Remembering Srebrenica
By Lauren Peace
June 23rd, 2016
Do you remember when we learned about Srebrenica in school?
You wouldn’t. Because we didn’t.
At least I didn’t.
When I was first posed with the possibility of traveling to the Balkans to pursue documentary work on post-conflict transformation, I was confronted with a reality that I had gone blind to for so long.
Albania. Bosnia. Kosovo. Macedonia.
The familiarity lies in the name alone.
When I made the decision to travel to Kosovo for the summer, I made the decision to immerse myself in a culture that I had spent my first 20-years neglecting.
The history is striking. The timing is ironic.
I was born in Pennsylvania in the fall of 1995. Just 3 months earlier in Srebrenica, 8,000 Bosnians were slain by Serbs in what stands as Europe’s greatest genocide since World War II.
Today, a graveyard for the victims acts as a memorial. Tombstones line the fields in which innocent blood was shed – for nothing.
Hasan Hasanović is a survivor, and he welcomes us to the memorial.
He is strong and tranquil in semblance, but his eyes have seen sickening things.
Hasan survived by walking 63 km through a wooded area to the neighboring Muslim territory of Tuzla. Both his father and twin brother were lost at Srebrenica. He was just 19 at the time of the massacre.
“Everyday, I wonder where I got that strength. When you’re in that kind of situation, where every step is a matter of life and death, your mind just works differently. The experience has stayed with me since then. It follows me everyday; from the moment I get up, to the moment I go to sleep. I just can’t get rid of it. The worst thing is the anguish that comes with thinking about Husein and my father — wondering how they were killed, whether they were tortured or not, and how long it took them to die. That pain is almost unbearable.”
https://www.srebrenica.org.uk/survivor-stories/hasan-hasanovic/
Bosnia-Herzegovina continues to face ethnic conflict and division today. Many Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs hope for unity in the future, but events of the past linger. There is much more healing to be done and accountability to be held before the possibility of a concrete reconciliation.