Adnan Subo was not yet two years old when he was struck by a sniper’s bullet while reaching out to his older sister to be picked up and taken to their mother. His mother, Fadila, on the Day of Remembrance of the Killed Children of Gorazde, recalled her son, as well as her brother who was killed while carrying the coffin, support, and sheet for Adnan’s funeral.
Adnan and Adnana are Fadila’s youngest children. After two daughters, she gave birth to twins in 1990. It was the happiest moment of her life.
When they were just two years old, in the summer of 1992, they had to flee their village of Suba near Foca in Gorazde, and then, on August 18th, Fadila had to shelter her children again due to an air raid alarm.”That day, when he was killed, was August 18th, there was an alarm, planes. They told us to go to the shelters. By noon, we went to a shelter here. One man told me, ‘Come on, Fadila, the planes have passed.’ And indeed, they had passed,” she recalls, adding that they took refuge at a neighbor’s place under a slab, where they sat on a couch.
“And my little Adnan saw this older daughter, he called her: ‘Asmira, come, pick me up,'” Fadila recounts while describing Adnan as a two-year-old advanced baby.
“I sat, holding Adnan. Asmira lifted him, and he [the sniper] noticed when she lifted him, and he hit Adnan with a sniper shot in the arm. He fell into my lap like that, and it seemed to me that Gorayde was screaming,” she adds.
After Fadila’s uncle Vejsil made a coffin and supports, at the time when Vejsil was supposed to carry them with a sheet, the city was shelled.
“Vejsil took that sheet, and from here, he went down to the street. Four grenades fell around him and smashed his leg. They took him to the Mujkovica Polje clinic. He was conscious for one day. On the second day, he fell into a coma, and on the third day, he passed away,” Fadila stated.
Hiding in Foca
When the war began in Foca, and Serbian military and paramilitary formations erected barricades and began combing villages searching for Bosniak families, Miholjka and Svetozar Prodanovic helped Fadila and many other Bosniaks in this area. They visited Fadila and her family, alerted them if they heard the army was coming, offered shelter in their home, and defended Bosniak neighbors with their bodies.
After seeing that there was no more safety for them in Foca, on August 1st, 1992, they set off on a journey to Gorazde, sleeping in streams, and stables, avoiding dangers to reach their family in Gorazde. Before that, part of her family, including her husband Mehmed, escaped through Montenegro to Novi Pazar, where they remained until 1996.
“It wasn’t until 1994 that I found out they were alive and in Novi Pazar, through ham radio. They registered to vote in ’96, and a bus brought them from Sandzak to Sarajevo. That’s when we saw each other for the first time, after four years, and then they returned,” Fadila recalls the meeting with her husband, who only then learned of Adnan’s and Vejsil’s deaths.
No one has been convicted for shelling and sniping civilians in Gorazde, which was under siege for 1.336 days. According to data from the Association of Civilian War Victims, about 2.000 civilians were killed during the war in Gorazde, including 151 children, Detektor writes.
E.Dz.
