Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 18, 1993 TAG: 9305180066
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Kevin Kitttredge
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As such, she is near the bottom of just about everyone's list of those who require sympathy these days.
Zora also is a former Fulbright scholar, a resident of Blacksburg for the past four years, and something of a star in the architecture department at Virginia Tech.
And in deep trouble.
"I am desperate," she says, with reason.
Zora, who left a still intact Yugoslavia in 1987 to study in the United States, is currently stranded in a small London apartment. She is forbidden to return to Blacksburg to join her husband and finish her Ph.D. in environmental planning and design.
Her sin? Leaving the country for a visit in England with her mother.
Last fall, Zora, 36, got word her mother was traveling from Yugoslavia for a visit with Zora's sister, who lives in London.
Zora went, too.
She should have stayed here.
Her papers were in order, she says. Had she stayed in Blacksburg, she could have graduated last week with all the others at Virginia Tech.
She left in October. She planned to be gone for 10 days.
She's there still.
Zora - who said she does not support the actions of the current Yugoslav government - apparently was unable to persuade U.S. Embassy officials in London that she would return to Yugoslavia once she finishes her degree at Tech.
No surprise. What sane person would right now?
"It is unfair," she says of her treatment. "I don't think I deserve it."
Of course she doesn't.
Nor, one could respond, do Muslims deserve "ethnic cleansing." Life is not fair.
But Zora's plight strikes uncomfortably close to home.
She has lived in Blacksburg for nearly four years, after all. Her husband - Lazar Boskov, also a Yugoslav from Serbia - still lives in their apartment on Washington Street.
Zora has, presumably, eaten at the Blacksburg McDonald's, and at Arnold's.
She has walked the long walk across the windy Tech drill field in February, and probably splashed her way through McCoy Falls in the spring.
And now she's gone - her work unfinished, her husband frantic, her professors scribbling letter after letter in an anxious effort to get her back before she's booted out of London to God knows where. Zora's British visa expired last month.
Sometimes Boskov, her husband, can stay busy enough to keep from thinking about the wife he hasn't seen for months.
But "a couple of times a day," Boskov said, "I'm just lost."
What happened?
The war, of course. The Bosnian mess stretched one long finger over half the world to touch Blacksburg, and make two people miserable.
In one way, of course, Zora Crnojacki is just one more victim of an ugly war - one very far away from the New River Valley.
Nor is she the worst victim, by any means. She has her life.
In another way, Zora Crnojacki is our neighbor.
And a human being.
And proof enough, all by herself, that war stinks.
Kevin Kittredge is a general-assignment reporter in the Roanoke Times & World-News' New River Valley bureau.
by CNB