Eurasia Press & News
The remains of more than 7,000 victims of the Bosnian War have not yet been found. The determination of some relatives is passed on to the next generations together with a sense of injustice and helplessness.
ida’s journey to the past began about a year and a half ago when she headed to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s countryside. It was there, in the little town of Kalinovik, where her uncle in July 1992 was arrested, kept in a gunpowder warehouse for a few days and then murdered along with another 23 men in a barn.
The uncle, Abdurahman Filipovic – or “Braco” (“Little brother”) as he was known among his loved ones – has always been in Aida’s life, even though she was only three years old when he died and has no recollections of him whatsoever.
From her childhood, she remembers the series of raw emotions, from hope through dismay to pain, that her mother experienced upon learning that Braco’s remains had apparently been found, but then finding out it wasn’t him. Because Braco is one of the roughly 7,600 people disappeared during the bloody war in Bosnia (1992–1995) who to this day have not been found nor identified in clandestine graves.
Aida has always been aware of his existence, but it was only when she was about to reach her uncle’s age at the time of his death that Braco – a phantom from the stories told at family table and black and white photos – suddenly became a real person.
“I realized I would have understood him now,” says Aida Hadzimusic, soon to be 34, a journalist who works for the Al Jazeera Balkans TV channel. “He would have been my age and I’m not this small girl any more – that changed my perspective.”
And so, she decided to travel to Kalinovik, find locals who knew him and, eventually, make a movie about him. “It became my mission to bring his story alive,” she says.
In many ways, Aida is a rare example. With the dearth of economic opportunities, weak governance, endemic corruption, poor air quality or rising rents on their minds, for many young Bosnians reliving the war that ended almost 30 years ago may be simply too much. Instead of struggling with yet another challenge, many chose to head abroad: a 2021 UN survey found that 47 per cent of Bosnians aged 18 to 29 are thinking of emigration, either temporary or permanent.
“In our conversations with local associations gathering the families of missing people, the limited engagement of youngsters is the issue that is pointed out quite often,” says Marko Matovic, 29, a communications manager at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the international organisations supporting actors involved in the tracing process, including the families of the missing.
According to the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a result of the war in this country, more than 32,000 persons went missing. To date, the remains of some 24,000 persons have been found.
Apart from the hardships of living in Bosnia there’s yet another reason for the youngsters’ reluctance – some parents simply try to protect them from having to deal with the issue.
“Once, I spoke to a woman who has been living abroad for many years now. Her husband went missing during the conflict and his remains were found at one point. She told me that during the search she insisted on leaving her children out of it, as the process was simply too upsetting,” says Matovic.
In Aida’s case, she has openly discussed the fate of Braco with her mother. Yet, she feels, her more distant family is unwilling to touch upon this topic as too painful.
Unwelcome to Kalinovik
Kalinovik is a little town in Republika Srpska, an autonomous entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina, some 70 kilometres south of Sarajevo. In this Serb-dominated region, Abdurahman Filipovic worked as a doctor; he was also a Muslim, but it didn’t seem to matter much until the war broke out. Eventually, however, these were exactly these two factors that sealed his fate. He decided to stay in war-torn Kalinovik to serve his fellow citizens. And he died because he believed in a different God than his murderers.
Today, many mass and individual grave sites where Bosniak Muslims were detained and murdered remain unmarked with memorial boards. At the very entrance to the town there is, however, a monument depicting convicted former Bosnian Serb military chief Ratko Mladic as a hero.
“There’s a lot of denial in this part of the country,” says Aida. “When I was filming interviewing a local person, a car was passing and the driver sounded his horn. They can make you feel really unwelcome there.”
Painful as it was, her two trips to Kalinovik in August 2021 and April 2022 resulted in some unexpected findings. For instance, Braco known as a jovial hail-fellow-well-met person was also a bit of a ladies’ man. That surprising fact alone led her to perhaps the most valuable discovery: the golden ring which Braco gave to one of his girlfriends. He said to her: “If they come to arrest me, take this ring and run away as far as you can.” After meeting this woman, Aida was offered the ring to keep, and she wears it today on the middle finger of her left hand.
She explains that her efforts to find the truth about her uncle are motivated by a professional passion for storytelling and strictly personal wish to bring a little peace of mind to her mother. “He sometimes visits her in the night. She seems to feel the smell of his skin,” Aida says. “And then she wakes up realising it was just a dream. When I see her being affected so much, I’m also affected.”
“But mainly, I think, I just want to know… I want to understand, why so many people had to die… Why Srebrenica happened… I simply do not understand it,” she says.
A common pain
Simeon Dzeletovic hardly remembers the days when the war wasn’t ever-present; he’s been involved in the search for the remains of his uncle Milenko since high school. He has openly discussed this bloody time in his family’s life with his friends and, frankly, with anyone who will listen. This is the task which he decided to shoulder: to inform, educate and make sure it will never happen again.
For him, the war is, in many ways, another daily challenge. And it doesn’t really matter that he’s just 24 years old.
With no recollections of neither the war itself nor his uncle, Simeon has gained knowledge about the past from his mother, Milenko’s sister and the head of one of the associations of Serbian families of missing persons. But, he says, right from the start he confronted himself with people from different ethnic groups, not just Serbs.
“Missing relatives is the common pain for all the communities in Bosnia,” he claims.
Born and raised in Mostar, a picturesque and multi-ethnic town in southern Bosnia with the iconic bridge and many other exemplary pieces of Islamic architecture, Milenko graduated from the engineering high school, but worked as a fisherman. But, over the years, Simeon couldn’t find many details about his fate.
“We don’t talk about him often, because it always provokes emotions and tears,” Simeon admits.
He remembers, though, how pleased he was upon learning from his mother that Milenko, playful and sociable, was similar in character to him. “The older I get, the more often I think about him. I hear from my friends, how they socialise with their uncles, taking trips together or having dinners. Life would definitely be easier with him for me and my mom.”
He tries to understand those who claim that Bosnia should focus more on the future than the past. “It’s not good to talk only about the past, because we have so many problems in present time,” he explains. “But without solving the problems from the past, we won’t live a normal life neither now nor in the future.”
Milenko Dzeletovic, 25, was among thousands of Serbs from Mostar and the Neretva valley who in June 1992, at the outbreak of the war, were forced out as part of an extensive ethnic cleansing campaign coordinated by Croatian forces. At the cemetery in Mostar a place next to his late father and mother is waiting for Milenko’s remains to be buried.
Not a statistic
Asked why some young people, like Aida or Simeon, take their time to discover the fate of their missing relatives, often people whom they didn’t even meet, Alma Bravo-Mehmedbasic lights a cigarette and after a while replies: “Firstly, in order to confirm that they are not just a number – that they have a name, some roots, identity.”
Bravo-Mehmedbasic is a psychiatrist with over three decades of experience working on post-war trauma. During the war, she was helping her fellow citizens in Sarajevo, which was under siege from Serbian forces for almost four years, the longest blockade of any capital city in modern warfare.
“Secondly, they seek legal and moral compensation for what happened with their relatives. They want justice,” she says, sitting in her office in central Sarajevo.
The agony of waiting combined with a strong sense of injustice and helplessness – many perpetrators have not been tried and convicted, while the conspiracy of silence on war-related topics is still widespread within many communities – is something that many have inherited from their parents. Even though in many Bosnian families the war is still a taboo subject due to the older generations’ painful memories or their will to spare their children pain, the mental discomfort is instinctively felt by the youngsters, claims Bravo-Mehmedbasic, and can have tremendous impact on their own wellbeing.
This is a psychological phenomenon called “transgeneration trauma”, which refers to a transmission of traumatic experiences to subsequent generations. If not worked through properly, it may, at worst, result in lower self-esteem, anxiety and depression, stress disorders, violence, drug abuse, or serious physical complaints. But it may also turn into activism or even a search for revenge.
“And thirdly,” says the psychiatrist, “they feel obliged to their relatives. They want to preserve their memory by setting up a memorial site, a grave… Without a grave, it’s like they have never existed.”
“It’s difficult to say when this trauma may end. It very much depends on how younger generations will work it out. There’s also no difference on how this trauma is being dealt with by people from different communities, regardless of whether one is Bosniak Muslim, Serb or Croat,” Bravo-Mehmedbasic adds.
Gift of life
Yet, there is little chance that the collective trauma of having a family member missing will unify Bosnia’s various communities. It’s also equally unlikely that unfinished business from the wars will not have impact on future generations. There are simply too many parallel and conflicted historical memories, and too many hurt feelings about not only what happened during the war, but also after when many wrongdoers managed to evade justice.
“This is our reality; without the truth there’s nothing and each lie provokes another lie. Here, each community has its own truth,” says Goran Zadro.
His two sons are too young to discuss the war with them, but as soon as they are ready, Goran is willing to share what happened with their relatives.
Goran, his brother Zoran and their friend are the only survivors of the brutal massacre of Croat civilians in the village of Grabovica in September 1993. Among 33 persons murdered by Bosnian Army troops were all the brothers’ relatives: their father Mladen and mother Ljubica, grandfather Ivan and grandmother Matija, and a four-year-old sister Mladenka. At the time of the massacre, Goran and Zoran were nine and eleven respectively.
Grabovica is a village between Sarajevo and Mostar divided by the Neretva river that flows right to the Croatian coast of the Adriatic Sea, and surrounded charmingly by sublime mountain and forest scenery. In these forests, Goran and Zoran found a shelter when the Bosniaks entered the village. They were hiding the whole day and came back home to find the massacred bodies of their close ones and neighbours.
We sit in the café in Grabovica and then we head to the cemetery up in the hill where his father and grandparents are buried. The bodies of his mother and little sister have never been found. “I think often about them, you can’t escape that. That’s part of you. And, as you remember, they are living through you. But I live a perfectly normal life. I’m a happy person. I graduated from the university, have a job, family… My life is really okay,” says Goran, a 40-year-old computer engineer from Mostar, 30 minutes away from Grabovica.
Asked if he feels he’s lucky that he survived, he hesitates. “I don’t know… I really don’t,” he says. “What I know is that life is a gift. People often don’t respect it enough.”
Living without grandparents and an aunt became, in some ways, a normal thing to his sons, who, Goran believes, will continue his efforts to bring the remains of two missing relatives to the Zadro family grave. And he doesn’t fear that these relay races of generations will deepen divisions in Bosnia. “It all depends on how you present the past,” he says, though admits it could turn toxic and result in anger or hatred.
“But they need information about what happened in their own country,” he explains. “They deserve to know… And make sure it will never happen again.”
