Breaking the silence: Looking back at the Bosnian war

In a country that was ripped apart by a bloody war just over 20 years ago, where women were raped on an industrial scale and where hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were massacred or simply ‘disappeared’, nothing quite prepares you for the ordinariness of Bosnia.

But in a country that exploded into a vicious ethnic conflict in 1992, there is also an unsettling silence about what actually happened and why on earth Europe stood back and allowed it to happen.

The hatred fuelled by ethnic divisions that emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia produced levels of brutality rare even in war, with aggressors raping women, decapitating and dismembering prisoners, shooting women in the back, torturing children and carrying out a vicious extermination of Bosnian Muslims in concentration camps which can only be compared to the Holocaust 50 years before.

Whole villages across Bosnia were cleared in an abhorrent and orchestrated exercise of ethnic cleansing but it is in Srebrenica, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered, that that horror is so keenly felt.

A cemetery of over 8,000 graves where parts of scattered bodies recovered from mass graves have been forensically matched so that mothers had at least something to bury of their sons and their husbands, stands as testimony to the evils that took place there.

What happened in Srebrenica is a horror story. It was basically a town that became a concentration camp. A place thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled to in the belief that it was a place of safety and that they would be protected from advancing Serbian soldiers by the UN forces based there. But they were wrong.

The deaths in Srebrenica represent the worst mass killing since World War II and horrifyingly, the current elected mayor of the town, where so few Muslims now live, is a genocide denier. He is not alone and his opinions only fuel the idiots that drive by tooting their horns and shouting obscenities at the mothers who lovingly tend the graves.

Walking around the massive cemetery, where every white headstone records the death of the person buried there as 1995, is a sobering experience. How did this happen in our lifetime, in living memory of the Holocaust, and in a country just three hours flying distance from our own?

There’s a plaque on the wall outside the old Dutch Battalion HQ where the UN soldiers were based and is now a memorial to the dead, it reads: ‘Srebrenica genocide – the failure of the international community’. I’m angry having been there. And so, too, should you.

But Srebrenica was not alone. One of the largest massacres took place in the small city of Prijedor, in northern Bosnia. In April 1992, as the Bosnian war was just beginning, the Bosnian Serb regime announced on the radio that it was taking over the town and the surrounding areas. On May 31st, Serb nationalists ordered all non-Serbs to mark their houses with white flags or sheets, and to wear a white armband if they left their homes. They were being marked out. ‘Othered’ by their friends and neighbours. Over the next few months, there were mass expulsions of an estimated 50,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Bosnian Croats. An estimated 25,000 people, including women, children, and the elderly, were taken to concentration camps outside the town, where, according to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), many were tortured or raped, and more than 3,000 were killed. Massacres like this were occurring across Bosnia, but, until Srebrenica, in 1995, none was larger than Prijedor.

Nejra Hasanic was just 14 when the tanks rolled into Prijedor. Two months before, she and her friends – or at least, those wearing the white armbands – were told not to return to school. There was a general sense of unease but it wasn’t until her father and other men and boys in the village were rounded up and taken out of the city on buses that fear began to set in. The electricity was disconnected and there were no telecommunications. Prijedor had all but been cut off from the outside world and shortly after, Nejra’s mother was badly injured in a grenade attack and taken to hospital some 20 miles away.

by Mandy Rhodes

Visiting Srebrenica filled me with anger and shame

Having been a carefree schoolgirl, Nejra was now living in an underground shelter beneath her home where the animals used to shelter and food would be stored, caring for her two brothers, eight and 15, not sure if her parents were alive or dead.

“I think I was probably very mature for 14 because looking back, I don’t know how I went from Nejra the schoolgirl to then looking after two brothers and obviously living in fear for a month without my mum or dad.

“I think I was very brave or maybe very stupid because I went to the market every day which I shouldn’t have done because there was a lot of soldiers around and they knew all the women were on their own. I took the risk to earn money by selling milk instead of putting it down the drain and wasting it. I took the risk so when my mum came out of hospital we would have money.

“I didn’t think of the risks, I didn’t think I could lose my life because you don’t know if someone is going to come and rape you then kill you, shoot you, you don’t know. I don’t think I took it seriously that it was a war. I was a child and I don’t think I knew what was going on myself. I think I was lost.

“You heard lots of stories about people getting raped, or about Serbs coming in the house asking for money – they went to my uncle’s house looking for keys for a car and said that if he didn’t give them the keys, they would set his house on fire. We had soldiers coming to ours and they knew it was only women around because they took all the men away so they were taking tractors, anything they could take. I was scared because they could be drunk or whatever and do anything.

“We didn’t really know why this was happening but I was sure it was about religion because my friend was Serbian, and when this started to happen, she said to me we weren’t friends anymore. We grew up together, we used to play together and everything and when I saw her that day they took my dad away, she said we’re not friends anymore because of the war.

“I didn’t really think about my religion before. Yes, I was Muslim, I went to the mosque with my granny and when it was Ramadan, she always took me every night for 30 days and I used to go on Sunday with the other kids because that was something to do, better to go and learn something than sit at home. So, yes, we used to go every Sunday but I didn’t tell any of my friends like it was a big deal, it’s just what we did. I think it wasn’t a big thing to know your religion but our neighbours knew our religion, we all knew each other’s religion but we weren’t bringing it up, it wasn’t a big thing. If it’s Ramadan, they would come to us, if it’s Christmas, we would go to them, but they would never say, ‘oh, you’re Muslim, you can’t come, it’s Christmas’. They would never say that, everyone was welcome in each other’s houses until the war.”

Nejra talks about the war in a disarming fashion, in a perfunctory, matter-of-fact kind of way and it isn’t until you scratch a little deeper and discover some of the horrors she witnessed; walking past dead bodies, seeing skeletons by the side of the road, walking for 24km to find sanctuary and an implicit understanding that women and girls like her simply lived with the everyday fear of being raped, that you understand how much this war has assimilated into her very being. The horror lives within her.

When Nejra’s mother was discharged from hospital, the family decided they couldn’t wait to find out if her father was dead or alive, they no longer felt safe. Nerja’s older brother was at risk of being taken to fight, even though they had swopped birth certificates so that he presented as being underage. They had heard stories about the concentration camps based outside Pirjedor and at night, women would be taken from the city by soldiers and never be seen again. They handed everything they had over to the Serbian soldiers, hoping it would buy them a safe passage. They were put on a bus for two days, dropped off at Travnik where thousands of men had been slaughtered and thrown into mass, open graves, and then walked for 24km to one camp before being taken to a camp for women in Croatia, Varazdin, where they stayed for over a year.

Nejra talks about cutting all her hair off because she was covered in lice and about the distress of other women because of the rapes they had been subject to but she also talks about this being a happy place, a sharing place where everyone helped each other, which seems unbelievable until you set it in the context of what she had left behind.

The family was also reunited with Nejra’s father who had been held in the notorious Manjaca concentration camp near the city of Banja Luka where thousands of Bosnian Muslims are thought to have been killed and her mother also gave birth to Nejra’s youngest sister.

From Varazdin, the family were evacuated to London and then brought to a house run by the Scottish Refugee Council in North Berwick.

“We thought at that time that we were going to be here for six months and then go back to Bosnia. That’s what we were all thinking. Once this war is over, we can go back, that’s what they told us, but then they gave us a house in Wester Hailes and after eight years, my parents decided they didn’t want to go back because I think as they were building a life, they realised life is better, they heard lots of stories from back home, lots of problems with the housing and everything and they decided we couldn’t afford to go back, we had nothing.”

Since 2005, Nejra has worked as a cook in the Scottish Parliament. And it was during a parliamentary reception to mark the anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica that she approached Kezia Dugdale, MSP, to tell her that she came from Prijedor and that it too should be remembered. Her presence was an incredible coincidence, but also a timely and human reminder about how a war in Bosnia could touch Scotland.

Today in Glasgow there is a special service organised by the charity, Remembering Srebrenica, to commemorate what happened in Bosnia just over 20 years ago. The theme for the service will be ‘Acts of Courage’, highlighting ordinary people who undertook extraordinary acts of courage during and after the Bosnian War.

For Nejra, and many other Bosnians, courage was simply about survival and as she gets older, she says the anger about what happened and the way the rest of the world stood by, only gets worse.

“Before the war, I was happy. So, we have a life here, we have money, but you can’t bring everybody together and that’s one of the saddest bits for me. I’m happy here, I’m raising my kids here, but I do miss that time when I was still 13 and when I got up I could go to see my granny and my aunties, my uncles, my cousins. I do miss that.

“I was 14 years old and I had just started at high school. I was making new friends and then when we, the Muslims, were told not to go back to school, I was left not knowing if my friends were dead or alive or what would happen to us.

“I think that time – that three years – was the longest time of my life and I couldn’t go through that again. If you asked me now to do it, I would take a gun to myself. I couldn’t do what I’ve been through again. I didn’t starve but there were days where there was no bread, so you’d eat just flour, and maybe you didn’t get bread for two or three days and no bread is fine, I could eat maybe tomatoes in the garden, and you couldn’t wash or change your clothes but I think living in fear, that fear, it did change my life. That was the worst.

“Every morning you’d say, ‘oh, I’m alive’ and then during the day you think, ‘oh my god, am I going to make another day, maybe no, maybe yes, but you don’t know who is going to knock at your door, maybe a horrible man, maybe a good man, maybe a good man but he comes with the soldiers who could be bad, and you just don’t know. It was the fear of not knowing all the time about what could happen next. I feel like I walked towards death and it broke my childhood.”