A little more than 30 kilometers from Srebrenica toward Skelani, nestled in dense hilly forest, there are about ten returnee houses. A village that once had 600 inhabitants now has only about ten, mostly mothers who live alone, surrounded by the ruins of old houses where they once spent time with large families.
Aisa is one of the few residents. She lives at the end of the hamlet, with one other returnee nearby. Recalling life before the war, she tells how they grew wheat and vegetables, kept livestock, and lived in prosperity and a house full of laughter. When she returned alone to the destroyed hearth, she brought some timber for building a house to the edge of the village, because the overgrown forest road prevented the truck from going any further.
Aisa Begic returned to the village of Radovcici 23 years ago as one of the first returnees. It was her 14th move since being expelled from her home. She didn’t even dare to tell her daughters, who live in Sweden.
“It was small, it could fit a stove and one couch like this,” she proudly describes the size of the shed.
After living there for two years, Aisa received a small wooden prefab house through donations, in which she lived for a little over five years, after which she began building a masonry house.
After returning, she began renovating the yard and the entire village, with access roads and water supply. She felt the need to bring life back to her village. Even though she lived alone and had no great need to produce food, Aisa decided to plant wheat.
Her husband and two sons were killed in the genocide in Srebrenica in 1995. She buried their almost complete remains in Potocari.
Support and comfort in the silence of Radovcici is provided by Fata Gurdic, who returned to the village with her husband and sons a year after Aisa. They survived the genocide, she says, because the children were small and her husband escaped through the forest, but July took many members of their close family.
In Radovcici, she used to raise livestock, but now she only tends to the garden at her house, where she lives alone, as she lost her husband five years ago and her sons moved to other cities in search of a better life. Still, for her, Fata says, life in her village is the best.
The village of Radovcici was burned and destroyed to its foundations in June 1992, after which the residents withdrew to the so-called “Refuge” in the place called Sehiti. Carrying only a few personal belongings, the families built a shelter in the Sehiti forest using just some tarps, plastic sheets, and other items they had. Some of them stayed there for a year. Sead Jahic watched from a nearby forest as his village burned.
“If someone managed to carry something from home, maybe a tent, plastic. Some even brought a stove. Then everyone made something for themselves, some from twigs, some from plastic sheeting, and huts. I spent a month or two there, but some people spent the winter,” says Sead.
Bringing life back to the village
After returning, Aisa invested great effort, as well as her savings, to revive the village, to make life easier for the few returnees, and to enable those who wish to visit the village to come.
Her only neighbor, Fata, says that Aisa never rests and constantly has new ideas for investing in the village.
“Look, the last thing she did was build the bridge at the entrance to the village, she gave her own 12.000 to make it, and then even gifted the craftsmen,” Fata says.
Describing Aisa’s desire to restore the village, Fata says there isn’t a day that Aisa loses the will for it, and that sometimes it’s impossible to even keep up with her efforts.
“We all get tired, only she never stops,” says Fata, Detektor writes.
