A voice that broke down limitations: Crowds fill Sarajevo to mourn beloved folks singer Halid Beslic

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SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Tens of hundreds of individuals from throughout the Balkans poured into the streets of Sarajevo on Monday to bid farewell to Halid Beslic, a Bosnian folks singer whose music and humanitarian work broke down limitations in a area riven by ethnic animosity.

In his native Bosnia, he was extremely revered for organizing concert events through the 1992-95 battle to boost cash for displaced Bosnians. He additionally gained hearts throughout the area together with his refusal to embrace hatred at a time of bloody battle. His songs about life and love, delivered in his distinctive clear voice, captured a deep sense of longing.

Mourners stuffed the streets in a funeral procession, many crying as they made their method in silence towards Sarajevo’s essential cemetery. Beslic died final week on the age of 71 from most cancers.

Muhamed Velic, the Muslim cleric who led the funeral service, recalled that Beslic’s voice “reached people’s hearts and his goodness broke barriers and crossed various borders.”

“An army of people knocked on his doors, asked for help and he opened to everyone,” he stated.

Beslic loved a profession courting again to the previous Yugoslavia, a multiethnic federation that broke up in a sequence of ethnic conflicts within the Nineties. A long time later, many within the area nonetheless revere Beslic as one of many symbols of the peaceable prewar period.

Tens of hundreds of individuals additionally gathered over the weekend in dozens of cities in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Montenegro, singing Beslic’s songs collectively.

Movies posted on social networks additionally confirmed individuals gathering in cities in Western Europe, Australia, Canada and the USA, which all have huge immigrant communities from the previous Yugoslavia.

Bosnian actor Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, a good friend of Beslic’s, described the late singer because the “personification of Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia.”

He “taught me how to live without prejudice,” he stated.

Beslic was revered in Bosnia for holding lots of of humanitarian concert events overseas through the battle to boost cash for battle victims. Throughout the battle he lived in besieged Sarajevo, which was uncovered to each day sniper hearth and shelling by Bosnian Serb forces.

The battle in Bosnia began when Bosnian Serb nationalists rebelled in opposition to the nation’s independence from the previous Yugoslavia, taking on arms to carve out a Serb state and unite with neighboring Serbia. The battle killed greater than 100,000 and left hundreds of thousands displaced.

Bosnia immediately stays ethnically break up and impoverished almost 30 years after the battle ended.

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