Finally, Gradiska. To reach the bridge, the column needed to pass through the town centre - swarming with a hostile crowd shouting for our blood. Some spat at the bus windows, others threw stones, and the police made no effort to keep the crowd away from the column. Negotiations were taking place on the bridge, and we had no choice but to wait. Suddenly, glass on one of the windows of my bus shattered. Somebody from the crowd had fired twice. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. I was amazed when I realised that I felt no fear inside me of being hurt. The first buses started crossing the bridge.
Over the bridge, I spotted the first UN forces deployed in the area. They were from Jordan, and were charged with monitoring any breaches of the cease-fire - signed by Serbs and Croats almost a year before this day. The first signs of dusk appeared, and the column was heading deeper into Croatian territory. Along the road were only ruins of what once used to be houses. Several kilometres after crossing the bridge, there was not a single sign of any kind of civilian life around. Jordanian soldiers waived to us from their barracks. I had no emotions. No sadness, no joy. Just vast emptiness inside me. I despised the world I left behind me. I despised the world I was approaching. I hated the world that let all of this happen. But this hatred was silent. The world I was entering into was not the same world as the one I had known in peace time. I was being deported from my country. It probably saved my life. But what was my life now anyway? I did not want to die, but I still felt no enthusiasm for the life ahead of me. I guess I was like an animal being released into wilderness after years of confinement. There was a huge hole in my life.
I felt I had been a coward for not having defended my home and my country, even though I had not been given any such opportunity. I felt I was a different kind of human being after these last seven months. Nothing was going to be the same again.
Close to the line of separation between the Zagreb government forces and the rebel Serbs another group of buses waited for us. The column finally stopped. We started disembarking from the buses. Crossing the line, we were welcomed by members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who put us onto new buses.
‘Good evening.’ Those before me greeted the new bus driver with smiles on their faces. I just passed him moving toward one of the back seats. I was in no mood to talk. I was a man in no-man’s land. This is where I wanted to stay. I wanted everybody to go ahead and grab their freedom and leave me alone in this land where there was no need to seek independence from others. I wanted to stay in the land where there were no ambitious administrations that could screw up my life to satisfy their own sick ambitions; the land where there were no profiteers using all possible means just to enrich themselves. I was sick of all the people of this world. Man was the most disgusting creature on earth. A blind idiot crushing everything he steps on without looking back at the damage he had done. For seven long months I had wanted to escape from people. All I wanted was just five minutes on my own.
‘Hey, chief. Could we hear some news on the radio?’ Somebody wanted to hear news that five minutes later would be an insignificant piece of history.
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘They were killing indiscriminately. They tortured and killed thousands of people. Each night there were thirty to forty men murdered.’A familiar voice was giving an interview to reporters on a Croatian radio station.
Words of warning by that good ICRC fellow - that it might be dangerous for those staying behind if we talked to the press - obviously had no meaning for the man being interviewed. He was a free man. Crossing the line, he instantly forgot the world behind. He forgot the men still waiting for their release. Looking quietly through the window, I could only ask myself one last time,
‘Will we ever learn?’
*****
Earlier that year my village, Old Kevljani, had been just another small and quiet place. On the morning of Thursday, 21 May, everything seemed as usual. It was a very pleasant and sunny spring day.
Around 01.30 pm Mama started to prepare lunch. I was hanging around the house and my brother Kasim was somewhere in the village. Suddenly, somebody was running and shouting,
‘Two thousand Chetniks are moving north of the village.’
It was the news everyone had been expecting - but hoping would never reach our ears. The place where the Chetniks had been reported was to the north, about one kilometre away from my house. It was not possible to see them from my place as a thick layer of woods concealed them from sight.
For the last two months, on the face of it, life in the region seemed normal. But in reality we could all feel signs of coming trouble. My village was more quiet than usual. There was something unpleasant about the quietness. I could not hear people calling each other to leave their gardening and come for a cup of coffee. The biggest sign of change was that there was no noise of children playing. The village was completely silenced. It was not normal for a place like Kevljani to be so quiet.
In better times, the population of Old Kevljani had numbered around six hundred. The village was set between the railway line in the south and the Prijedor-Banja Luka highway in the north. We were the most eastern Muslim village in the Prijedor district, situated at the edge of the territory populated dominantly by the Serbs. On three sides, we were surrounded by the Serbs. The only direct route leading to Kozarac, the largest Muslim town in the region, was a road running north-east towards the highway. All other routes led directly to Serb villages.
All the houses in the village, about one hundred houses, were lined along three main roads which met in the village centre. I lived with my parents and two older brothers in the central part of the village called Srednja Mahala. Mama, Kasim and I were still at home, while my father and elder brother worked in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Serbian attacks on towns in northern Bosnia, Bosnian Posavina, had closed all routes for their safe return home.
Kasim had worked in Croatia, too, but several months earlier he had decided to quit and come home. As for myself, like many other young people of my generation, for the last three years I was caught in a wide-spread trap of unemployment. Some people had decided not to wait and see whether the Serbs would carry out their threats. Instead, they packed their bags and left the village.
Once I heard the news of the Serbs’ approach, I ran to the woods above our house. When I arrived there, I heard some voices coming from behind the bushes. Looking very carefully in that direction, I recognised two of my neighbours. They had heard the same news and had also decided to come and investigate for themselves. We remained hidden in the green part of the woods where nobody from the other side could see us. Beyond the woods there was a vast clear area of farm-land, and we could see some figures moving along a road at its far end. They were some four to five hundred metres away. From this distance it was impossible to recognise faces. The pair of binoculars I had was of very little help. I could only see their automatic weapons and the olive-green JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army) uniforms. They did not try to hide. I had a feeling they wanted to show us who was controlling the whole situation. Behind them there was a forest, and it was possible more of them could have been hiding there.
Some three kilometres further east was the main Serb stronghold of Omarska, and my neighbours decided to move on to the part of the woods facing it to see if there were other Serbs coming from that direction.
‘You stay here,’ they said. ‘More men should join you soon.’
Waiting for others to arrive, I wondered if there was a way we could defend ourselves. Most of us had gone through a compulsory period of National Service - where we had been given some basic training in handling infantry arms such as Kalashnikovs or semi-automatic rifles. We had not been trained for a conflict of this nature. But we had no arms - not even rifles - nor any kind of military organisation. We were just a bunch of villagers at a loss as to what to do. The Serbs had always dominated the JNA and they had appropriated both the JNA’s small and heavy weaponry.
During the last couple of days, the village had been preparing to send women and children to Kozarac in case of an emergency. While I was on my way to the woods, our neighbour Hasnija came to our house and told Mama that women, children, and the elderly were being evacuated. In all this panic and confusion, Kasim told her to leave the village immediately. Hugging him in tears she said,
‘My dear son, are we ever going to see each other again?’
As Mama was leaving for the village centre, Kasim remembered that I had some money with me. It was always with one of us in case we had to run. He thought it might be of greater help to her than to the two of us. He ran to the woods to take it from me, but by the time he was back in the village she was already gone. She had had just enough time to put her shoes on. Minutes later, Kasim was back in the woods. The whole family was dispersed now. Two of us were still in the village. Mama was in Kozarac not knowing where she was going to spend the coming night; and my elder brother and father were in Zagreb - which seemed to be on another planet.
Meanwhile, three other young neighbours arrived in the woods, too. They said several other groups had taken positions at other places around the village.
‘I will stay here with them. You go home and feed the animals,’ Kasim said to me. ‘They have not been given any food since morning.’
I left them behind to observe movements of the Serbs through binoculars. Using the longer path home, I passed by the other groups our neighbours had mentioned. I wanted to know how long they intended to stay there. All of them told me they were going to guard the village during the coming night from their present positions. Back home everything looked so sad. In the kitchen there was a pie covered by a tray that Mama had made just before she fled. It was still warm. Next to it were freshly roasted coffee beans. The house looked ghostly, as if suddenly all life had disappeared without a trace. It was like a scene from the ‘Twilight Zone’. Barking dogs were the only sounds that could be heard in the village.
I fed the animals and gave them some water. Halfway through the job, I noticed a small group of the villagers I had left behind in the woods coming back to Kevljani.
‘Why are you coming back? Weren’t you supposed to stay there all night?’ I wondered what made them change their minds so suddenly.
‘It’s not too safe to stay there in the dark,’ they said. ‘We don’t have enough weapons to defend ourselves if the Chetniks decided to attack tonight.’
‘Well’ I thought, ‘it doesn’t really matter whether they attack by day or by night. Whichever they do we have no weapons to stop them.’ Nevertheless, I thought these men should have remained in the woods - if only to alert everybody in the village.
I went back inside the house to get something to eat. Soon, Kasim came back home, too.
‘What would you like to eat?’ I expected him to be hungry as he had not eaten anything for some seven or eight hours.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he replied.
‘What are you going to do tonight?’
‘We’re going to watch closely all the approaches to the village.’
‘Should I go too?’
‘It would be better for you to stay at home, and when I get tired around midnight you can replace me until morning.’
The rest of the night went on without any incidents. After the excitement of the previous day and a sleepless night, everyone fell asleep the following morning. Nobody thought that the Serbs would begin their attack at first daylight. Fortunately, the morning passed quietly.
The problems that we, the Muslims of the Kozarac region, were facing were also well known to the Muslims of Brdo - a group of villages set on the western side of Prijedor town. Since the Serbs had ousted Prijedor’s legally-elected government some weeks earlier, they now demanded that the non-Serb populations accept their rule. Both we, the Muslims of the Kozarac region and those from Brdo, rejected such an option because we knew what had happened to the Muslims in the Drina Valley - where some people were massacred and others expelled. After the coup in Prijedor, no-one could trust the Chetniks.
While we rested in our village after the sleepless night, on the other side of Prijedor five Serb soldiers in a vehicle approached the checkpoint controlled by the Muslims from Hambarine - a village in Brdo. The checkpoint had been established out of fear that the Serbs might enter their village and massacre their people. The soldiers demanded to be let through. They were told to drive back to where they came from. One of them, thinking that the machine gun would be a better method of persuasion, walked back to the vehicle, took up his gun and blasted fire at the men standing at the checkpoint. They fired back and shot him dead. Two more Chetniks died instantly and two were wounded. The dead body of the unsuccessful negotiator was placed in the vehicle and one of the wounded irregulars drove back towards Prijedor.
In the evening, the Serbs used the radio station in Prijedor to broadcast another ultimatum to the Muslims of Hambarine. They named Aziz Aliskovic, a former policeman, and a group of other men, demanding their surrender by 07.00 am the following morning. None of the men they asked for were present at the checkpoint at the time of the incident. The ultimatum was not met.
The Serb-controlled TV Banja Luka presented a completely different version of the event. One of the wounded soldiers told the TV cameras that he and his colleagues were simply going home from the front in Croatia. The Serbian propaganda had transformed this incident into a deadly plot against all the Serbs by Muslim extremists. The same TV station was used as a vehicle for propaganda which presented the Serbs as being under threat from the Muslims wherever they moved.
Once the demands for delivery of Aziz and the others failed to be met, the deadline was extended until 09.00 am. Two hours later, the silence in Hambarine was broken by two shells landing on the village. It was a warning. The people of Hambarine decided to remain firm in their decision not to deliver a single man. They knew that the casualties at the checkpoint were the result of self-defence, and that the men the Chetniks demanded had not been there at the time of the incident. At 10.30 am, the village came under heavy shell fire. Weapons used for the attack were stationed at the aerodrome at Urije, a suburb of Prijedor. The shell fire was followed by an infantry attempt to overrun Hambarine, but the defenders succeeded in driving them back. The first attempt to capture Hambarine ended in failure. The second try followed soon, but once more they were forced to retreat. The Chetniks resumed with heavy shelling. Ground skirmishes lasted until 07.00 pm.
Entering Hambarine with two tanks and an armoured personnel carrier (APC), the Chetniks forced the locals to withdraw to nearby Kurevo and Ljubija. Some five hundred people, all unarmed civilians, were never given the chance to run for cover. They became the victims of the first mass slaughter in the district.
end of the excerpt
