Shaykh Yaser Birjas, who spent three years in Bosnia doing relief work after the war, has some moving and interesting reflections on that experience over at Muslim Matters
The Refugees of Srebrenica
It was almost two years after the genocide had taken place that I came to Vozuca in the late spring of 1997. Above us, the weather was cloudy and raining, and below us, the roads were destroyed and hard to drive on without a vehicle equipped to properly handle the terrain. Ahead of us, as I looked at the residents, I could feel their sadness and grief before even meeting them. As we continued driving along the muddy and rough terrain, traces of life were hardly visible. Even the rich agricultural land was left dead in many areas, and not simply due to lack of equipment or manpower – the people themselves had lost motivation after the immense loss of their loved ones.
As we toured the village, our astonishment grew, seeing the number of women and children whose lives had been ruined and needed rebuilding. Widows with their children constituted half the population of Vozuca, many of whom refused to believe that their men and children were gone forever. They held themselves together on the false hope that their husbands or children were either misplaced or held captive by the enemy. Even as news of newly discovered mass graves surfaced every few months, they clung to the hope that their loved ones had survived the trap of death set for them by soldiers of the Army of the Republika Srpska. That glimmer of hope was all that kept them surviving day-to-day.
We also found that the widows had already organized themselves to live in wrecked homes. In many cases, two, three, or more families were living in the same house. There were no men around, only women and young children. The first house we visited had been made into a small orphanage where some of the widows were caring for both their own children as well the children of other fellow Srebrenicans that had fallen, many of whom were close relatives or neighbors. They didn’t have much, but with what little they had, they were able to keep the children from going hungry or freezing.
Please read the whole thing.
