“The coffee is bitter and black, and the headstones are white. I am sad every day, from morning to night.”
This is how Mejra Djogaz begins her story. She looks from the window of her family home, where she lives alone, every morning at the Memorial Center in Potocari near Srebrenica, where her two sons, Omer and Munib, are buried.
Mejra’s eldest son Zuhdija and her husband Mustafa were killed in October 1992 in the vicinity of Srebrenica.
After her husband’s death, Mejra was left alone with three minor children. With her two sons, daughter, and daughter-in-law, she spent the war days, as she says, in a shed in Potocari near Srebrenica.
A new family tragedy followed, in which Mejra also lost her sons Omer and Munib, killed at the age of 19 and 21. They were killed after they, together with other men from Srebrenica, headed through the forest towards Tuzla, trying to reach the territory under the control of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH).
“After three days, the women and children were transported by buses to Tuzla. On the road between Kravica and Avdagina njiva, near Bratunac, we saw a convoy of 15 trucks carrying men who were captured in the nearby forests,” Mejra points out.
As she says, she recognized her son Omer on one of the trucks.
“That was the last time I saw him. They were taken in an unknown direction and shot,” she says.
The remains of her two sons, killed in the genocide, were found 14 years after their suffering, and they were buried in the Memorial Center in Potocari.
“I don’t know what keeps me alive anymore. I guess it’s because I pray to Allah to ease my pain and that of every mother,” she concluded, Radio Slobodna Evropa reports.
E.Dz.
