(tekst koji slijedi objavljen je na
portalu National Geographic, 4 januara 2018. godine, autor teksta
Nina Strolčić, autor fotografija Sulejman Bijedić. Fotograije na linku ispod teksta.)
20 Years Later, a Bosnian Returns to
His War-Scarred Home
Sulejman Bijedić fled Bosnia and
Herzegovina as a child. After the war he visited to his ancestral
village to document life.
During the Bosnian war, many of the
houses and cultivated fields were burned in the village of Počitelj,
where photographer Sulejman Bijedić's family is from.
By Nina Strochlic
Photographs by Sulejman Bijedić
Even though he left Bosnia at age 5,
Sulejman Bijedić still remembers playing at grandparents’ house
and his father throwing him into the Neretva river to teach him to
swim. He remembers the sounds of gunshots and chaos on the streets
and his father being taken to a prison camp. He remembers being
driven to a port in Croatia and, at night, boarding a ship to Italy.
Sometimes the noise of a plane or a siren will bring back these
memories.
In 2016, Bijedic flew from Italy to his
mother’s village with a camera. He'd visited with his parents when
he was younger, but this time he came alone. He wanted to document
the Muslim community who remained in Počitelj and those who returned
after the war. Bijedić called the project Odavle Samo U Harem—a
phrase he heard a town elder say, which means “From here only to
the cemetery.”
The suburbs of the village are full
of gomile, stones piled as high as 15 feet. Ancient legend
claims they cover the bodies of Greek soldiers who died of the plague
during the Ottoman wars.
A water supply system was only
recently installed to reach the houses in Počitelj. Before that,
rain water and hand wells were the village's water source.
The imam of the village prepares for
Friday prayer. During the war, Serb and Croat forces massacred Muslim
Bosnians—known as Bosniaks—in an ethnic cleansing campaign.
Zulfo, a village elder, is the guardian
of endless anecdotes about the people of the village. He knows by
heart the family trees of those who have lived on this land for
centuries.
Fata is slowly getting blind. She
spends most of her day in front of the window light. When I ask her
to tell me about the war she says she does not remember anything
about those terrible days, but we both know that it is not the
truth.
His mother’s childhood stories
painted Počitelj as an idyllic town filled with pubs and restaurants
and surrounded by nature. What he found was a village destroyed by
the war being fought between Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, Catholic Croats,
and Muslim Bosnians after Yugoslavia broke up in the 1990s. Local
industries had collapsed, leaving unemployment high and social
tensions strained. Trash floated on the Neretva river.
But each summer, members of his
generation return from across Europe to reconnect with their
ancestral homeland. “Their parents do not want their children to
lose touch with their origins, their language, and the family,”
Bijedić says.
Coming home is a fraught process for
refugees. Even decades after the war has ended, soccer clubs, shops,
and neighborhoods are segregated by ethnicity in towns across Bosnia
and Herzegovina. [Read about Sarajevo's last lunar clock timekeeper.]
A peace agreement was struck in 1995,
and by the late 1990s the international community began pressuring
refugees to return to Bosnia. This would bring much needed economic
help and also prove that newfound reconciliation policies were
working, says Hannes Eisporn, a humanitarian who studied
Bosnia’s returnees while pursuing a master’s degree at
Oxford in 2016. When people return home after a war, he says, they
“are voting with their feet and giving confidence that state is
functioning again.”
But getting back is just the first
step. Then begins the process of reclaiming their land, rebuilding
their houses, and mending relationships. Military escorts followed
United Nations-chartered buses filled with returnees, and legal
assistance was offered to returnees. The ground had been laced with
mines and buildings had been booby trapped.
Animosities were still fresh. Returnees
were persecuted and even shot at, particularly in areas where the
ethnic composition had changed during the war. As recently as 2015,
people have been physically attacked for returning to their
homes in northern Bosnia. More than 7,000 people are still
living in temporary centers across the country.
In 2004, the 1 millionth refugee
returned home to Bosnia and Herzegovina. But the average returnee is
old or retired, says Eisporn. Often, they keep a house elsewhere in
Europe and go back and forth to their villages in Bosnia. With few
economic opportunities, young people don’t want to making a
permanent return to their parents' land.
In Prejidor, where Eisporn did his
research, the city remains divided. The shops in the center are owned
by Serbs, and there were few Muslims living in their original
quarter. A couple new houses had been built by returnees who live
there seasonally. It felt, he says, like a ghost neighborhood. “They
return to their villages, but then you have two different villages
with no real interaction between them.”
As the years progress it gets more
difficult to return. Eisporn takes issue with the terminology used by
the international community to describe going home. “Repatriation
is this notion that people return to patriat—the homeland [in
Latin],” he says. “It doesn’t take into account that the
country itself changes. The home changes.”
For returnees to make a smooth
transition they must gain economic and political power, Eisporn
concluded in his research. But the plans to build a diverse nation
didn’t materialize on a local level in Bosnia. “It’s a frozen
conflict,” he says. “It’s not something that’s been
overcome.” The need for integration after conflict is something
that will have to be addressed places like Iraq and Syria, says
Eisporn, who now works for the NGO CARE in Iraq.
But even for those unable to move home,
a visit can heal old wounds. When Sulejman Bijedić returned to his
mother’s town, he met an elder named Abdulah Boškailo who
instinctively understood the young photographer’s quest. When
Boškailo was dying, his family tried to move him into a hospital and
each time he refused, telling them: “Odavle samo u harem.”
This attachment to the land resonated
in Bijedić. “Being born in a place with which you are not able to
have direct contact and growing up in a foreign country is not an
easy thing for anyone,” he says. “It is like not having a solid
foundation beneath your feet.” His elderly friend helped him regain
that foundation, and instill pride in his homeland. He took the
translation of Boškailo’s saying—”from here only to the
cemetery”—and turned it into a photography project.
“The war does not end on the day the
soldiers stop firing,” says Bijedić. “For many people that is
just the beginning, because they will have to carry the consequences
of the war for a lifetime, or worse, for generations.”
Fotografije na linku ispod.
Opis ispod fotografija:
During the war, when men and boys
were being deportated to concentration camps, many used the woods as
a hideout. Some of them remained hidden for months before finding an
escape route.
Only a few children are left
in the village. Many don’t want to work the land as the tradition
dictates, but the education costs are very high for their families.
"Their future is uncertain," says Bijedić.
The remaining original
inhabitants of the village have known the horrors of war and a
lifetime of sacrifices.
On Fridays, the day of prayer for
Muslims, the mosque fills with worshippers. The imam's sermons
encourage peaceful coexistence with neighbors from different
ethnicities
Meals are prepared almost
exclusively with what is produced off the land. The villagers only
buy what they cannot grow themselves.
Počitelj was built in 1383
by the Bosnian King Stjepan Tvrtko. Its historic center, a UNESCO
World Heritage Site, is almost unchanged since then.
In the summer the village is
full of a new generation that grew up overseas because of the war.
They're called "the diaspora teens."
A new mosque stands on the
ruins of the previous one, which was destroyed during the war.
A man has a moment of meditation
after a prayer.
A teenager plays with a child
in front of a herd of sheep.
You may see more of Sulejman Bijedić's
work on his website and follow him on Instagram.
Nina Strochlic is a staff writer
covering culture, adventure, and science for National
Geographic magazine.
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