AVOIDING BLANKET BLAME

The Suitcase: Refugee Voices From Bosnia and Croatia
Edited by Julie Mertus et al. (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997)

Introduction

During the Bosnia war, Serbian forces set for ethnic cleansing terrorized and pushed nearly all of the Muslims out of Bijeljina by the end of 1993. The extract below is from a Muslim woman who was forced to leave Bijeljina

Excerpt from pages 40-41

My children all left for Germany, but I stayed alone with my husband because he was sick. They came to throw me out of my house. My husband died the next day; we buried him, but I stayed on because of my mother and my brother. We stayed for two years and by then we couldn’t get out anymore.

Thankfully there is an agency in the center of our city of Bijeljina. A man named Dragas runs it, a man from outside, a man from nowhere. He just showed up and set up business. You have to go there and pay by selling your house, of course at a very unfair, low price. You sign that you are leaving everything of your own free will to the state, and then you can get out. The price per person is now five thousand German marks. Otherwise, you cannot get out o the city. Officially it is not permitted. I don’t now if it is all arranged, but it is a good thing that there is such an agency. At least one can leave safely. Everyone knows about the agency. Of course we had to use it too.

. . .

Our life in Bosnia had become impossible. There was a certain man named Vojkan who took men away during the night, to Majevica to work, and women and children were taken to Tuzla. We were afraid and that is why we left, all together: Mother, who is eighty, myself and my brother with his wife. The local Serbs were OK, but they dared not protect us. The ones from outside who came from nowhere, from places I never heard of, they were terrible. They came to take away even my brother, who was a soldier of the Yugoslav regular army. They surrounded the house and we escaped through the back door.

It would take me five days to tell you what it is like in Bijeljina: in Janja and Bijeljina there are no more old Muslims. They would just come to get you during the night and you would disappear. We had to leave because we decided not to fight on any side. What for? Whom for? That is why we decided to go to Germany, not to Turkey where we would be engaged on the other side. We left our rich and beautiful house to a man, a refugee, a wonderful man, a Serb who will take care of it.

When we left a Serbian woman came to see us off. She was my best friend and we had lived thirty-seven years together. She brought me oranges and tomatoes for the trip. My elderly mother was completely lost and I was desperate.

Many refugees were helped by neighbors, often those very people who were now supposed to be enemies. As one Muslim woman said, ‘I don’t know if those were friends or not who helped us out of Bosnia, who gave us papers for foreign countries. True friends would have helped us stay in our homes alive. But for us it was a question of life or death, so we had to consider them as friends.(p22)

Questions and Discussion

Many Muslim refugees had long standing friends who were Serbian. When the Serbian forces invaded these cities and towns to force out the Muslims, most Muslims differentiated between the Serbs who were their neighbors and who continued to treat them kindly and those Serbs who came from elsewhere and who treated them horribly.

Neighbors could have had various motives for helping Muslims leave Bosnia: (1) a desire to help friends and neighbors reach safety, since Serbian forces from outside their towns would arrive and haul off Muslims, or, (2) these Serbian neighbors had an interest in helping Muslims quickly evacuate so that they could then stake a claim in their abandoned property. Even if neighbors ended up benefiting from the expulsion of the Muslims, do you think it was a good deed to aid the Muslims in reaching safety? What alternatives were there? What do you think it was like to stand aside and watchmore Muslim families separated as men and women were sent to different concentration camps, hauled to unknown destinations, and killed?