March 6, 2009, Washington, DC: The leader of a Bosnian women’s group is headed to Washington next week to share her experiences creating art and dialogue in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Beba Hadzic (below), the founder and director of Bosnian Family (BOSFAM), will be a keynote speaker March 10 at Bosnian Women’s Day on Capitol Hill. The event is being supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation of North America, the Bosniak American Advisory Council for Bosnia & Herzegovina (BAACBH), and The Advocacy Project (AP).

Ms. Hadzic founded BOSFAM, a longtime AP partner, in 1994 as a center for refugee women to gather, weave, and talk during the war of aggression in the Balkans. Today, BOSFAM continues this tradition while providing women with income-generating handicraft projects. The women of BOSFAM produced the Srebrenica Memorial Quilt, honoring victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Bosnian Women’s Day will celebrate the courage of women and their important role in fostering multi-ethnic dialogue in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The event will take place from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, March 10, in the Congressional Meeting Room North at the Capitol Visitor Center.

In addition to Ms. Hadzic, the program will feature comments from Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas); Elmina Kulasic, Executive Director of BAACBH; Sebastian Grafe, Program Director for Foreign and Security Policy and Transatlantic Issues at the Heinrich Böll Foundation; and AP Executive Director Iain Guest. The former Bosnian Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Bisera Turkovic, has also been invited to speak.

In the next few weeks, Ms. Hadzic and Ms. Kulasic will also travel to cities across the US to meet with Bosnian diaspora communities, show the memorial quilt, and speak about women’s empowerment.