Serbian

Semsa Cerovic's commute from her village home to her city office should be a breeze. It's just 12 miles each way on a modern highway through scenic mountain terrain. But the 51-year-old land surveyor, who lives in Serb-run Pale and works in Muslim-run Sarajevo, must cross a boundary of ethnic hostility and fear. A legacy of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, the line is invisible but real enough to make the trip an ordeal.

LONDON - Going into Saturday's group-play match against Serbia, Tony Azevedo, captain of the U.S. water polo team, must have felt a bit like a law student getting an advance peek at the bar exam. Although the game wasn't exactly meaningless, the Americans have already qualified for the cross-over stage, where they're likely to meet Serbia again. That made the Americans' 11-6 loss to the tournament favorites a valuable chance to study. "From every loss, you learn a great deal," Azevedo said.

The 9-month-old attempt to force "ethnic cleansing" on the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina has produced waves of shocking images. First, the photographs of skeletal Muslim men behind barbed wire in Serbian-held camps and the ruined, beseiged city of Sarajevo, where the onset of winter has made the battle even more deadly. And then reports on the fate of women and children, who compose three-quarters of the estimated 2.5 million people who have been forced from their homes in the conflict.

In 1944, as head of the Office of Strategic Services in Bari, Italy, George Vujnovich guided a team of agents who worked with Yugoslav guerrilla leader Draza Mihailovich to airlift more than 500 airmen from a makeshift runway carved on a mountaintop in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. The World War II air rescue mission, "Operation Halyard," was relatively obscure until the 2007 release of "The Forgotten 500," a book by Gregory Freeman. "We didn't lose a single man. It's an interesting history.

Her body savaged, her family wronged and her future ruined, 13-year-old Pranvera Lokaj has taken off for the mountains of Kosovo to seek the only solace her hidebound clan accords a rape victim: to kill or be killed in pursuit of vengeance. "I have given her to the KLA so she can do to the Serbs what they have done to us," Haxhi Lokaj said of his daughter, who has been sent to fight with the rebels of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

So let's get this straight. A guy in the raspberry business from western Serbia smashes and grabs his way through a heist eight time zones away in Tokyo and scoots off past shopping centers and sushi bars with a $31-million necklace known as the Countess of Vendome. It happens. Djordjije Rasovic graced arrest warrants, a thief with brazen nerves, part of an international Balkan crime gang known as the Pink Panthers.

He's everything his country wants to be: confident, successful, comfortable in his own skin and able, at last, to put a violent past behind him. It's not often that a tennis star embodies the hopes of an entire nation. But in Novak Djokovic — the world's No. 2 men's player, whose perfect win streak this year was finally snapped here Friday at the French Open — Serbia has found what it thinks is the perfect pitchman for a rebranding campaign, someone who'll bring back the shine to its tarnished reputation.

The turmoil in Yugoslavia spread to Centre Court at Wimbledon on Sunday. A telephone call from Yugoslavia complaining about Goran Ivanisevic's swearing--in Croatian--prompted officials to warn him about his language during his final against Andre Agassi. Ivanisevic blamed the call on Serbs. "Somebody called from Yugoslavia, probably some Serb, so he (the umpire) told me, 'Don't swear,' " Ivanisevic told the Associated Press after his loss to Agassi.

With indignation, I read the so-called rape testimonies reported by a Croatian women's group, vilifying Serbian soldiers. Your article states that "the rapes by Muslim and Croatian soldiers are of a different order of magnitude." Thousands of Serbian people were forced from their homes and are in Croatian camps now. They are suffering the same tragedy as they did during World War II, when the Serbian population was decimated by Croatia's Nazi puppet regime. If the Serbs were not massacred, they were rounded up and shipped to Nazi forced labor camps.

The Serbian government confirmed it has paid $900,000 in compensation to the family of an American who was badly beaten, allegedly by a Serb. Government official Slobodan Homen said the money was paid to the family of Bryan Steinhauer, 22, who was allegedly assaulted by his Serbian classmate Miladin Kovacevic during a barroom brawl in upstate New York in May and left in a coma. Kovacevic, a 22-year-old former basketball player at Binghamton University, jumped bail and fled the U.S. a month later with emergency travel documents provided by Serbian diplomats in New York.

USC's new players Name; Pos.; Ht.; Wt.; Previous school; Comment Strahinja Gavrilovic; F; 6-8; 220; San Diego Rock Academy; Member of Serbian youth national teams can provide an inside presence. *Ari Stewart; F; 6-7; 205; Wake Forest; Averaged 8.5 points and 4.4 rebounds as freshman in Atlantic Coast Conference. Brendyn Taylor; G; 6-2; 170; Fairfax High; Only high school player in class averaged 18 points, 3.5 assists and five rebounds last season. J.T. Terrell; G; 6-3; 180; Peninsula College; Could provide much-needed outside threat.

Twenty years ago last week, Serbian snipers fired on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators in Sarajevo, launching a brutal siege that brought ethnic violence in the Balkans to menacing new heights. In the two decades since, attention has understandably focused on the deeds of the architects and perpetrators of the Balkan wars. Confronting the truth about how the violence was planned and orchestrated, many have argued, is an essential step in getting formerly warring factions to reckon honestly with their responsibility for what transpired.

The New Zealand-set coming-of-age quirkfest "Boy" proves as slight as its minimalist title. Like the film's lead character, a scrappy 11-year-old everyone calls simply Boy (the wonderfully expressive James Rolleston), there's potential here. But writer-director and co-star Taika Waititi ("Eagle vs Shark") never builds much momentum for his largely uneventful if sometimes inventive story. For Boy, life in his Maori beach town consists of watching over a brood of young cousins with his kindly grandma, pining for eye-catching but dismissive classmate Chardonnay, hanging with his buddies, and bossing around his little brother, Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu, charming)

There's nothing particularly subtle about the political observations in "Cirkus Columbia," but that's as it should be in this dark comedy set in 1991 Bosnia-Herzegovina, on the blinkered brink of war. If anything, the latest feature from Danis Tanovic ("No Man's Land") could have benefited from a more defined absurdist edge. Yet despite its wobbly tone and stumbles into implausible melodrama, the film succeeds as a study of realignments among friends and family, a gently cracked mirror held up to the insanity that would soon devastate the region.

What Angelina Jolie has accomplished in "In the Land of Blood and Honey" is both impressive and unexpected. But because the task she set for herself is so difficult, it is not quite enough. Though not appearing on screen, Jolie functions as writer, director and co-producer of a film with subject matter so painful and emotionally complex it would be a challenge for even the most experienced creator. Not surprisingly for someone serious about involvement with humanitarian causes, Jolie has set "Blood and Honey" in the violent maelstrom of the former Yugoslavia during the war in Bosnia that lasted between 1992 and 1995.

A roundup of entertainment headlines for Tuesday. Amy Winehouse's dad is quoted as saying Lady Gaga "would be great" to play his daughter in a movie about her life. But another report quotes him as saying a movie won't happen. ( Mirror , Daily Mail ) The music industry executive injured in the Hollywood shooting last week has died. ( Los Angeles Times ) The song isn't so rosy for "Glee," which is seeing its ratings drop in its third season. ( Los Angeles Times )

Twenty years ago last week, Serbian snipers fired on a crowd of unarmed demonstrators in Sarajevo, launching a brutal siege that brought ethnic violence in the Balkans to menacing new heights. In the two decades since, attention has understandably focused on the deeds of the architects and perpetrators of the Balkan wars. Confronting the truth about how the violence was planned and orchestrated, many have argued, is an essential step in getting formerly warring factions to reckon honestly with their responsibility for what transpired.

In an article that would otherwise be unworthy of comment, MacArthur makes one omission more sickening than anything he wrote. MacArthur permits himself to completely forget about Serbian collaboration with the Nazis and Italian fascists during World War II. He forgets that Belgrade was declared the first Judenfrei (Jew-free) city of Europe. He forgets that Banjica, a concentration camp located in Belgrade, was staffed almost entirely by Serbs. Over 90% of Serbia's Jews were exterminated.

The timing of the PBS series "Women, War and Peace" could not be more fortuitous. Last week, for the first time ever, three women — Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman — won the Nobel Peace Prize for their extraordinary efforts to promote peace and women's rights in their countries. Not only are two of them, Gbowee and Johnson-Sirleaf, featured in the series' second episode, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," but by honoring them, the Nobel committee illuminated the point of the series — that women around the world experience war differently from men, which increasingly leads them to fight against it in similarly unique ways.

He's everything his country wants to be: confident, successful, comfortable in his own skin and able, at last, to put a violent past behind him. It's not often that a tennis star embodies the hopes of an entire nation. But in Novak Djokovic — the world's No. 2 men's player, whose perfect win streak this year was finally snapped here Friday at the French Open — Serbia has found what it thinks is the perfect pitchman for a rebranding campaign, someone who'll bring back the shine to its tarnished reputation.