SARAJEVO: Ten years have passed since the internationally sponsored Dayton Peace Accords ended the bloody war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But lives remain disrupted, and thousands are still missing. This land, once described as “the model of multi-ethnic mixture” of Muslims, Serbs and Croats in former Yugoslavia paid for the war with more than 200,000 lives. Most of those killed were Muslims.
The post-conflict recovery and nation building since 1995 when the wars ended was supported by more than five billion dollars in international aid for reconstruction, but this healed wounds only superficially.
“There’s peace and security, but there’s no chance that our lives will ever look the same as in pre-war times,” Abid Dudic (51) told IPS. He returned to his pre-war home in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia from Germany only two years ago. He fled with his family in 1992 when the conflict broke out. The family returned to find that Dudic’s father Huso and his wife Fahreta’s three brothers Resad, Sefik and Redzep went missing in July 1995 after the Bosnian Serb Army overran the United Nations protected area of Srebrenica. More than 20,000 Muslims had been crammed into that small town since 1992. When it fell to Serbs in 1995, at least 8,000 Muslim boys and men were executed. Relatives of the Dudics were among them.
“If it was not for pictures, I would not know that my brothers existed,” Fahreta told IPS. “The pain, the emptiness will always remain in my heart.” Fahreta and Abid share the destiny of hundreds of thousands who still feel the trauma of war in Bosnia, regardless of ethnicity.
A recent post-war study by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Bosnia confirmed that the legacy of a painful past still remains. “The first and fundamental conclusion is that an extremely deep sense of grievance remains,” said the study, published under the title ‘Justice and Truth in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Public Perceptions’.
Half of all the interviewees said that what happened in 1992-95 affects their everyday life today. That was true for almost 60 per cent of Muslims, 46 per cent of Croats and 39 per cent of the Serbs surveyed. The war had threatened the lives of almost 70 per cent of Muslims surveyed, as well as 54 per cent of Croats and 45 per cent of Serbs. A total of 54 per cent from all three ethnicities said they would never forget it. Another study showed that thousands suffer from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The study, published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggested that many survivors are plagued by a “a fear of loss of control over life”, even though the guns and tanks went silent 10 years ago. “These findings may have important implications for reconciliation efforts in post-war countries and effective interventions for traumatised war survivors,” said the authors, seven psychologists and psychiatrists from former Yugoslavia.
Based on interviews with 1,358 survivors conducted between March 2000 and July 2002, the experts examined factors contributing to chronic depression among those who lost loved ones and homes or were otherwise traumatised. On average, victims suffered 12.6 “war-related events” such as combat and torture, living as refugees, witnessing the death or rape of loved-ones, being exposed to mass graves or enduring sniper fire, siege or aerial bombardment.
Some 79 per cent of war survivors in Bosnia said they believed justice has not been done.—Dawn/IPS News Service
