Srebrenica massacre: ‘I am one of the lucky ones because I found two of my son’s bones’

On Nermin Subašić’s 16th birthday, war engulfed his hometown in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina.

His mother, Munira, said a neighbour gave him a slice of bread and cup of tea as a birthday present as food was in short supply.

Nearly two years later, just before his 18th birthday, Nermin was dead.

Despite his untimely death, his mother refuses to let her memories be overshadowed by war.

‘When I see a slice of bread and a cup of tea, I always think of him,’ Munira said.

Nermin was among the 8,372 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) executed in the worst massacre in Europe since the end of World War Two, carried out by Bosnian Serb forces 30 years ago today.

For three weeks, between July 11 and July 31 in 1995, women watched as their sons, brothers, fathers and husbands were taken away, not knowing that they would be slaughtered.

As many as 3,000 boys and men were shot to death in fields. Others were marched to school playgrounds, football stadiums, warehouses and farms, and killed with machine guns and grenades.

Back in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina, the collapse of Yugoslaviaforced the economy into freefall, with many in the the town of around 36,000 people relied on foraging, winter supplies, and bartering to survive.

‘I never imagined I would survive the genocide’

Metro sat down with Munira, who is now the president of Mothers of Srebrenica, a collective name for a group representing the survivors and victims of the genocide, to mark the 30th anniversary.

As well as the death of her son, the 77-year-old lost her husband Hilmo, 50, and 22 members of her immediate family in the mass killings.

‘I never imagined that I would survive [the genocide] and that I would lose so much,’ she said, her voice steady with decades of grief.

Munira has been carrying this pain for 30 years. There is determination in her eyes as she speaks about the perpetrators behind these crimes.

Yet, they soften and fill with tears as she remembers her younger son when he was a schoolboy before the war started.

She says: ‘My Nermin was born eight years after his older brother. He was a very quiet, well-behaved boy and he loved life.

‘He loved his brother, loved school and he was excelling in classes all the time. He was always happy if he received a gift, some attention. He loved attention terribly.

‘My Nermin was an athlete, he loved to play football, and dreamt of being a great man someday.

‘Somehow, it is probably what God intended for those children, whose lives were ended early, to be special.’

Munira carries a compact photobook, always carrying the pictures of her son and husband in her handbag. She shows a black-and-white photo of Nermin, a stoic young man, with great kindness in his expression.

‘Very early on Nermin tried to reassure me that the war would pass quickly,’ she recalls.

“‘It won’t last long’ he told me. My Nermin always comforted me instead of me comforting him.

‘The last time I saw him in Potočari, we got separated. He told me, “Mom, take care, I will see you soon.” He was killed months before turning 18.

‘I am one of the lucky ones because I found two of his bones, so Nermin has a gravestone. Many mothers do not even have that.’

In 2012, she identified the man who had taken Nermin to his death – an official in Srebrenica’s police department, General Ratko Mladić, referred to as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, who later was sentenced to life in prison in 2017 after being found guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war.

A year later, she buried the remains of her son that had been located – just two sole bones that were found 15 miles apart.

Knowing that the rest of his body may never be discovered, she buried him in Potočari, which was designated a memorial site and cemetery after she campaigned for it.

‘Our goals [Mothers of Srebrenica] are to find our children’s bones and for the criminals to be brought to justice,’ she said.

‘Every person has the right to their mark when they die. If their death is not recorded, then they did not exist.

‘People know that their children were alive and killed but a grave is also a reminder that their lives mattered and that the mothers need to have the place not only to pray for their children but also to talk to them.

‘So the grave stone is very important.’

Munira has dedicated her life to the Mothers of Srebrenica group, haunting those responsible for the genocide – including a contingent of Dutch UN peacekeepers who enabled the mass executions of men and boys.

‘My childhood ended on the first day of the war’

Sitting beside her in a Premier Inn in London is Elmina Kulasic, Bosnia and Herzegovina country director for Remembering Srebrenica UK.

Elmina was seven years old when she spent more than a month in Trnopolje concentration camp, near the northwestern Bosnian town of Prijedor.

She said her life has since been remolded by cruelty she could not comprehend at the time.

‘Within days, the town of Kozarac, where my family lived, was completely demolished and left in flames,’ Elmina recalled, as she spoke about what she described as the ‘end of her childhood’.

Both her grandparents were likely taken and killed by Bosnian Serb forces, though their remains were never found to confirm their fate.

‘They survived World War Two, but did not survive [the war in] 1992,’ she said.

The rest of her family was then forced into Trnopolje, a former elementary school. It was one of the several detention facilities established by Bosnian Serbs in 1992.

‘We were all forced into the concentration camp – me, my older sisters and actually everyone that I knew,’ Elmina said.

‘My family and I were in one classroom, stuffed in a corner, and there was no food or water unless we were permitted to have it.

‘We heard the screams, we saw people being taken out, tortured and killed. If it was not for the international Red Cross, we would have stayed in the camp much longer.’

Trnopolje functioned as part of a much wider system of ethnic cleansing targeting Bosniaks. Conditions inside were inhumane – overcrowded and unsanitary, with food and water rarely given out to the civilians inside.

Mistreatment was widespread and there were numerous cases of torture, rape and killings.

Between May and November 1992, an estimated 30,000 people passed through the camp.

It only attracted global notoriety in August 1992 after a team of journalists from ITN channel broadcast a report showing scores of skeletal inmates surrounded by barbed wire.

Lessons learnt from Srebrenica Genocide

Though their experiences are harrowing – one of a mother who lost her son, husband and several other members of her family, and another a child who lost her grandparents and survived a concentration camp – both Munira and Elmina do not want sympathy.

For them, the focus is not on their individual suffering, but on using their voices to demand accountability, resist genocidal denial in Bosnia and call for lessons to be learnt to prevent future atrocities.

Elmina said: ‘If you are talking to a survivor of a genocide, there is always a lesson to be heard and learned.

‘It is one of the reasons I became an advocate and worked in Washington DC to make sure that people understand that we may have the criminal cases, we have the resolution [to commemorate the 1995 Srebrenica genocide] but we still have genocide denial in Bosnia.

‘We have to have allies to make sure that our voices are not only the voices of survivors, but educators and active members of the society where we are at.’

Outlining the lesson, she added: ‘The key lesson to be learnt from Bosnia is that the peace agreement has to be just.

‘There should be no rewards for any of the political ideologies part of the killings; and if you are going to have a peace it has tangible and all the political leaders have to be around the table to discuss progress.’

The Dayton Peace Agreement, signed in December 1995, ended the war, but its fairness toward the victims of the genocide is highly contested.

While it successfully stopped the violence, many survivors, legal experts, and scholars argue that Dayton entrenched injustice and rewarded ethnic cleansing, especially in relation to Srebrenica.

Elmina added: ‘In terms of ordinary citizens, the lesson is that a genocide can happen anywhere. No society is immune.

‘If you let hatred and intolerance go on for a long time, they can turn into violence and eventual war, and in a war a genocide is always possible.’

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