ok, here's my report from central Bosnia but I did warn you this was a sombre one...
Last Sunday was the commemoration day of a massacre of civilians in Vrbanja in 1993. The village has always been a mixture of muslims and catholics (also referred to as Bosnians and Croats, even though they are all born and raised in Bosnia & Herzegovina). It would take me all day to explain why the divisions became so marked and created such problems as they did in the 90s, but let's just throw some words in and you'll get the idea: economic and political instability, unemployment, increased reliance on religion to help people though the difficult times, greed for the region's natural resources, etc. Put all that in a country where religion defines your identity and sadly, some people will get more riled up than others.
In July 1993 in Vrbanja 64 villagers were killed, and 45 were tortured and/or raped. The oldest was 87 and the youngest was 15. Mostly farmers and housewives. All muslim. Killed by their catholic neighbours who had joined the HVO, a croatian defence council created to control the croatian/catholic populated areas of Bosnia.
I have a copy of the report of the events in front of me. The individual stories are all too tragic to tell without me breaking apart here. Even leafing through the photos of the victims make me shake - these are all the types of faces you see walking past you in the street, not strangers far away on a TV screen. However I will tell you the story of one family, whose son is my DH's best friend and who have embraced us in to theirs as their own.
The women and children were sent off to hide in a house with many others from the village. The grandfather, 80, refused to move from the house in which he had been born and raised, saying that he'd never harmed them so why should he fear harm from them. He was dragged off by these 'soldiers', tortured at their headquarters, killed, and dumped by the river. The same happened to his 75 year old brother. The grandmother died a couple of weeks later presumably from the shock. The eldest son, a journalist, politics graduate, and father of two toddlers, was shot as he stood watch over his village and the house in which his mother, wife and children were hiding. All three bodies were found by the remaining son.
Does a family ever recover from such events? To sit in their garden and drink coffee with them, they are a happy family, affectionate and always joking. But there is a shadow of loss over everything. You can almost see the grief that the mother, now in her 60s, is carrying around with her at the loss of her firstborn. The panic comes out of her if any of her grandchildren fall or are hurt whilst playing - she immediately starts wailing that they could die and she'd lose them. The father carried his anger about with him for the rest of his life. It consumed him. He suffered from cancer twice, the first time from throat cancer which took away his ability to talk and express his pent-up anger at losing his father and his firstborn son. The second time was too much for his body and for the doctors, and he died earlier this year. The two sons who lost their father are now 15 and 16 and have turned out to be wonderful young men. The eldest wants to be a journalist like his father and wants the world to know what happened in his village.
On Sunday I was honoured to be a part of the village remembrance service at the muslim graveyard, DS and I probably the only two non-muslims there. The grief that this family holds in the rest of the year came out on that day ? I don?t need to tell you what it was like to sit there and feel it with them. I don't need to tell you either the anger and pain I felt watching the grandchildren of this family praying for their lost father/uncle and other relatives. Words can?t express it.
Although everyone knows who committed the crimes (they had all grown up together after all) no one has yet been brought to trial, fiftenn years later. Many of the ?soldiers? still live in the village. The memorial plaque in the village has a list of the dead and the word "WHY?" on it. Sadly, we all know the answer: religious intolerance.