Muslim, Serb women united by heartbreak of war

Belgrade, Serbia-Montenegro- Over seven months, the women met and told their
stories: heart-rending tales of hugging husbands and sons for the last time,
witnessing atrocities, struggling to survive and fight for their children after
the Balkans bloodletting ended.

A program to bring together Serb, Croat and Slavic Muslim women on opposing
sides of the 1990s conflicts triggered by the breakup of Yugoslavia sought to
promote mutual understanding and build bridges, something their political
leaders have so often failed at doing.

The stories were collected in an 80-page book titled “Women, Victims of War,”
published this year. The pain and fear from the wars remain deep, however, and
many of the women wouldn’t allow their names to be used with their printed
stories.

A 90-year-old Croat, who used only her initials, M.L., said she was raising
three grandchildren by herself when armed men burst into her village one winter
afternoon and shot everyone.

“The men came in and first shot Luka in bed, then the two younger ones. I was
last. They shot me in the mouth, but the bullet went out through the cheek. I
fell to the ground and came to in the hospital. All my three grandchildren . . .
were dead,” she wrote.

The project, organized by the Serbian Civis women’s group and sponsored by
the British Embassy in Belgrade, involved 187 women from Muslim and Serb towns
on both sides of the Drina River separating Serbia and Bosnia – bitter foes in
the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

The women’s group organized face-to-face meetings at different venues in the
two countries, and the women would “simply meet one another and tell their
stories,” said Marija Mlinaric, the project’s manager.

“These were dramatic, shaky meetings. Each had her own pain, fear. But
slowly, you could see them relax and take steps toward each other,” Mlinaric
said.

The meetings were the idea of Nada Muzdeka, a Serb refugee from the once
Serb-populated enclave of Banija in Croatia. She fled to Serbia in 1995 after
Croatian troops retook land captured by Serbs who had rebelled against Croatia’s
secession from the Yugoslav federation.

She settled in Bajina Basta, a town on the Serbian side of the Drina, where
600 other women refugees from Serb enclaves in eastern Bosnia found new homes.

Among them, they lost 290 of their men.

Muzdeka said her years as a refugee made her want to reach out to women of
different nationalities with similar destinies. “It’s different when a woman
talks to another woman,” she said.

Organizers had to overcome deep layers of enmity. It took 20 attempts before
Muslim women from Srebrenica – where 8,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred by
Bosnian Serb troops in Europe’s worst carnage since World War II – agreed to
meet with Serb women.

“There was deep mistrust . . . but finally they realized we only wanted their
voice, the truth to be heard in Serbia, too,” Muzdeka said. “The wars were not
the fault of women. We had to stay home while our husbands went to fight.”

Dzemila Delalic, a Bosnian Muslim mother of five daughters and three sons,
told of losing 32 men from her extended family during the war, including her
sons at Srebrenica.

“The last three years of the war we lived in Srebrenica. My sons went into
the woods. . . . Later, I found my oldest in a mass grave near Bratunac. I
buried him. The youngest I found in a mass grave in Glogovac. I don’t know
anything of my middle son. How strong should a mother’s heart be to endure all
this?” the 70-year-old wrote.

“I was searching for my daughter in Potocari, when I came across a young
woman in labor, screaming. I tried to help her. She gave birth to a baby boy,
big and strong. Then armed men came and ordered her to lay the baby down on the
hot asphalt. A soldier crushed the baby to death with his boots.”

The book’s editor, Dejan Vojvodic, said the women’s accounts outweigh by far
“often insincere efforts by [Serb] politicians to reveal the full truth of
Srebrenica and build multiethnic understanding.”

With 500 copies printed, the book was published in English and Serbo-Croatian
and is being given free to libraries and nongovernmental groups across the
Balkans.