to be stationed in the lower level in the classroom until morning.
--:-- Halima Shah: That he guarantees that nothing is going to happen to us.
--:-- Halima Shah: But the ones left behind, they will pay for this.
--:-- Halima Shah: And then Elvedin saw the ones left behind outside.
--:-- Halima Shah: His dad was one of them.
--:-- Halima Shah: They had their hands tied behind their backs and were taken to a different part of the school.
--:-- Halima Shah: That night, you know, we heard screaming and you can hear the beating and noises above us.
--:-- Halima Shah: The next morning, women and children who had been separated from the men boarded buses headed for Bosnian territory.
--:-- Halima Shah: There were several stops along the way, and on one of them, Elvedin saw a familiar face.
--:-- Halima Shah: That's when I reunited with mom.
--:-- Halima Shah: When mom saw me, she immediately started crying.
--:-- Halima Shah: She said, what happened?
--:-- Halima Shah: And that's when I told her that this happened, and everybody started crying.
--:-- Halima Shah: It was horrifying.
--:-- Halima Shah: But I said, we surrender.
--:-- Halima Shah: I'm here.
--:-- Halima Shah: And I said, they promised our dad and everyone will stay alive.
--:-- Halima Shah: They didn't promise that, though.
--:-- Halima Shah: No, they did not promise.
--:-- Halima Shah: They did not live.
--:-- Halima Shah: Part of me thinks that they're still alive because they're still missing.
--:-- Halima Shah: It's been 30 years since that massacre, and mass graves are still being discovered from the genocide in Bosnia.
--:-- Halima Shah: But Elvedin's father and uncle still have yet to be found.
--:-- Halima Shah: And yet this massacre at Grabovica was hardly the worst that happened during the war.
--:-- Halima Shah: The U.S. wouldn't even get involved for another almost three years when the violence reached horrific highs.
--:-- Halima Shah: Can you tell us what the conditions of living in Srebrenica were like before July 1995, say in May?
--:-- Halima Shah: That's when the most infamous massacre took place, at a Muslim enclave called Srebrenica, which was being protected by hundreds of UN peacekeepers when Serbs attacked it.
--:-- Halima Shah: The Serb forces basically did what they had been doing throughout the course of the war.
--:-- Halima Shah: They were separating Bosniak men and boys who might be able-bodied enough to fight them and killing them.
--:-- Halima Shah: About 8,000 people died at Srebrenica, and that was a turning point because up until then, the US and NATO were responding with the occasional airstrike.
--:-- Halima Shah: And there was a lot of anger towards them.
--:-- Halima Shah: The world was saying that the U.S. and NATO was, quote, muddling through.
--:-- Halima Shah: Mr. President, as leader of the free world, as leader of the only superpower, why has it taken you, the United States, so long to articulate a policy on Bosnia So the U can ignore Srebrenica
--:-- Halima Shah: That same year the Clinton administration does two big things.
--:-- Halima Shah: They back a NATO bombing campaign on Serb targets.
--:-- Halima Shah: And they get the Kroap president, the Bosnian president, and the Serb president, Milosevic, to an airbase near Dayton, Ohio, to end the war.
--:-- Halima Shah: I believe the talks will succeed.
--:-- Halima Shah: And we are here to join these efforts in bringing peace to the Balkans.
--:-- Halima Shah: These three men who cannot stand each other come to a deal called the Dayton Accords.
--:-- Halima Shah: They agree that Bosnia is going to be a country made of two entities.
--:-- Halima Shah: One called the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and another called Republika Srpska, or the Serb Republic.
--:-- Halima Shah: And to keep this very fragile peace, Bosnia has three rotating presidents, a Serb, a Croat, and a Bosniak.
--:-- Halima Shah: And that's a power-sharing structure that stands till today.
--:-- Halima Shah: Halima, what ended up happening to Elvedin?
--:-- Halima Shah: After Grabovica, Elvedin and his mom settled in a Muslim community that was north of Sarajevo, and they stayed there till the end of the war, when he turned 17.
--:-- Halima Shah: But on his 18th birthday, Elvedine learned that he's qualified to come to the U.S. as a refugee.
--:-- Halima Shah: So he comes to the U.S. and basically starts his life here.
--:-- Halima Shah: He finds work, he meets a Bosnian woman, they get married.
--:-- Halima Shah: She convinces him to live in St. Louis.
--:-- Halima Shah: And he has two sons who are 10 and 13 now.
--:-- Halima Shah: Has he told his kids about any of this?
--:-- Halima Shah: He's begun telling them parts of it, and he's also taken them back to visit Bosnia, too.
--:-- Halima Shah: But he does feel very distressed by the ongoing turmoil in Bosnia, and he says he doesn't know how to talk to his kids about that.
--:-- Halima Shah: Bosnia's shaky power-sharing structure is basically struggling to stay in place.
--:-- Halima Shah: It's been over 30 years, and there's been an explosion in Serb nationalism and separatism in recent years.
--:-- Halima Shah: I don't particularly love Bosnia and Herzegovina.
--:-- Halima Shah: I don't love Bosnia the way I have other political loves.
--:-- Halima Shah: Milorad Dodik, who we talked about earlier, is now saying the Bosnian genocide never happened.
--:-- Halima Shah: Why would he do this?
--:-- Halima Shah: Because it makes him incredibly popular among Serbs, and he's got an election to win this weekend.
--:-- Halima Shah: But Dodik could also be putting the country at risk for another civil war.
--:-- Halima Shah: Milorad Dodik and his agenda, his approach, it's very scary.
--:-- Halima Shah: And are we back to square one where actually all started again?
--:-- Halima Shah: Support for today's show comes from Adio.
--:-- Halima Shah: What is Adio?
--:-- Halima Shah: Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Halima Shah: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model.
--:-- Halima Shah: According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds, you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Halima Shah: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data.
--:-- Halima Shah: And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Halima Shah: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more.
--:-- Halima Shah: You can go to atio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Today Explained, we're back with Yasmin Mijanovic, who's a political scientist and analyst of southeastern European politics.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Halima, earlier in the show, my colleague Halima Shah talked to a Bosnian man in St. Louis who lived through the war.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: This man is terrified of Milorad Dodik.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: What is your analysis of Dodik?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I do think he's scary.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I think he's an extremely opportunistic leader.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He's a political chameleon who has changed his colors many, many times.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: But above all, he's concerned about his political survival.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And there is, I fear, no limit to what he is willing to do to ensure his political survival, including fomenting violence in Bosnia 30 years after the end of the last war.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Dodik shared these scenes on social media, he and colleagues singing Serb nationalist folk songs in their Sarajevo headquarters.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: The message is rooted in wholesale political and historical revisionism of the facts of the Bosnian war and the Bosnian genocide and the broader Yugoslav dissolution.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: The actual upshot of all that revisionism and negationism is that he is seeking to realize what the Gino Siders were unable to do, which is to ensure the formal and complete secession of this erstwhile self-declared entity of the Republika Sipska, and ideally it's appending to a greater Serbian state.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: All right, Dodik is a Bosnian Serb running to be president of Republika Srpska, or the Serb Republic.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: It's sometimes also called the RS Entity.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And he wants what exactly?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: For the RS Entity to be only Serbians?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: What Mr. Dudek wants is that this entity, this entity that was created in the early 90s in the context of the Bosnian War, he wants to formally take that entity out of Bosnia-Herzegovina and append it to a greater Serbian state.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Why does that scare people so much?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Because the original way in which the RS entity was created was through the wholesale extermination and expulsion of virtually the entire non-SERB community.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Large parts of what is today the RS entity used to be majority Bosniak and in some areas majority Croats.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Almost all of those communities were exterminated or expelled.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And still to this day, about, depending on how you want to count, 20 to 25% of the population in the RS entity is non-SERB.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: It would mean that the international community in allowing something like the formal secession of the RS entity would effectively be greenlighting genocide as a way of legalizing the redrawing of borders in Europe and the world more broadly.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And moreover, I think from a practical standpoint, there is no way and no world in which the ethnic Bosnia community in particular would allow the RS entity to secede without a very serious conflict, who would see this very much as an existential threat to their existence and their survival as a people and as a community.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: What is Dodik's backstory?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: How did he get to be where he is?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He's an interesting figure.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He comes from a fairly small-time obscure family.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And in 1998, he is ushered into power with the help of the United States, who kind of facilitate the transfer of power in the entity.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And Milena Dodik is, you know, touted as the new moderate face of Serb politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: What happened is that in the mid-2000s and into the 2010s, Milena Dodik began to reinvent himself as an arch-alternationalist.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I think to my mind, the point at which there is no return any longer really is 2014.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: In 2014, two very important things happened.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: One, in the international context, obviously, is the initial invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And Dadek, along with a host of regional leaders, really look at the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and think, you know, this is the twilight of the West.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And they really begin to see Russia as a rising power and a power which they want to hook themselves up with.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Putin's own nationalist credentials, his sort of orthodox revivalism.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: This is all very, very tailor-made for sort of Serb nationalist leaders in the Western Balkans.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And then the other thing that happens locally in Bosnia-Herzegovina is you have the most significant anti-government protests in the country since the end of the war.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: They're very, very dramatic.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: The state presidency is torched and sacked.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: There have also been demonstrations in the capital, Sarajevo.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: It's a sign of deepening social unease over the lack of economic and political progress.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: There's real rage and anger at this kind of post-war corrupt criminal political elite, of which Dudik is very much emblematic.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And Dudik really begins to think very, very seriously about how to cement his regime.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: At the local level, Mr. Dudik has done everything conceivable to undermine the peace accords.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He has done everything conceivable to undermine any kind of form of rational governance within the Bosnian state.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He is currently in the process of trying to create these breakaway institutions.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He's talking about turning these paramilitary police into a Bosnian Serb army.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He very frequently denies the facts of the genocide in Bosnia.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He consistently refers to the state of Serbia as his actual homeland and his motherland and the state that he's actually committed to, that he cares nothing for Bosnia, that Bosnia is not a real place.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: You're also on the record, though, as saying Bosnia is a, quote, rotten country, a, quote, country which doesn't deserve to exist.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Are you retracting those statements?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: No, no, no, no.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: At the international level, he enjoys very close ties to the broader European far right.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He's a very close associate of Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Very recently, he's exchanged a series of letters which have been published in the media with Mr. Orban, talking about the need for the renewal of a Christian Europe, the need to expel alien peoples and cultures from Europe, which is very clearly a reference to Muslims in Europe, but very specifically the ethnic Bosnia community, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is predominantly Muslim.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: So he is very much this kind of combative, reactionary, xenophobic, chauvinist figure that unfortunately now also enjoys significant support within the international community.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He embraces right-wing nationalism because it works, and he and other leaders around the world have learned that lesson.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Once he embraced this ideology, is there any turning back?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I don't think there's a turning back.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I think there has to be a point of catharsis and there has to be a point of resolution.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: We've seen that everywhere where these kind of hard right, ultra-nationalist ideas begin to take root, especially ones that advance their political discourses and narratives on the basis of revisionism, conspiracism, disinformation writ large.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Because these people remake the world in their own image, right?
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I think the people who really go along with them, they live in a parallel reality.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And at some point, that parallel reality has to begin to be able to remake the actually existing world in its own image if it is to survive.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And that is ultimately what is driving Dadik.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: He has to go full on and he goes for the realization of his political project because that's the only thing left.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I was also born in Bosnia.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: My family was very fortunate to have fled the conflict very early on.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: But, you know, I was a refugee.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: I was a displaced person and it has very much colored the entirety of my life.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: And I do take the view that when you're dealing with extremists like Dadek, willing and desiring to enact violence to preserve himself and to realize these ideological machinations that he has, I think you take them at their word.
--:-- Yasmin Mijanovic: Because if you don't, you risk a still more catastrophic turn of events.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was reported and produced by Halima Shah.
--:-- Noel King: It was edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Noel King: It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard.
--:-- Noel King: And it was engineered by Afim Shapiro and Paul Robert Mouncey.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Thank you.
