I
t was a moment of “sheer terror” – a heart-stopping moment that longtime human rights activist Jane T. Olson (B.A. ’64) said she will never forget. It happened on a foggy, drizzly morning in the autumn of 1992 ... while the former UNL journalism major and two other American women from the New York City-based International Rescue Committee (IRC) drove along a muddy road that ran across the war-torn landscape of rural Bosnia. As representatives of a global humanitarian organization dedicated to protecting wartime refugees, the three American women were headed toward a series of makeshift camps near the border between Bosnia and Croatia. On that chilly morning 17 years ago, the Bosnian refugee camps were jammed with desperate Muslim women, children and the elderly ... all of whom were in flight from the Serbian artillery shells that were rapidly destroying their world. Astonishingly brutal, the ethnic fighting around them had been triggered by the collapse of the former Yugoslavia and was now raging across the Balkans. Bosnia in the early 1990s was “hell on earth,” according to later United Nations reports that described mass killings and rapes there, and at least half a million mothers and their children had been driven out of their towns and villages into a series of filthy, ramshackle settlements ... where they were being ground to pieces by malnutrition, psychological trauma and spreading disease.
During her 30 years as a human rights activist who has traveled the globe to defend refugees in flight from war, Jane Olson has never stopped believing in “the basic goodness of the human heart.” Today, at 67, she chairs the board of trustees of the global Human Rights Watch – where she works daily to promote “the kind of world in which innocent people will no longer be held hostage to the cruelties and abuse of warfare.” By Tom Nugent
30 fall2009
NEBRASKAMAGAZINE
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