GENOCIDE SCARS STILL RUN DEEP
It was the most horrific massacre of the bloody Bosnian conflict, but few people in Geelong know what really happened in Srebrenica 25 years ago. We meet two local families that will never let their memories die.
FOR 10 years, Dzeva Djogaz waited to hear from her brothers. Were they alive? Did they escape? If they were in hiding, why hadn’t they let her know they were OK?
She clung to hope. It was all she had. Eventually, the cruel reality set in.
Her 19-year-old brother, Sabahudin, was found in a mass grave.
Two years later, the body of her youngest sibling, Samir, was retrieved in similar circumstances.
He was only 17 when he was killed.
“No one knows what happened to them,” Ms Djogaz said, her voice breaking.
“We will never know. It makes you feel awful. I just want to know. Were they suffering? What did they do to them?”
The teenagers were among more than 8000 people, mainly men and boys, murdered in July 1995 around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War.
The mass killing campaign — internationally recognised as genocide — was perpetrated by an ethnic Serb army against the local Bosnian Muslim population.
In just a few days, thousands of victims were rounded up and slaughtered.
It remains Europe’s worst atrocity since the Holocaust, with bodies still being found decades later.
Even those who survived were forced to flee, eventually making new homes in locations spattered around the world, including Geelong.
Ms Djogaz, who lives in Mount Duneed, said the loss of her brothers changed her forever.
“You’re never the same person,” she said. “You just learn how to live with the pain.”
As the massacre nears its 25th anniversary on July 11, Ms Djogaz is publicly sharing her grief and heartache for the first time. For 25 years, she has concealed her pain, relying on silence as a coping mechanism.
“It’s sad, and I suppress those feelings, like it never happened,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.
“The pain is still there. It’s still there, every time. And I hardly talk about it, but sometimes I have to say something so it doesn’t happen again.
“People don’t understand.”
JULY
11 is a day unlike any other for Armina Makas. She was pregnant with her first child last year when she went into labour the day before the genocide anniversary.
“The only thing that kept going through my head was, ‘Please don’t be July 11’,” Mrs Makas said from her home in Bell Post Hill.
“How do you celebrate someone’s birth on that day? It’s such a sad day for us.”
Her daughter was born on July 12.
Mrs Makas and her sister, Irma Garaca, were just toddlers when Srebrenica was overrun in 1995.
Living in a small village outside the main township, they were forced to flee their home with their mother. The trio sought safety at a United Nations base in Srebrenica, which had been designated a “safe zone” during the conflict.
A Serb offensive led to the UN troops surrendering and later agreeing to help the invading army load Muslim refugees — mainly women and children — on to buses.
An older male relative had been with Mrs Makas and her family at the scene.
Before they could board their bus, he was stopped by members of the Bosnian Serb army, who told the family not to worry, that he would take another bus.
Like so many other men and boys, he was never seen again.
Mrs Makas’ fa father was lying in a Srebrenica hospital after a gunshot wound to his leg weeks e earlier.
The family w was forced to le leave without h him and did not know k his fate for fo months, fearing fe the worst. w
“Mum kept checking c through th hh the Red Cross to see where he was,” Mrs Makas said.
“Someone would say that they saw he was dead, other people said they didn’t know, others said he might be alive — but he was never on the list.” It turned out her father was alive. He had been taken as a prisoner of war and spent several months in torture camps before being released.
“In a way, that leg saved him, when you think about it,” Mrs Makas said.
“I guess we were one of the lucky ones, because a lot of our friends, and a lot of people, lost their dads and never get to see them again.”
Although their father survived, the sisters did lose an uncle earlier in the war.
A memorial wall at Potocari, near Srebrenica, reveals their extended family suffered numerous deaths.
“You go to Potocari and you look under our surname and you just see the list go on,” Mrs Makas said.
SREBRENICA
was not always a town gripped by conflict.
Ms Djogaz recalls a time of peace and unity before she left in 1987 to get married.
“Oh, it was the best life,” she said.
“We never talked about religion. I didn’t know much about religion. Now it’s all about religion.
“Most of the population were Muslims and Orthodox, and I always thought that no other religion existed, as religion was never really a topic of discussion. We just all lived peacefully.”
Ms Djogaz was the eldest of five siblings and lived with her parents.
Her father and sister would also be killed during the Bosnian War.
Her mother and another sister were also shot and injured, while their family home was destroyed.
Ms Djogaz returns to Srebrenica every two years, but says it is not the same place it was before the war broke out.
“All the houses are destroyed,” she said.
“It’s only graveyards and missing family.”
Her ageing mother lives alone in a house overlooking a mass cemetery for the victims,
including their family members.
“She doesn’t want to go from there,” Ms Djogaz says.
“She feels she will abandon them if she leaves.”
Ms Djogaz’s daughter, Merlina Djurovic, was not born in Srebrenica but has visited several times since she was 16.
She said the sense of grief was palpable and impossible to ignore.
“You want to do something to help these people, but you can’t. There’s nothing you can really do but sit there and watch,” Ms Djurovic said.
“They’re sitting in silence and they’re just consumed by their despair and their grief. I’ve got a background in mental health, so I understand that.
“Grief and loss can take years, decades. Sometimes people never fully recover.” THE bloodshed may have ended long ago, but another war continues to be fought. While international courts have declared the massacre an act of genocide, Serbian political leaders have refused to accept the label.
Over the past 25 years, Srebrenica survivors have not only spent efforts on honouring those who died, they have also battled to ensure the genocide is remembered for what it was.
Ms Garaca points to the fact 2000 people were murdered in one day alone.
“It can’t be anything but genocide,” she said.
“It kind of makes you angry because you had all these lives lost and all this pain that everyone has gone through.
“You can’t change history. You can’t erase it.”
Ms Djogaz agrees.
“They say it’s not a genocide, but it is if you kill 8000 people,” she said.
“What do you call that if it’s not a genocide? If you kill all the men in one factory?
“If people tried to escape, they would hunt them like a pig and kill them. What do you call that? It’s genocide.
“It’s not like they were defending themselves. They actually caught them and slaughtered them.”
Even in Geelong, where she has lived for more than 20 years, Ms Djogaz feels few people are aware of the massacre — despite the city’s local Bosnian community meeting each year to hold a small memorial event for the victims.
Ms Djogaz fears history will repeat itself unless the genocide and its horrors are properly understood.
“We have to talk about it so it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
Amra Begic-Fazlic, who lost her father during the genocide and now works as curator at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre, said it was critical that people all over the world learnt about the events of July 1995.
“I used to say, if this could happen at the end of the 20th century in the middle of modern Europe, then it can happen anywhere,” she said