Kemo Mujcinovic spent his childhood and early youth with his family in the village of Pobudje, municipality of Bratunac, not realizing that because of the war, he would have to grow up suddenly and fight for his own life.
The seventeen-year-old Mujcinovic set out on his road to death with his brother, other relatives, and neighbors, carrying with him some dry biscuits, a kilogram of sugar, and the hope that the journey would last as short as possible and that he will safely cross over to the territory under the control of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH), a free territory for him.
His journey lasted 65 days, during which he wondered which path would lead him to freedom.
”He was thinking the most of Udrc because I spent a month on Udrc, and when you climb to the top of Udrc you see part of Kalesija, you see lights, you see freedom within range, you have some, I don’t know, 50-60 kilometers airline, you don’t know what you’re going to do, you don’t know where to go,”Mujcinovic described the days on the Udrc mountain, which, at an altitude of more than a thousand meters above sea level, was a way of salvation for many people from Srebrenica who fled after the fall of the United Nations (UN) protected zone under the control of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS).
Even a year younger Emin Omerovic could not decide on Potocari for the same reason. Not believing in the protection of the UN or VRS soldiers, he set off on the road through the forest with his father and brother.
”I was 16 years old, as a teenager, I couldn’t imagine what was waiting for us on that journey, to me it was more like a trip, I go, my father goes, my brother goes, backpack on my back, nobody touches you,” he recalled the moment of decision.
On the road to death, he saw his school friends, neighbors, girlfriends, and even children around 13-14 years old. Many of them failed to cross over to the free territory.
A dream next to the murdered and hallucinations
At the age of 15, Hasib Suljic, he remembers, made the decision in Susnjari to go across the forest with his father, even though his relatives warned him not to go to Potocari with his mother, sisters, and brother. That decision saved him, Suljic will later describe in his book about survival.
”Tall for Potocari, weak for forests,” he remembered his father’s sentence, with whom he would be separated during the ambush on ‘Kamenicko Brdo’.
”I felt so exhausted that I could fall asleep right there, and I started going towards a tree, but suddenly I saw the house of my late uncle Izet. Whoever was close could hear me, I was shouting ‘why am I going to sleep under a tree when I can sleep in the house’, and I quietly entered the house, opened the door, positioned myself in the middle of the room to lie down, there was no one at home, I lied down. Got up in the morning under that tree, alone,” Suljic recalled the hallucination he experienced.
From the road of death to the Peace March
After 25 years since the genocide in Srebrenica, Hasib Suljic found the strength to cross the road of death again, this time as part of the Peace March. He knew that only the third section of the road was authentic to the one he was following because he did not travel on that road in July 1995 in the first two sections.
”But the third one was authentic, it was also horrible to go through, especially when I came to the place where I ate with my father for the last time, it was very difficult. Physically, I could have gone further, returned to Ilijas again, but mentally, if it had been the fourth stage, I would not have been able to,” he recalled, Detektor writes.
E.Dz.
