It is through a child’s eyes Sabina Kadic -Mackenzie recalls the signs of creeping conflict in her former hometown in Bosnia: the school friends who shunned her; the Serb soldiers who began appearing on the streets.
Old men, neighbours who used to fish with her father and had watched her grow up would spit obscenities when she passed in the stairwell of their apartment block.
She remembers helping her neighbour and best friend Bojana make colourful confetti for her birthday party and the hurt she felt when she wasn’t invited to the celebrations held within earshot of her family’s apartment.
The little girls had mixed since they were babies; Sabina, an ethnic Muslim and Bojana, a Christian grew up together decorating Easter Eggs and celebrating each other’s religious festivals of Christmas and Eid.
Sabina said: “My best friend was a Serb but it had never mattered before. No one took any notice of what you believed in, which God you prayed to or your ethnicity.”
Sabina Kadic-Mackenzie, right, with her twin sister Almina, who survived the Srebrenica massacre and escaped to Scotland
Sabina visits the memorial to the victims of the Srebrenica massacre
Then came the rise of Serb nationalism following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.
The proclamation of Bosnian independence in 1992 provoked outrage in Serbian president Slobodan Milošević who saw the country as belonging to the ethnic Serbs.
He ordered a campaign of ethnic persecution against the Muslims known as Bosniaks, which brought sectarianism, hatred and division; neighbour was turned against neighbour.
Sabina said: “As children we couldn’t understand how we could have gone from one day being best friends, next day to not. It really affected us. Of course, things were happening behind the scenes that we didn’t understand would change our lives forever. War was coming.
“We would be sent to our bedrooms to play but we would peek round the door and all the adults would be watching the TV and the footage of soldiers and tanks. They watched for hours, night after night. The women cried. The men stood in silence, in disbelief.
“Gradually it became ordinary. The worry on everyone’s faces seemed like it had always been there.”
As Sabina sifts through her memories we are sitting in a bustling street café in the old town in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, eating baclava and sipping coffee from a traditional fildzan – a small, handle-less cup.
Bullet holes still mark the walls in the Bosnian town
Sabina, 40, has taken time away from the West Lothian home she now shares with her husband Stuart and two small daughters, to lead a delegation from Scotland to Bosnia; the mission is to spread awareness of the genocidal war waged in the country between 1992 and 1995.
She works as a strategic PR but is also vice- chair of the charity Beyond Srebrenica in Scotland.
A few times a year, she brings groups, including politicians, educators and church leaders from Scotland to bear witness to the stories of ethnic cleansing and genocide perpetrated in this country only a two hour flight from the UK.
She said: “Delegates come and they leave but it is different for me, the history of this country is woven into the fabric of who I am.”
No city, town or village emerged from the war unscathed and more than 100,000 civilians were killed and two million displaced.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic pictured in 1995
The single worst atrocity took place in the town of Srebrenica in 1995 when 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered by Serb forces over one bloody week in July.
The genocide was the most heinous atrocity in Europe since the Holocaust.
The crime may be only a heartbeat away in history but a campaign of denial is now gathering a terrifying momentum. Serbian leaders say that the mass graves of Srebrenica were a fabrication; that there was no genocide.
In July this year Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić stood in the United Nations, wrapped in his national flag and protested the marking of the Srebrenica atrocities.
Vučić, backed by Russia, has frequently hailed the perpetrators of the Balkan mass murders as heroes. Critics say he is glorifier-in-chief of the perpetrators of war crimes.
The leaders of Republika Srpska – one of the two entities that make up Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the ethnic Serb Mayor of Srebrenica, also refuse to acknowledge the genocide.
General Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb army
Sabina is aware that if ever there was a time to reawaken the world to the horrors of Bosnia it is now, before the truth is buried like the murdered.
Sanski Most the hometown which saw Sabina displaced when she was nine years-old, lies 150 miles northwest of Sarajevo. Most of her relatives have gone now; ejected or swept away in the ethnic cleansing. She has rarely been back since she left on April 15 1992; it hurts too much.
They left just in time. The Serb army occupied the town the day after she fled with her mother, Beisa, her twin Almina, older sister Azra and three year-old cousin.
On May 31, the Bosnian Serb army massacred 19 Bosniak civilians on the town’s Vrhpolje bridge. The men and boys were ordered to remove most of their clothes and then jump off the bridge, while the soldiers competed to shoot them mid-air.
As we sit in Sarajevo, a fascinating and beautiful city, you could be fooled into thinking that Bosnia has successfully moved on from this violence and hate.
Tourists wander in balmy sunshine through cobbled streets, ticking off the city’s sights; taking selfies by the Ottaman fountain in Pigeon Square; haggling in bazaars; shopping in Coppersmith Street which for five centuries has heard the tapping of artisans’ hammers crafting trinkets and souvenirs.
Mass graves are still being discovered in Bosnia
Outside the old town, there are the chic boutiques, the restaurants and bars of Ferhadija Street where trendy youngsters drink beer in front of grand 19th century Austro-Hungarian buildings.
A few feet from the city’s Latin Bridge and Miljacka river is a museum marking the spot where in 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, sparking the First World War.
But the people of Sarajevo don’t need a museum and sepia photographs of conflict to comprehend the wrecking ball of war; their own horror is within living memory.
For almost four years the city was besieged by the Serbs; its population a sitting target for the reinforced artillery positions perched above in the surrounding hills.
More than 300 shells pounded Sarajevo every day; schools, hospitals, and homes were not spared; people were starved of food and medicine; left with no electricity and little water.
From tower blocks and the hills, riflemen made a sport of shooting civilians as they darted for essentials and the targeted boulevards were daubed by the Sarajevans with warnings of “Sniper Alley”.
A woman weeps as she searches for her relative among the coffins of the victims of Srebrenica at the memorial centre at Potocari
Only eight years before, the city had been hailed for playing the perfect host to the winter Olympics but the facilities were soon destroyed by war; the Serbs bombed the Zetra stadium where Torvill and Dean won gold for Great Britain.
Sabina takes the delegation on an alternative route to a typical tourist map; to see the city’s battle scars; many marked by Sarajevo Roses; the craters in concrete made by mortar shells, later filled with red resin to memorialise areas where multiple people were killed.
There are 200 Sarajevo Roses spread throughout the city.
Sabina takes the delegation to the burned-out Olympic bobsleigh track on Trebevic mountain overlooking the city which was a Bosnian Serb artillery stronghold; then to the War Childhood Museum where donated objects like toys; comics; a romper suit and a swing reflect memories of youth blighted by conflict.
Of the 11,541 killed in the Sarajevo siege, 643 were children.
In the museum tears pool in Sabina’s eyes; now she has her own children she understands the terror her mother must have felt.
Sabina said: “She shrunk as a person. She protected us so much that she took on all our pain as well as her own. Now that I am a mum, I know that you don’t worry about yourself, only your children.”
Forensic workers remove soil in the search for further mass graves in the area
Their life had been so content before the war; her father Sadik ran his own engineering business and they lived in a comfortable apartment in multi-ethnic Sanksi Most, a town of lush green which sits on nine rivers.
They went on ski trips; swam in the rivers; at weekends, they would visit the tiny village of Stari Majdan where both sets of grandparents lived.
Sabina said: “It was a happy childhood; it was a content childhood. It was unremarkable in the best possible way.”
Then the soldiers came, school and normality stopped and their world became a place of danger.
Sabina said: “I remember we had drawn a multicoloured hopscotch with chalk we had found at the empty school building. Our game stopped the minute we noticed the soldiers walking towards us in full uniform, smiles beaming, holding up three fingers.”
Traditionally used to represent the Holy Trinity, the three fingered sign became a gesture for a Serb pledge to: kill a third; displace a third and leave a third to suffer, as they “cleansed” Bosnia of the Muslim population.
The family left Sanski Most with only a few basic possessions to stay with an aunt in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. She had already taken in so many fleeing relatives, 16 of them were crammed into a two-bedroom apartment with no money and little food.
Fadila Efendi, President of the Association of the mothers of Srebrenica
Sadik stayed behind in Sanski Most.
“He watched his whole world drive away in a bus the morning we left,” said Sabina.
As happened to most Bosniaks, the soldiers arrived at Sadik’s door days later and ordered him to leave, giving him no time to pack.
His apartment was given to a Serb family.
A neighbour called after him as walked away, broken to leave the precious home he had worked so hard to provide for his family.
“You forgot to leave the spare set of keys,” said the neighbour.
After six months, Beisa managed to get her family on a refugee list with UK Christian charity Alert which took them by bus from Slovenia to North Yorkshire.
The charity brought them to a disused court building in Harrogate which had been converted for refugees and the family moved in with one carrier bag of possessions between them.
Sabina remembers looking from the window of the bus which took them from Dover to Harrogate and being mesmerised by the unfamiliar sight of cats eyes on the motorway.
She said: “The roads looked like they had glitter on them. It was magical.
“It was all so strange and new. When I got off the bus someone said “hello” and I didn’t know what the word meant.”
A Bosnian woman cries between the graves of victims of the Srebrenica genocide
It was in the UK that Sadik reconnected with his family.
They slept in the offices once occupied by court staff and were grateful. They had their lives and the generosity of the community around them.
Within eight months, Sadik got an engineering job and he found his family their own home.
The children quickly learned English and became excellent students and Sabina and her twin both chose to study journalism at university; inspired by the war correspondents they had seen reporting from Bosnia.
On the first night of freshers week at her new university of Stirling, Sabina met Stuart and her future became rooted in Scotland. They made their home in Linlithgow.
The Mackenzie’s two girls Elsa, 10, and Olive, 8, treasure a white-collared tartan dress that Beisa bought Sabina when they first moved to the UK.
Sabina said: “I think quite often about how fortunate my girls are and how different my childhood could have been – how different it should have been. They say that childhood is the first casualty of war and I wouldn’t dispute it.”
On the day before they leave Bosnia Sabina takes the delegation the three-hour trip to the memorial marking the Srebrenica genocide.
Stark white obelisks mark 6,721 graves of those murdered. Many more are still missing or unidentified.
Thousands fleeing the Serb attacks on villages had gone to Srebrenica for refuge after the UN declared it a “safe zone”.
It was to prove a fatal misplacement of trust as the Dutch peacekeepers did nothing to protect the population while Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladić ordered the men and boys to be rounded up and murdered.
The UN barracks are now a museum. Sabina can’t bear to watch the footage shown on a loop from a trophy video of Bosniak men being shot by Serb police unit, the Scorpions.
Arms tied behind their backs, they walk stiffly through a meadow to wait for the crackle of murderous gunfire, as one by one they are shot in the back.
Sabina Kadic-Mackenzie meets her sister Almasa in Bosnia
After the war the genocidal forces dug up mass graves containing the bodies of the executed and reburied them as far as 50 km from the original site to cover their crimes.
Bones from the dead are separated and scattered across multiple sites. Families must exhume and reburying their dead when additional bones of their loved ones are found.
In 2017 Mladic was jailed for life for his part in the genocide but the number of convictions have been pitifully small.
Old enmities simmer across Bosnia as victims are forced to live beside perpetrators.
Sabina said: “Genocide and acts of hatred happen to ordinary people.
“I think it’s important to remember though that ordinary people make them happen.
“To this day, most of the “ordinary people” who perpetrated the atrocities in Srebrenica and across Bosnia are walking free; often in the neighbourhoods where the horrors took place against ordinary families like mine who were one day just living their lives and the next, fleeing to save themselves.
“Healing will only happen if we recognise the past, learn from it and hold accountable those who, to this day deny genocide ever happened. Without that, never again is just an empty promise.”
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Publish date : 2024-11-01 12:47:00
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