A voice that broke down barriers: Crowds fill Sarajevo to mourn beloved folk singer Halid Beslic

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SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — Tens of thousands of people from across the Balkans poured into the streets of Sarajevo on Monday to bid farewell to Halid Beslic, a Bosnian folk singer whose music and humanitarian work broke down barriers in a region riven by ethnic animosity.

In his native Bosnia, he was highly respected for organizing concerts during the 1992-95 war to raise money for displaced Bosnians. He also won hearts across the region with his refusal to embrace hatred at a time of bloody conflict. His songs about life and love, delivered in his distinctive clear voice, captured a deep sense of longing.

Mourners filled the streets in a funeral procession, many crying as they made their way in silence toward Sarajevo's main cemetery. Beslic died last week at the age of 71 from cancer.

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 said.

Beslic enjoyed a career dating back to the former Yugoslavia, a multiethnic federation that broke up in a series of ethnic conflicts in the 1990s. Decades later, many in the region still revere Beslic as one of the symbols of the peaceful prewar era.

Tens of thousands of people also gathered over the weekend in dozens of cities in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Montenegro, singing Beslic's songs together.

Videos posted on social networks also showed people gathering in cities in Western Europe, Australia, Canada and the United States, which all have big immigrant communities from the former Yugoslavia.

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

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

Beslic was revered in Bosnia for holding hundreds of humanitarian concerts abroad during the war to raise money for war victims. During the war he lived in besieged Sarajevo, which was exposed to daily sniper fire and shelling by Bosnian Serb forces.

The war in Bosnia started when Bosnian Serb nationalists rebelled against the country's independence from the former Yugoslavia, taking up arms to carve out a Serb state and unite with neighboring Serbia. The war killed more than 100,000 and left millions displaced.

Bosnia today remains ethnically split and impoverished nearly 30 years after the war ended.