Dr. Svetlana Broz: Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award

Dr. Svetlana Broz will be speaking on Educating for Civil Courage: The Challenge of the Former Yugoslavia. Svetlana Broz is a Bosnian–Serbian author and physician who is a former cardiologist. She is the granddaughter of the late former Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito. She graduated from the Belgrade Medical School in 1980 and served as a cardiologist at the Military Medical Academy (VMA) from 1981 to 1999, and volunteered her services at the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 in the atrocity zones. Over and over again her patients told her how their survival had been possible only thanks to individuals with the courage to stand up against the ethnic violence perpetrated by members of their own ethnic group, and in January 1993 she began interviewing for the book that describes these human experiences during the Bosnian War. The book was published in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999 with a title “Dobri Ljudi u Vremenu Zla” and in 2003 in the USA under the title Good People in an Evil Time. In 2000, she moved to Sarajevo permanently. The reason for this was, as she stated in an interview for Bosnian daily newspaper Nezavisne novine: “After the NATO intervention, I moved to Sarajevo. Twenty years ago, Belgrade was a European metropolis, a city that I loved a lot. Unfortunately, in a way, that city has lost its soul. Sarajevo, despite going through a four-year long siege of hell, kept its soul intact. I love Bosnia-Herzegovina, I feel as this is my homeland. Last year I even became a citizen.” Broz is currently heading the local branch of the Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide (GARIWO) non-governmental organization in Sarajevo. She is the founder of “Education Towards Civil Courage”, a series of seminars designed to teach adolescents from all over the Balkans how to stand up to corruption and social and political divisiveness.