03 April 2016•Update: 04 April 2016
SARAJEVO, Bosnia
During his years as a political science professor, current Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was working in Malaysia during the 1990s when the bloody Bosnian war broke out.
At that time Davutoglu inaugurated and chaired the Political Science Department at Malaysia’s International Islamic University.
That was a period when tens of thousands of people were killed in Bosnia during the war.
One of Davutoglu's students in Malaysia was a Bosnian, Edhem Faco, now 44 years old and Al Jazeera’s Sarajevo bureau chief.
The two met in 1991 when Faco was part of a group of 10 Bosnian students studying in Malaysia.
“He used to play football with us,” Faco recalls. “He used to take care of even our smallest needs.”
Their ties in Malaysia were strong and close, as Davutoglu was the person who had to deliver the most painful news of Faco’s life: that his younger sister had been killed during the Bosnian war.
“It was 1993. Our teacher Davutoglu learned that my younger sister had been killed. He was trying to tell me this in the most appropriate way.
“That day we were together all day. We went to his house and drove in his car. He was trying to get me ready to hear this terrible news,” he recalled.
First Davutoglu told him that his sister might be wounded, he remembers.
They even tried to make contact with his family back in Bosnia but were unsuccessful.
In the end, Davutoglu had to deliver the sad news.
“That was a heavy situation for both of us,” Faco told Anadolu Agency. “This memory will always tie us together, whether we see each other again or not,” he says.
