SREBRENICA, BOSNIA—The soft-spoken son of a Muslim farmer who spent most of his life herding sheep, Almir Salihovic wasn’t one to dream big or shock his friends with grand plans for the future.

So when Salihovic announced two years ago that he was in love with a woman who is half Serbian and half Croatian, his news came as a bombshell.

“My friends said, ‘You are crazy. You can’t do that. It just isn’t done. You might as well kill yourself,’” recalled Salihovic, 28.

He shrugged off the criticism and, in doing so, has become a symbol of modest progress in famously fractious Bosnia.

Salihovic and his fiancée, Ducisa Rendulic, who is Catholic, are planning to get married in May. When they do, city officials and Alen Hasanovic, a local Muslim imam, say they will become the first interfaith couple to marry and live in Srebrenica since the end of the Bosnian War in 1995.

In the pre-war era, roughly 33 per cent of the registered marriages in Bosnia were interfaith unions, officials say.

But that was before Srebrenica entered the annals of modern warfare. Over two summer days in Srebrenica in July 1995, ethnic Serb soldiers methodically separated Muslim men and boys from women and led them away to be killed.

Nearly every Muslim male in the city — including Almir Salihovic’s father — died, many having their throats cut. After two days, as many as 8,000 people had been killed, making the genocide the worst mass killing in Europe since the Second World War.

Srebrenica became a symbol of the ham-fisted failure of international peacekeepers to protect civilians.

The city had earlier been declared a “safe zone” by the United Nations, a process Turkey’s government says is now being considered as a way to protect Syrians caught up in that country’s bloody war.

Canadian soldiers stationed in Srebrenica took weapons away from local Muslim residents purportedly to ensure there would be no bloodshed.

The French blocked UN airstrikes on Serb forces as they advanced on the town. Finally, Serb soldiers overran some 350 Dutch soldiers protecting Srebrenica, taking some hostage and stealing their iconic blue helmets to trick Muslim families into thinking they were UN troops.

“What happened here was so bad that the people responsible cannot be punished enough in this world,” said Hasanovic.

Srebrenica was a low point in a war that cost the former Yugoslav republic 200,000 lives, roughly 5 per cent of its population.

It was years after the war ended before Muslim women who had fled the remote mining town in eastern Bosnia felt safe enough to return with their children. Many did so only because they had nowhere else to go and because international aid agencies had offered to repair or rebuild their homes.

Srebrenica now has a population of about 12,000, nearly half of it Muslim. For years it remained a divided city, even after Muslim families began to trickle back.

But two years ago, around the time Salihovic met Rendulic, relations here began to slowly improve.

A local rock band named Stari Grad (Old Town) with both Muslim and Serb members blossomed, landing concert bookings throughout Europe.

A youth camp for 18-to-25-year-old Serbs and Muslims at nearby Perucac Lake — near the site of a mass grave discovered in 2001 — attracted more than 1,000 attendees, who spent weeks cleaning up the lake and its beaches.

A local activist group has arranged for Srebrenica’s most popular Muslim café, the Acapulco, to host local Serbs every second Friday night. On the other two Fridays of the month, the Marlboro Café, a longtime Serb hangout, rolls out the welcome mat for Muslims. And in a small but noteworthy development, the popular Croatian beer Karlovacko began to be available at restaurants and bars through the city.

“For years Serbs hated Croatia and when I asked for this beer, everyone in the bar would stare at me, like, ‘Why did you ask for that?’” said Adis Oric, a Bosnian actor and commercial director in Srebrenica. “But now it doesn’t matter. Things are better.”

Salihovic met his future wife in May 2010 in Tuzla, a city in northern Bosnia that has a robust Muslim population.

In July 1995, only hours before Serb soldiers began their killing spree here, Salihovic and his mother and four siblings were among the thousands of Muslim women and children rounded up by Serbian soldiers and sent out of the city.

They wound up living in a refugee centre in Tuzla and later settled on the outskirts of the city.

In 2010, Rendulic left her home in Gospich, Croatia, to visit her Serbian grandmother near Tuzla. While she was taking milk from her family farm to market, she saw Salihovic.

“I dropped a milk bottle on purpose to get him to notice me,” Rendulic, 24, said. “He did, but he didn’t say anything. He just smiled.”

A day later, they had their first conversation and they were dating within a week.

In November 2010, Salihovic suggested the couple move to Srebrenica to a one-square-kilometre patch of land his mother owned.

“I said, why not. I wasn’t worried. People are the same everywhere,” explains Rendulic. “No one has blue blood.”

A German aid agency styled after Habitat for Humanity built them a one-bedroom home of rough-cut pine; seven months ago, the couple celebrated the birth of their son Jusuf.

“We aren’t talking about another one,” Rendulic says. “There’s an economic crisis in this country right now.”

Indeed, times are tough throughout Bosnia. Corruption is rife in both of the country’s main entities, the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation. On Transparency International’s corruption index, Bosnia ranked No. 91, tied with Liberia and Zambia.

In Srebrenica, the unemployment rate is more than 50 per cent.

Along the city’s thoroughfare, dozens of homes and factories remain empty, abandoned during the war. Homes are scarred by bullet and shrapnel pockmarks. And jagged glass juts out from the broken windows.

The stretch of road into town is marked by a band of crumbling factories. The abandoned Potocari battery factory, where Muslims were kept in 1995 in the hours before the genocide, attracts a rare burst of activity as a small handful of visitors arrive on the daily early-afternoon bus from Sarajevo.

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Salihovic works cutting grass for companies and retirees, making about $75 a week. A charity delivers basic foodstuffs such as flour, sugar and cooking oil every two months to the family.

“We just were given 10 sheep by a charity and we have 14 chickens now,” says Rendulic. “We are poor, but we are happy. Neither of our families have a problem with us getting married.”

Salihovic, she says, has promised to pay $250 to rent her a flowing white wedding dress for their marriage in May.

“That is my dream,” she said.

A few minutes later, walking around their home, pointing out a new chicken coop and pen for their sheep, Salihovic sighs and rubs his close-cropped brown hair.

Asked whether he’s concerned about ethnic tensions resurfacing, Salihovic answered, “I’m not worried about the past in Srebrenica. I’m worried about the future. I just want a job.”

To be sure, not everyone in Srebrenica is willing to put the past behind them.

“There are still some people, not a lot, who are very angry,” Oric says. “One guy I know hates Serbs and says that when he starts not hating them so much he goes on YouTube and watches videos of them killing Muslims to get his hate back.”

Oric says Srebrenica is like any other town where jobs are scarce. Fights are common after a night of drinking.

“But it’s only Muslim fighting Muslim or Serb fighting Serb,” he says. “If a Muslim and Serb fight, it becomes something much bigger. No one wants that.”

Several families here say it will be years, if ever, before the concept of interfaith marriage is widely embraced once again.

“If my son came home with a Serbian girl, I would say fine, but you’re not having her in my home,” said Sefika Halilovic, 47, as she served guests cups of strong Bosnian coffee and juice on a recent late afternoon.

“But then I would say the same if he came home with a Canadian,” added Halilovic, whose husband was killed during the war along with 14 other family members.

The unlikely love story may spark memories of a couple who fell head over heels for one another during the war here and became known as Sarajevo’s Romeo and Juliet: Bosko Brkic, an Eastern Orthodox Serb, and Admira Ismic, a Muslim.

The couple met years before the war at a New Year’s Eve party and fell in love.

“My dear love, Sarajevo at night is the most beautiful thing in the world,” Ismic wrote to Brkic when he was away from home, serving mandatory military service. “I guess I could live somewhere else but only if I must or if I am forced. Just a little beat of time is left until we are together. After that, absolutely nothing can separate us.”

Both died when they were gunned down on a bridge in Sarajevo in May 1993 while trying to escape the city together.

Suzie Wagner, a sociology professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is researching ethnic relations in Srebrenica, said few couples are willing to risk being ostracized by marrying outside their ethnicity.

“A Serb might love a Muslim but they aren’t willing to face the sanctions that would come with a marriage,” Wagner said. “Going outside the social discipline here could jeopardize their prospects, maybe cost them a job. The people in control don’t want the current traditions to change.”

Still, on a quiet patch of farmland on the outskirts of Srebrenica, Salihovic and his fiancée say they are willing to buck traditions and become a symbol of what Srebrenica might become.

In the meantime, Rendulic said she’s enjoying the unexpected benefits of marrying a Muslim.

“As a Christian, I’ve always loved Christmas with the gift boxes for kids and pies and cakes, but the Islamic holidays are amazing, too,” she said. “At Eid, we have the dessert baklava and that alone may make it my favourite.”