The Continued Toll of the Bosnian Genocide

Last year, I published my first book. I wanted to highlight why immigrants flee their homes to come to America, so I interviewed fourteen people from a variety of countries to give “voice” to those who otherwise are not heard. My rationale was that as a nation our current administration has determined that immigrants and refugees have no place in our society, and it has painted them as pariahs rather than worthy of human decency and compassion.

With April being Genocide Awareness Month, I reflect upon two women I interviewed for my book who were little girls in Bosnia during the early 1990s, as both suffered the consequences of the genocide perpetrated by the Serbian government, though in different ways.

Mirela and her family, currently the subject of my second book to be published by the end of the year, endured the horrors of concentration camps before fleeing for Germany, and then the U.S. Dina and her family escaped to Croatia and then to a refugee camp in Pakistan prior to coming to America.

Dina is now an associate professor in a college in upstate New York. I have gotten to know her well since interviewing her in early 2018, and we keep in touch. We have been on a podcast together, and she has contributed to a presentation I made to the Islamic Community Center in San Jose, California in February of this year with majority of congregants being Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims). I will also be taking this presentation “on the road” to promote understanding of what transpired and how it continues to haunt those who survived, including the college Dina teaches at.

After my recent presentation two people approached me. The first was a woman whose daughter translated her mother’s Bosnian. With tears in her eyes, I can still envision the sad, and almost ancient countenance of the woman as she said how my presentation prompted her to reflect upon her husband’s murder at the hands of the Serbs in Srebrenica.

As a reminder to those who may not remember, or a quick history lesson to those who may not know, Srebrenica is the town that saw the execution of 8,000 men and boys over a three-day period while Dutch UN Peacekeepers stood by. It is the only event that the war tribunal in the Hague acknowledged as worthy of the designation of genocide.

The second was a man sitting at a table during the evening of my presentation with his father who told of their survival in a concentration camp. It seems that a former high school friend of his was a prison guard in the camp. That friend was the recipient of this man’s generosity when they were teenagers. His father had died and he and his mother were to be evicted from their apartment for lack of ability to pay the rent. I learned from the man that he and his friends raised money to help the family stay in their home.

The prison guard had been part of a team of those who tortured their prisoners, but he made sure that his benefactor and father were spared. This did not mean that he didn’t torment the others, but the kindness that the guard had received earlier in his life protected this man and his family.

Both of these people still suffer the trauma sustained in ways that most of us will never understand.

Dina, whose family fled central Bosnia, had two grandfathers and an uncle stay behind believing that their Serb neighbors would never harm them. All were killed within a month of Dina’s family leaving.

Although she, her brother, and parents live safely in New York, she wrestles with wanting to forgive, and the loathing she feels for the murderers of her relatives and so many others. And she and her husband, who also fled Bosnia as a child, are torn with how to impart to their young child as she grows up, an understanding of what the Bosnian people went through.

In reality, there were about 100,000 men and boys murdered by the Serbs, and by some estimates, 50,000 women and girls raped and sexually assaulted, between 1992 and 1995, the years of the Serb invasion into Bosnia Herzegovina. To me, and to others who closely follow the continuing war criminal trials and other issues that haunt those who survived, the entire campaign often termed “ethnic cleansing,” was in actuality a genocide.

Muslims were targeted and cruelly dealt with. Families lost loved ones. Psychological and physical trauma for survivors remains. But there are too many who deny that this was anything but a necessary action by the Serbs to protect their desire to create a “Greater Serbia,” which could not happen if Muslims remained in Bosnia.

The lessons we learn from this and any other genocide that has been committed by governments as a justified response to “cleansing” themselves of those they deem as preventing their dominance and greatness, must be heeded in the most significant of ways. History seems to continue to repeat itself even today as we witness the targeting of the Uighurs in China, and the Rohingya in Myanmar, to name just a couple.

It is time to remember the human toll. As I write about the most horrific event in Europe since the Holocaust, I am made aware of the legacy of pain that genocide brings, and with it, a knowledge that those who continue to suffer must know that there is a large swath of humanity that recognizes the need to stop the madness once and for all. Just ask a Bosniak who survived their genocide, as I have learned through Mirela and Dina.

For more information on Jordan go to jordanstevensher.com