7/14/2015
Remembering Mirela Ahmetovic : News
SREBRENICA ANNIVERSARY
Remembering Mirela Ahmetovic 6 HOURS AGO • BY PATRICK MCCARTHY
I had the honor of sharing the stage last week with Elvir Ahmetovic, who survived the war and genocide in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica 20 years ago this month by living in a small cellar with his parents and family for more than three years. The cellar had a dirt floor, no windows, no electricity and no running water, but as Elvir said, it was better than living outside in a field. At the beginning of the war, Elvir’s family was expelled from their village in the Srebrenica municipality and they sought refuge with a distant relative in a neighboring town. “We survived by the goodwill of our neighbors who gave us some food when we had none, even though they had very little themselves,” Elvir told the audience gathered for the presentation “Remembering Srebrenica” at the International Institute. Then, Elvir recounted for us the terrible day when his mother and 4-year-old sister, Mirela, were outside as a Serb mortar shell landed. Mirela was killed instantly and his mother was badly wounded. Forced to leave her daughter’s dead body behind, Elvir’s mom came home literally trying to hold her own insides from falling out. Though Elvir’s mother miraculously survived, the memory of Mirela still haunts him. Elvir choked up recalling the loss of Mirela more than 20 years later. A wave of deep sorrow washed over the audience. I thought of my own daughter Mia who just turned 4, and my mind went black as I tried to take in the magnitude of the horror Elvir had just described. Later, I realized that Mirela, had she survived, would today be the same age as my now adult daughter Kate, who grew up visiting Bosnian refugee families with me when they first arrived in St. Louis in the 1990s. Twenty years later, more Bosnians now live in St. Louis than in many large cities in Bosnia. Last summer, Kate accompanied me on a trip to the Srebrenica Memorial Center in Potocari where we were reunited after 15 years with Muska Oric and her children, the subjects of a book I wrote with photographer Tom Maday about an extended family in St. Louis from Srebrenica. Muska’s husband, Haso, perished along with 8,372 men and boys during the dark days of the http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/remembering-mirela-ahmetovic/article_e71dfb7f-d841-576d-866f-4b04c175affc.html?print=true&cid=print
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7/14/2015
Remembering Mirela Ahmetovic : News
July 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. After living as a refugee in St. Louis for six months, Muska returned to Bosnia with her four children as she struggled to re-establish her family here without a husband and father. Ultimately, every war is reducible to one person’s sorrow and loss. During a radio interview after our presentation, I heard Elvir talk about the profound loss of his sister. “After she was killed, I would dream about Mirela every night and in my dreams, she was always alive. Then I would wake up from my dream to the nightmare of the reality that my sister was gone.” For three-and-a-half long years, we appeased nationalist Serbs as they “ethnically cleansed” cities, towns and villages across Bosnia-Herzegovina. In the end, we accepted the false assumptions of the aggressors that the people of Bosnia could not live together. We imposed a peace agreement that divided the country and rewarded the perpetrators of genocidal crimes. In the coming days, we will gather to remember Srebrenica and all of the places from which the large Bosnian community in St. Louis has come. We will recall the horrific circumstances that brought them here and we will rightly honor their remarkable resilience. While doing so, we should pause to acknowledge our own role in the tragic human cost of the Bosnian war. Above all, we should remember Mirela Ahmetovic and the children of Srebrenica whose futures were violently foreclosed before they even had a chance to begin. Patrick McCarthy is the author of “After the Fall: Srebrenica Survivors in St. Louis.” He is associate dean of libraries at St. Louis University.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/remembering-mirela-ahmetovic/article_e71dfb7f-d841-576d-866f-4b04c175affc.html?print=true&cid=print
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