Is genocide a flavour of Gatorade?
I was 2 years old when the Bosnian Genocide began. My dad was shot in his left ankle by Serb nationalists and developed permanent physical and mental health issues because of it. Their attacks didn’t end just because he was in the hospital. The Serbs continuously bombed the hospital and my dad saw blood and charred bodies everywhere. In the hospital, people were still being targeted by snipers. Christiane Amanpour, a British-Iranian journalist, was also in the hospital at the time. A lot of people didn’t give a damn about the Bosnian Genocide and about us, but she chose to care.
My mother and I had to flee Bosnia without my dad when I was 2. We travelled from Bosnia to Croatia, Paris, a refugee camp in the Czech Republic, and then Malaysia where we were granted refugee status. After my father was shot, the first time I saw him again was in Malaysia. We were grateful to Malaysia for taking us in but at the same time, it was a huge culture shock. We came from Europe to Asia. There was a lot to get used to – a new language, a new culture, and a new way of doing things. It wasn’t easy and people don’t understand what it’s like until you’ve gone through that situation. When I was 7, we received the news that we’d been accepted to the US.
People assumed it was easy for us because we were from Europe, but that’s not true. We were never really accepted.
We moved to Michigan which has a large Bosnian refugee population. The area we lived in was dangerous and scary, there were a lot of gangsters. People assumed it was easy for us because we were from Europe, but that’s not true. We were never really accepted. It’s painful to leave everything and to live with memories of war, rape, death, and torture. Then you’re thrown into another system where you have to compartmentalise to survive.
School was difficult. I didn’t have many friends, but I worked very hard. The US doesn’t have a war or famine, but it does have a bullying crisis which culminates in hatred, killings, and massacres. We were refugees who fled an active war but here in the US my mom was still worried whether I would come back from school or not. Nothing shocks me anymore because I’ve seen so much evil.
There was so much ignorance about the Bosnian Genocide. When I was in high school someone asked me if genocide was a flavour of Gatorade.
I know Bosnian kids who were pushed down the stairs, had their eyes gouged out and were shoved into lockers. Bullying in the US is a systemic issue, and no one cares. Political leaders fill their pockets and parents are tired from working all day. Whenever I saw anyone getting bullied, I discreetly used to report the bully. I couldn’t just watch it and do nothing. War is bullying on a larger scale and when problems aren’t addressed, they escalate and blow up. There was so much ignorance about the Bosnian Genocide. When I was in high school someone asked me if genocide was a flavour of Gatorade.
I write to process everything I’ve seen. I’m an author and poet. I’ve written over 90 books talking about war, courage, human rights, rape, and the Bosnian Genocide. I’m compelled to speak about the Bosnian Genocide and what my family went through. My talent is writing and sometimes it’s overwhelming because I have so much to say. Parents need to do a better job when they raise their children. When I was a student, I had people come up to me and say they would kill me. That’s not a joke. We were the victims of a genocidal campaign by Serb and Croat nationalists in the 90s and in the US all you have to do is listen to the news to learn about the latest school shooting. The systems are so lenient that they punish the victim. If you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else will.
You need a lot of self-confidence when you find yourself in very hard circumstances. You need to strengthen yourself from inside. You shouldn’t care how people look at you. You can’t accept judgment; those people don’t know what you’re capable of. My husband and I used to strengthen each other. We would reflect and remind ourselves of why we are here, what do we need to do, and we managed to keep going together. My husband and I had visited Europe for business trips but it’s very different in a sales meeting versus when you claim asylum. We lost everything and we had no assets, normally people value other people’s assets.
War doesn’t end with the last bullet fired. War never really ends, it shows up as intergenerational trauma, as resentment and hatred. Whole families were killed. They can’t expect forgiveness.
The UN are evil. They ignored the suffering and let 8,372 Muslim men and boys get slaughtered in Srebrenica. They didn’t do anything to stop the evil, they just let them die. Clinton also could’ve done more. Hillary Clinton lied about ‘coming under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996’, the war was over by then, it was a lie. We almost died and she lied about being in the war. She didn’t care. There are still landmines in Bosnia today. War doesn’t end with the last bullet fired. War never really ends, it shows up as intergenerational trauma, as resentment and hatred. Whole families were killed. They can’t expect forgiveness.
People glamourise war in the movies. It’s a lie. War is not cool or interesting. War is horrifying and relentless.
People glamourise war in the movies. It’s a lie. War is not cool or interesting. War is horrifying and relentless. It lives eternally in your mind, and you can’t erase the things you’ve seen. You can’t truly comment on it until you’ve been there yourself. Despite everything they’ve gone through, I haven’t met a single Bosnian who complains about their hardship. They don’t go out to torture other ethnic groups like they were tortured during the Bosnian Genocide. Bosnians who survived war and genocide did not do crimes that landed them in prison and they haven’t gone crazy. They are just focused on making a living. I’m so proud of them for that. They easily could have chosen to become evil, but they haven’t.
Bosnians were pawns stuck between Serb and Croat nationalism. Serb and Croat nationalists were willing to destroy us and rip apart our land to achieve their objectives. Europe knew what was happening, but they didn’t help. The then French President Mitterrand was sadistic, he told Bill Clinton that, ‘he was more sympathetic to the Serbs, and was less willing to see a Muslim-led unified Bosnia.’ He said it was ‘unnatural for Bosnia to be the only Muslim country in Europe’ but we’re not just a Muslim country, we’re very diverse. We have huge Orthodox, Jewish, and Catholic populations. Mitterrand had been “especially blunt in saying that Bosnia did not belong and that British officials spoke of a painful but realistic restoration of Christian Europe”.
This hateful rhetoric is idiotic and it’s not representative of our culture. It’s a derogatory political rhetoric designed to degrade our culture, country, belief system and image in the world.
During the genocide, Serbs stabbed pregnant women in their stomachs and shredded Bosnians from their throats to their stomachs. They literally cut people in half. Now they’re trying to push their genocide denial narrative, they are lying sadistic filth. They’re trying to say nothing happened when we went through hell and were robbed and stripped of everything. It’s evil beyond comprehension.
I write songs about rape, war, and sexual abuse. These stories must be told. My mom’s friends were raped during the Bosnian Genocide. Every country in the world is dangerous for women. In college 4 of my friends were raped. 1 of them even went to Harvard. I want to punch people who say it’s the woman’s fault. In the US, some men rape in one state and then go on to rape again in another state because of the statute of limitations. So many Bosnian women never got justice for the sexual abuse and rape they suffered during the genocide but in the US rape survivors can’t get justice either. In the eyes of the international community, women are collateral damage and, in the US, women are seen as objects. Where profit is concerned, they don’t care about justice.
My mom knew Nusreta Sivac, who was taken to Omarska, a site of horrible torture, where she was raped repeatedly. For three months, she and other women in the camp were raped, beaten and tortured. Women barely have any rights outside of war, but within the context of war, a woman is only a number. Nusreta could’ve stayed silent, but she didn’t. She chose to help women who were raped during the war. Nusreta found a way to put the Chetniks who raped her and other Bosnian women in prison.
I believe women are worthless in the eyes of international law, why else would the world wait until the 90s for another genocide to happen in Europe to accept rape as a war crime?
Rape in the context of war was recognised as a war crime by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, because of Nusreta’s efforts. I believe women are worthless in the eyes of international law, why else would the world wait until the 90s for another genocide to happen in Europe to accept rape as a war crime? There are so many women in Bosnia who never got justice. Women are seen as spoils of war and worthless in the eyes of international law and in the context of war. Women need to learn how to defend themselves using whatever means necessary.
To me, the word refugee means you’re not politically free. Citizens of a country are free. They can walk and talk in peace, but refugees don’t have those rights. It’s a privilege to live as a human, to have friends, a job and to go out to eat and not be killed. People don’t understand that refugees are forced to flee, we didn’t leave out of our free will. We left conditions where politicians literally made decisions along the lines of today is a good day to let them live or die. The politicians never suffer, it’s always the people who do.
Refugees are vulnerable and instead of welcoming us with respect and understanding, we are treated terribly like we aren’t even human. There is constant hate directed towards refugees and no one is ever punished for it. If a refugee came to the US (or any other country), even if they were a doctor in their country, you’ll see them cleaning houses or hotels. They will work multiple odd jobs, at whatever hour just because they don’t want their children to starve. They could be suffering from PTSD or be sick because of war. However, you hear stories of privileged and rich people getting tax breaks. My mom was a lawyer in Bosnia, now she works as a bank teller. These systems are designed to oppress people and punish them for seeking sanctuary.
Refugees are expected to be grateful towards a system trying to break and control them through oppression and fear. A lot of people who come as refugees to new countries eventually lose their minds. They go off the rails because they’ve received no support.