Continuing to learn from our shared history

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak. I was pleasantly surprised when Julia Bard reached out to me to join you tonight, as we met decades ago – before we had grey hair – in an anti-deportation campaign to support a Congolese family with children in London. Campaigning works, they won and they're now probably British citizens going about their lives.

So, indeed, I came from Sarajevo and I was there when the siege of Srebrenica started happening 1993. This was the first attempt by war criminals to expel and murder the Bosniak Muslim population from the region, and it was prevented by the UN declaration that Srebrenica is a safe haven.

That was before the internet, but the world was watching. I was a journalist, and I was working with international journalists, and I kept thinking: if only the rest of the world could see what’s happening, then people would know, and we could stop this. Of course, I was young, and I was naïve. People did see and they didn’t stop it. There are many reasons for that – books have been written and there are transcripts from trials that went on for 20 years in International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague – but at the time, despite the evidence, it was really hard for people to believe what was going to happen, even though it had happened before.

This was part of my personal history: tonight is the night, on 26th January 1942, when my grandfather from Sarajevo somehow ended up in the Mauthausen concentration camp. We know that around 300 people from Bosnia were deported to Mauthausen. I don’t know how he ended up there. There is no plaque. There is no book. There is no family story, because my father, my aunt and my uncle all died before telling me that story. There is now an online record that he arrived on that terrible January night. My grandfather survived and came back to Sarajevo. He became an alcoholic – self-medicating as a result of that experience. So the inhumanity, violence and genocide was part of my family history, and yet I couldn’t believe it was going to happen again.

This is what was really difficult for us – for me and for many Bosnians: we were hoping for a miracle, but actually all the signs were there. People who were about to carry out genocide told us that they were going to do it. And they were doing it already. Complete destruction was everywhere around us – thirty years on, you can still go to Sarajevo and see the damage on our streets and homes. Yet somehow we clung to this idea that it might not happen; that it would somehow be prevented.

After the genocide in Srebrenica happened in 1995, and there was no intervention – even though the UN peacekeeping troops were there – it is still really difficult to actually say that that genocide is in the past because if we take Gregory Stanton’s definition of the stages of genocide [Classification, Symbolisation, Discrimination, Dehumanisation, Organisation, Polarisation, Preparation, Persecution, Extermination, Denial] the genocide is still happening because it’s being denied in Bosnia. Some of the Bosnian Serb leaders ended up in The Hague and were convicted of war crimes and a few are in prison. Still, many are in power and, at the time when these declarations and convictions were coming, they declaratively said: yes, they accept that that genocide happened in Srebrenica. But now they’re saying: “No! No! No! It didn’t happen.” Again, for their political gain. And this is where we get stuck a lot of the time and there is no way to move forward.

I have gone back to Bosnia to places where war crimes happened, ones that didn’t make it into the indictment for genocide. We are a small and insignificant country with no power or resources, where other powers make decisions about what has happened to us and what will happen to us. In the original indictment, my neighbourhood was listed as an area of genocide – and then somehow it got dropped. We were promised justice, and the trials went on in the Hague, but direct accountability is often lacking in many cases, particularly for survivors still looking to find their dead.

In 2005, I went back to northern Bosnia – to the Prijedor area, where there are still people missing, and where infamous camps were discovered by British journalists in 1992. In that place the head teacher of one school imprisoned and tortured the headteacher of another primary school. They were colleagues before the war started and then suddenly they were transformed into these people who were willing to torture their former friends in the name of ideology and nationalism in our case.

Any form of the kind of ideology that treats people as “other” is clear to me. I have spent my entire life – and I’m no longer young – and, in particular, the last three decades, fighting that othering, sharing my story, raising awareness and making sure that it doesn't happen again. It’s unfortunate that it does, but we must not give up. 

A lot of the time, I am a lonely voice when I raise the alarm about the far right. People dismiss me because of my experience. They say, “Oh, Zrinka, this is not Bosnia.” And in many cases, I say, “Well, actually, it is sometimes worse than Bosnia because you’re completely unaware and in denial, and think it cannot happen to you.”

This is where I think we’re now facing a difficult challenge with racism in this country – with the world as it is right now – when people are telling us who they are and we’re struggling to believe them and to take them seriously. I have to say that it really saddens me. I still have rage in me at the horror of what’s happening. This drives me to work with people who are seeking protection from persecution, war and genocide because I think that the best way to honour the dead is to help the living.

I work for a refugee charity and, currently, we do not feel safe publishing our address online. That is really scary. But when I share that fear with some of my British friends, they just cannot relate to it. They cannot understand what I’m talking about. But my risk assessment of all the threats we’re getting online, from all the racism that our members are experiencing, and from the direct attacks that we experienced last summer, has made me fearful, and we have to take steps to protect our staff, our volunteers and our members.

This is really an indictment of where we’re at. Another thing that scares me is that, starting from Syria and Sudan and the genocide that is happening in Gaza, we can actually see it in real time. And still nothing is being done – or not enough is being done to prevent murder, genocide and war crimes.

I feel that my work is the way to honour the dead in my family, as well as the people of my country, and show how borders feature in our lives. My grandfather never moved and he lived in three countries. My grandfather was imprisoned in Austria during the Second World War by people for whom he had fought 25 years earlier in the First World War, because he was drafted to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bosnia was their colony and that war started in Sarajevo! Borders are part of fictional stories that we tell ourselves about differences between people defined as nations, after army generals and politicians draw lines on a piece of paper – usually preceded by war and genocide .

When I came to the UK to claim asylum, Germans and Austrians, from countries that had imprisoned my grandfather five decades earlier, could travel as members of the EU, which was observing the war in my country, pretending to keep an imaginary peace, and standing by while genocide was happening. I couldn’t travel freely and had to become a refugee. To make it worse, once I escaped, I was refused protection.

These are the stories that I still haven’t got round to writing down. But it does enrage me, how we perceive these differences and take them for granted and forget about humanity, with complete disregard for what that does to the w           orld, to our future and to our children.

So I’ll stop my rage and rant there. And will listen and take part in the conversation. Thank you very much for inviting me.

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Photos: Top, Zrinka Bralo on the 30th anniversary of Migrants Organise. Above left, Sarajevo after the war.