I Survived The Srebrenica Massacre. 25 Years Later, I’m Still Hurting
I have happy memories from before the war.
Growing up in my village with my mother, father, two brothers and three sisters, our vegetable farm was doing really well, and my father had a decent job in construction which allowed him to travel. There was a mosque nearby, and every Friday we would join our neighbours there for jummah prayers. There was a real sense of community.
Everything changed when I was nine. When trucks of Bosnian Serb soldiers arrived in the village.
There had been talk among our community that war was coming, and that us Muslims were under attack. But even so, we couldn’t believe what we were seeing: soldiers burning down the houses of Muslim families like ours.
We knew we had to get out.
My family and I took what we could carry and fled to Srebrenica on foot, because it was the biggest city in the region and we thought it would be safer. We were joined by my grandmother, my uncle and his family. It took about four hours and was pouring with rain. Above us, Serb forces dropped poisonous gas. My dad told me to put my T-shirt over my face to protect my mouth.
I wasn’t fully aware of what was happening – I was just a child after all. But I knew it was bad.
Bosnian Serb forces were burning villages like mine, driving people to the city, and then bombing us once we got there. We were trapped.
I had an aunt in Srebrenica so we settled with her, but she had five children so the house was already crowded. At one point there were 13 of us living there. Her husband had been killed a year before, and her daughter was killed by a bomb not long after we got there.
Bosnian Serb forces were burning villages like mine, driving people to the city, and then bombing us once we got there. We were trapped. We hardly had any food: we would scavenge among old plants to see what we could find and the older people would try and cook something out of it. Other aspects of life went on: we still went to school. One day a grenade hit the school playground and...
