Slika 1 – S lijeva na desno: Midheta, Fatima, Nizama, Centar grada u Tarčinu. 1999.
Na fotografiji Fatima Đuderija zaštitnički spušta ruku na rame svoje najstarije kćerke, a drugom hvata ruku mlađe, njene djevojčice. Godina je 1999. i njih tri su na slici u centru Tarčina u Bosni i Hercegovini, gdje Fatima predaje u osnovnoj školi.
Četverogodišnja Midheta nosi ružičastu haljinu sa volanima na rukavima i rozetom ušivenom na kragnu. Njene bijele tajice s uzorkom čipke i male crne cipelice govore o djetinjstvu i majčinoj brizi. Dvogodišnja Nizama nosi sličnu haljinu, ali u Robin's-jajasto-plavoj, njene bijele hulahopke i Mary Janes jednako netaknute. Ali za razliku od starije sestre i majke koje vire direktno u kameru, ova djevojka gleda ulijevo, negdje dalje od mjesta gdje zamišlja njenog oca Mirsada Đuderiju kako se trudi da izmami osmijehe svoje porodice. Na ovoj fotografiji njegovi napori propadaju. Godina je 1999., neposredno prije nego što porodica emigrira u Sjedinjene Države.
Godina je 1999. i višemjesečni vazdušni napadi NATO-a na srpske vojne položaje okončani su 10. juna, samo nekoliko dana nakon što je nastala ova porodična fotografija. Srpske trupe — pod vodstvom Slobodana Miloševića — protjerale su 1,5 miliona kosovskih Albanaca iz njihovih domova i masakrirali najmanje 10.000 civila.
Kosovo je 1999. bilo na raskrsnici, ali počevši od 1991. godine, Miloševićev (tadašnji predsjednik Srbije) otrovni nacionalizam pokrenuo je raspad bivših republika Jugoslavije i podstakao kampanju genocida i silovanja širom Zapadnog Balkana. U ovim ranijim ratovima, umjesto da ciljaju na etničke Albance, srpske snage su poklale više od 100.000 Hrvata i Bošnjaka — bosanskih Muslimana poput Đuderija na fotografiji.
Do marta 1991. rat je stigao u Hrvatsku. Kao pješadinac u Jugoslovenskoj narodnoj armiji, Mirsad Đuderija je 1980-ih bio raspoređen u Makedoniju. Prepoznao je znakove upozorenja i razumio je da će Bosna biti sljedeća. Još nije bio suprug Fatime ili otac dvije djevojčice, Mirsad je težio da postane oficir, ali raspadom Jugoslavije to se nikada nije dogodilo. Umjesto toga, živio je u Foči, rodnom gradu svoje porodice, i radio u livnici Maglića.
Tokom aprila 1992. godine, kao i mnogi drugi, porodica Đuderija je zadržala kolektivni dah dok su vojne i paravojne snage – komšije Srbija i Crna Gora – postali neprijatelji-agresori – opkolile grad. Riječ o koncentracionim logorima i onome što će se nazvati “logorima za silovanja” kovitlala se u vrtlogu rastućeg straha i panike.
Mnogi nesrpski stanovnici Foče su pobjegli. Mnogi su bili zarobljeni od lokalnih četnika (neregularne snage) i mučeni. Ta 1992. bi bila godina kada su ubijena braća Mirsada Đuderije, Esad i Avdo. Sabina, Avdina zaručnica poginula je u Goraždu nekoliko mjeseci nakon njega, tokom granatiranja grada.
Do januara 1994. godine – iste godine kada su se Mirsad i Fatima vjenčali – u srpskoj kampanji etničkog čišćenja ubijeno je ili nestalo 2.707 nesrba u Foči. Među ove potonje ubrajani su i Mirsadova majka i brat. Broj silovanih žena i djevojaka u Foči, kao i u cijelom regionu, možda nikada neće biti poznat, ali svjedoci navode stotine žrtava od jedanaest do sedamdeset godina.
Slika 2: Nizama (u sredini) na protestu u Foči, avgust 2020.
Sjećate li se djevojčice na fotografiji? Dvogodišnjakinja koja stoički gleda van kamere? Nizama Đuderija se 19. juna 2020. godine pridružila ostalim govornicima Udruženja žrtava rata – Foča 92-95 povodom obilježavanja Međunarodnog dana borbe protiv seksualnog nasilja u sukobu. Tog dana 2020. ustala je u znak protesta, dajući glas onima koji su dugo bili šutljivi.
Kao dijete rata, Nizamin put natrag u domovinu, a posebno u Foču, čini se i izvanrednim i neizbježnim. Grad se nalazi na obalama rijeke Drine, u jugoistočnom dijelu Bosne i Hercegovine (BiH), ali Foča pripada Republici Srpskoj (RS). Teritorija RS od skoro 10.000 kvadratnih milja ostavljena je Srbima kao rezultat Dejtonskog mirovnog sporazuma u decembru 1995. godine. Sporazum je okončao rat, ali je podijelio zemlju uspostavljanjem dva entiteta po etničkoj liniji: Srbi RS i Bošnjaci (bosanski Muslimani) i Hrvati FBiH.
Slika 3: Nizama kleči na grobu svog amidže i nane u Susjesnom, Foča. avgust 2021
Tada je Fulbrajtova stipendistkinja Nizama stigla u Foču nakon dvadeset pet godina u krhkom miru koji je pokazivao sve više znakova lomova. Kao i mnogi njeni savremenici, ovi prijelomi se ogledaju u njenoj porodici, porodici koju su oblikovale traume i gubici. Na fotografiji ispod prikazana je Nizama kako kleči između dva nadgrobna obilježja, jednog za nanu po ocu Fatimu i drugog za Avdu, jednog od amidža. Njihova tijela su vraćena tek nakon dugog i bolnog perioda za porodicu Đuderija. Međunarodnoj komisiji za nestale osobe trebalo je devet godina da locira njihove posmrtne ostatke. I bio je potreban sav novac koji su njeni roditelji uštedjeli u Sjedinjenim Državama da finansiraju povratak njenog oca u Bosnu da ih identifikuje.
Prijelomi porodice Đuderija bili su brzi i bolni, grane otkinute sa porodičnog stabla – nana, amidže, braća – posljedice su dugotrajne.
Istina
Kako se porodica oporavlja od ovakvog gubitka? Kako je mlada žena poput Nizame Đuderija pretvorila užase prošlosti svoje porodice u moćan motor za promjene? Za Nizamu, njena potraga je uvijek uključivala neuhvatljivu istinu. Ovdje ona prepričava ulogu svog oca u tome.
„Naš otac ne zna da laže, da krije informacije o ratu; pronašao je tijela svoje majke i brata tek nakon što su njihova tijela ekshumirana iz masovnih grobnica 2001. godine.” Nizama se prisjeća da je kao mlada djevojka gledala VHS kasete. Njen otac bi ubacio zdepastu traku u prednji otvor jedinog porodičnog televizora; umjesto Diznijevog videa, gledala bi dokumentarne ratne snimke ili video zapise koje su njen otac ili amidža snimili sami. “Mislim da je ovo bio način na koji se moj tata nosi sa traumom koju je doživio. Moji roditelji su bili vrlo otvoreni prema mojoj sestri i meni o ratu i onome što im se dogodilo, iako osjećam da uvijek ima još toga za otkriti. Moj babo je nevjerovatno snažan kada priča o tome. Do danas ga nisam vidjela da je pustio suzu, čak ni na grobovima svojih najmilijih.”
Slika 4: Nizamina sestra na slici kao beba sa ocem Mirsadom
“Da, bilo mi je traumatično gledati jezive fotografije i video snimke ratnih scena. Godinama sam čitala biografije preživjelih od genocida i slušala srceparajuća ratna iskustva odraslih o događajima u bosanskoj zajednici. Ali osjećam da je to ono što mi daje sigurnost da se uhvatim u koštac sa realnošću i suočim se s njom. Suosjećam se sa svakim Bosancem, ako se ne suočiš sa traumama rata, same će te slijediti.”
Vjera i identitet
Umjesto da se muči u stanju žrtve, Nizama je krenula stopama svojih roditelja. Njena majka Fatima je oduvijek bila pobožna muslimanka. “Moja sestra i ja smo je vidjele kako moli svoje dnevne molitve i učile smo iz njenog primjera. Moja vjera je ono za što vjerujem da mi je pomoglo da shvatim svoj identitet i – život u multireligijskom društvu – pomogla mi je da vidim kako je to više koristilo Bosni nego što je dijelilo.”
Slika 5: Nizama u Aladža džamiji, avgust 2020
Ipak, odrastanje u Americi i proučavanje načina na koje nacionalizam nastavlja da zabija klin između ljudi različitih vjera i etničkih grupa, predstavljalo je dodatne izazove. “Borila sam se da uskladim svoj bosanski i američki identitet. Kako sam starila, otkrila sam da mi je iskrenost u vezi sa svojim osećanjima donijela više jasnoće. Od malih nogu sam znala da sam ovdje u SAD-u kao rezultat nepravde. Ali kada sam proučavala pokret za građanska prava, saznala sam da nepravda postoji i u Americi.”
Nepravda: Ispravljanje nepravdi
Nije iznenađujuće što Nizama sada radi kao kriminalistički istražitelj u okrugu King, WA. “Nadnanacionalna kriminologija je uvijek bila moje najveće interesovanje. Željela sam da shvatim kako se najmoćniji ljudi na našoj planeti moraju okrenuti kriminalu da bi zaradili svoja dostignuća. To je uključivalo ratne zločine. Zatekla sam sebe kako poredim korupciju vlade u Bosni sa pokvarenim sistemom krivičnog pravosuđa u Sjedinjenim Državama. ”Usprkos njenoj jasnoj procjeni kako američki „rat protiv droge, masovno zatvaranje i militarizovani policijski sistem“ nesrazmjerno utiče na najugroženije članove društva, ona i dalje vjeruje da bi reformisani američki sistem krivičnog pravosuđa „mogao biti kohezivni faktor za poboljšanje društva u našem moralnom i humanističkom jezgru.”
Slika 6: Nizama kod spomen obilježja u Srebrenici, avgust 2020.
Sjećanje
I smatra da je za pripadnike bosanskohercegovačke dijaspore, kao i za one koji danas žive u Bosni, važno da nikada ne zaborave nepravde iz prošlosti. “Bez odgovarajućeg obrazovanja o bosanskoj historiji, samo dopuštamo da sudbinu naše zemlje kroje ruke njenih agresora.
Ono što je sada uznemirujuće je da ljudi počinju da zaboravljaju šta se dogodilo. Oni su podijeljeni. Morala sam da odlučim: na šta da se sada fokusiram?“
U gradovima poput Foče, opštinske vlasti RS-a ne osjećaju nikakav pritisak da podignu spomenike Bosancima koji su stradali u ratu, Bosankama koje su silovali i mučili po njihovom naređenju. „Svakog Bosanca koji pamti rat gledam kao delikatan dio žive historije“, kaže Nizama. “Moramo pružiti nepodijeljenu pažnju, holističku brigu (fizičku, psihološku i duhovnu) za svakog od ovih ljudi.” Kao akademik i humanista, ona insistira na tome da istinsko razumijevanje kako je srpska agresija na balkanskim ratovima 1990-ih „zakuhala do svog krvavog početka i najkrvavijeg kraja” mora biti zajednički napor. Tek tada možemo reći “nikad više” i znati da to zvuči istinito.
(Dina Greenbreg)
Članak Dine možete pročitati ovdje i na Engleskom jeziku:
Thirty Years Beyond War in Bosnia: A Family’s Severed Branches
In the photo, Fatima Đuderija rests her hand protectively on her oldest daughter’s shoulder and—with the other—she clasps the hand of the younger, her baby girl. It is 1999 and the three are pictured in the city center of Tarčin in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where Fatima teaches elementary school.
Four-year-old Midheta wears a pink dress with frills at the sleeves and a rosette stitched onto the collar. Her white, lace-patterned tights and black Mary Janes speak of childhood and a mother’s care. Two-year-old Nizama wears a similar dress, though in Robin’s-egg-blue, her white tights and Mary Janes equally pristine. But unlike her older sister and mother who peer directly into the camera, this girl gazes off to the left, somewhere beyond the spot where I imagine her father, Mirsad Đuderija, works hard to coax smiles from his family. In this photo, his efforts fail. It is 1999, just before the family emigrates to the United States.
It is 1999 and months of NATO airstrikes on Serbian military positions have come to an end on June 10, just days after this family photo was taken. Serbian troops—under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević—have driven 1.5 million Kosovar Albanians from their homes and massacred at least 10,000 civilians.
In 1999, Kosovo was in the cross hairs, but beginning in 1991, [then Serbian president] Milošević’s toxic nationalism had triggered the dissolution of the former Republics of Yugoslavia and incited a campaign of genocide and rape throughout the Western Balkans. In these earlier wars, rather than targeting ethnic Albanians, Serb forces had slaughtered more than 100,000 Croats and Bosniaks—Bosnian Muslims like the Đuderijas pictured in the photo.
By March,1991, war had arrived in Croatia. As a pješadinac (an infantry man) in the Yugoslav National Army, Mirsad Đuderija had been deployed to Macedonia in the 1980s. He knew the warning signs and understood that Bosnia would be next. Not yet a husband to Fatima or a father to two little girls, Mirsad aspired to become an officer, but with the dissolution of Yugoslavia this would never come to pass. Instead, he was living in his family’s hometown of Foča and working at the Maglic foundry.
Throughout April of 1992, like so many others, the Đuderija family held their collective breath as military and paramilitary forces—Serbian and Montenegrin neighbors-turned-enemy-aggressors—encircled the city. Word of concentration camps and what would come to be called “rape camps” swirled in a vortex of growing fear and panic.
Many of Foča’s non-Serb residents fled. Many were taken captive by local Chetiks (irregular forces) and tortured. 1992 would mark the year that Mirsad Đuderija’s brothers, Esad and Avdo, were killed. Sabina, Avdo’s fiancé, would die a couple months after him in a grenade attack in Goražde.
By January 1994—the same year Mirsad and Fatima married—the Serbian campaign of ethnic cleansing had left 2,707 of Foča’s non-Serbs dead or missing. Mirsad’s mother and brother were counted among the latter. The number of women and girls who were raped in Foča—as throughout the region—may never be known, but witnesses reported hundreds, victims as young as eleven, as old as seventy.
Photo 2: Nizama (center) at the protest in Foča, August 2020
Remember the little girl in the photo? The two-year-old gazing stoically beyond the camera? On June 19, 2020, Nizama Đuderija joined other speakers for the Association of Victims of War – Foča 92-95 to commemorate International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. That day in 2020, she stood in protest, giving voice to those who had long been silenced.
As a child of war, Nizama’s path back to her homeland, and especially to Foča, seems both remarkable and inevitable. The city perches on the banks of the Drina River, in the south-eastern portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but Foča belongs to Republika Srpska (RS). The nearly 10,000-square-mile territory of RS was bequeathed to the Serbians as a result of the Dayton Peace Agreement in December, 1995. The accord brought the war to an end, but divided the country by establishing two entities along ethnic lines: the Serbs of RS and the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) and Croats of BiH.
Photo 3: Nizama kneeling at gravesite of her uncle and grandmother in Susjesno, Foča. August 2021
Then a Fulbright scholar, Nizama arrived in Foča twenty-five years into a fragile peace that showed increasing signs of fracture. Like so many of her contemporaries, these fractures are mirrored in her family, a family shaped by trauma and loss. The photo below shows Nizama kneeling between two grave markers, one for her paternal grandmother Fatima, and Avdo, one for her uncles. Their bodies were repatriated only after a long and painful period for the Đuderija family. It would take the International Commission on Missing Persons nine years to locate their remains. And it would take all the money her parents had saved in the United States to fund her father’s return to Bosnia to identify them.
The fractures of the Đuderija family were swift and painful, branches torn from the family tree—a grandmother, uncles, brothers—the effects long-lasting.
Truth
How does a family recover from this kind of loss? How has a young woman like Nizama Đuderija turned the horrors of her family’s past into a powerful engine for change? For Nizama, her quest has always involved an elusive truth. Here, she recounts her father’s role in this.
“Our father doesn’t know how to lie, to withhold information about the war; he found his mother and brother’s bodies only after their bodies were exhumed from mass graves in 2001.” Nizama recalls viewing VHS tapes as a young girl. Her father would feed a chunky tape into the front slot of the family’s sole TV; instead of a Disney video, she would watch documentary war footage or videos that either her father or uncle had taken on their own. “I think this was my dad’s way of coping with the trauma he experienced. My parents were very open with my sister and me about the war and what happened to them, although I feel there is always more to uncover. My dad is incredibly strong when he speaks about it. To this day, I never saw him shed a tear, even when at his loved ones’ graves.”
Photo 4: Nizama’s sister pictured as a baby with her father, Mirsad
“Yes, it was traumatic for me to view gruesome war-scene photos and video. For years, I’ve read biographies of genocide survivors, and listened to heart-wrenching war experiences from adults at Bosnian community events. But I feel this is what gives me the reassurance to tackle the reality head-on, and to face it. I feel for any Bosnian, if you do not face the traumas of the war, they will only follow you.”
Faith and Identity
Rather than wallowing in a state of victimhood, Nizama followed in her parents’ footsteps. Her mother, Fatima, has always been a devout Muslim. “My sister and I saw her pray her daily prayers and we learned from her example. My faith is what I believe helped me to understand my identity and—living in a multi-religious society— helped me to see how this benefited Bosnia more than divided it.”
Photo 5: Nizama at Aladza Mosque, August 2020
Yet, growing up in America, and studying the ways in which nationalism continues to drive a wedge between people of different faiths and ethnicities, presented additional challenges. “I struggled with balancing my Bosnian and American identity. as I got older I found being honest about my feelings brought more clarity. From a young age, I knew that I was here in the U.S. as a result of injustice. But when I studied the civil rights movement, I learned that injustice existed in America, too.”
Injustice: Righting the Wrongs
It's not surprising that Nizama now works as a criminal investigator in King County, WA. “Supranational criminology was always my peak interest. I wanted to understand how the most powerful people on our planet must turn to crime to earn their achievements. This included war crimes. I found myself comparing government corruption in Bosnia with the broken criminal justice system in the United States.” Despite her clear-eyed assessment of how America’s “War on drugs, mass incarceration, and a militarized policing system” disproportionately affects the most vulnerable members of society, she still believes that a reformed U.S. criminal justice system “could be a cohesive factor to bettering society at our moral and humanist core.”
Photo 6: Nizama at memorial commemorating in Srebrenica, August 2020
Remembrance
And she believes that it is critical for members of the Bosnian diaspora as well as those living in Bosnia today, to never forget the injustices of the past. “Without proper education about Bosnia’s history, we are only allowing our country’s destiny to be shaped by the hands of her aggressors. What’s upsetting now is that people are starting to forget what happened. They are divided. I had to decide: What do I focus on now?
In towns like Foča, the RS municipal powers feel no pressure to erect monuments to Bosnians who perished in the war, Bosnians who were raped and tortured on their orders. “I look at every Bosnian person who remembers the war as a delicate piece of living history,” says Nizama. “We need to provide undivided attention, holistic care (physical, psychological, and spiritual), for each of these people.” As an academic and a humanist, she insists that truly understanding how Serbian aggression in the 1990s Balkan Wars “boiled up to its bloodies beginning and bloodiest ending” must be a collective effort. Only then can we say “never again” and know that it rings true.
