In a war where even the slightest whisper was important for survival, and the sound of a shell was a sign to hide, as seven-year-old Hasan Muskic saw the scenes before and during the genocide in Srebrenica, but he could not hear them or talk about the fear he felt. He knew he had to run when others did too. His testimony is the quietest memory of the Srebrenica genocide, told using sign language.
The first scenes of the war that Hasan Muskic remembers are the more intense shelling of the villages around Cerska already in 1993, when he was only five years old. He could not hear them, but he could feel them with his body, and with his eyes he understood what fear, suffering and death were.
Hasan was born without any difficulties, but after a medical procedure at an early age, he lost his hearing and the ability to speak. In the conversation, he uses sign language, which his brother Semsudin interprets for journalists, although, with his desire to talk, the journalist team almost didn’t need help.
He was never separated from his brothers or his mother during the war, for fear that his life would be in danger because he could not hear or speak. As he tries to describe the amount of fear he felt at the time, Hasan hugs himself tightly with his arms and shows reporters the chills on his skin that he constantly had.
“We didn’t have enough food to eat, nor enough clothes and shoes. But the first thing I remember is that I was the first of all the children who got something to eat,” he recalls.
After the nearby villages were occupied by the Serbian army in 1993, and the houses were burned to the ground, Hasan left his native Cerska with his family. Together with a larger group of people who gathered from Cerska and nearby villages, they headed towards Konjevic-Polje, and then Srebrenica. Remembering that day, he says that it was not clear to him why they were doing it, nor did his people know how to explain it to him at the time.
Safe zone and insecure childhood
Contorting his face and trying to bring back old memories of life in Srebrenica, Hasan reluctantly answers, because the images of fear and suffering he saw in other people come back to him. One of the seemingly happy moments of children’s play during a football tournament at the training ground in Srebrenica, on April 12th, 1993, was interrupted by four shells fired from the positions of the Army of the Republika Srpska (VRS), which killed 105 and wounded more than 100 civilians.
“I was afraid, I was scared, I didn’t know where I should go. Our relatives lived in the school near the training ground, my father’s cousin quickly took me and kept me safe in the school. That relative was later killed in the genocide, he did not manage to save himself”, he recalls and adds that he felt the vibrations of the shells, and saw blood and wounded people. Today, Hasan lives with his brother in his native Cerska.
His brother Semsudin, only one year older than him, was a child himself during the war, and he says he was rarely separated from Hasan, because they were really close. When he went to get water or food with his brother, Hasan would be left with his mother. Even today, he cannot forget that journey to fetch water.
“Two or three shells fell, and that’s when I saw for the first time with my brother that it killed a woman on the spot. It’s not that you don’t know what it is, you can see, she doesn’t move, you can see the blood”, Semsudin recalls the event that left him traumatized to this day.
He has three sons of a similar age to them during the war, and he sees the missed childhood in them.
“It was difficult and scary… You were a child, you should play, socialize, grow up, you were in some fear, whether you would survive from home to the water place, the playground, whether someone would throw a grenade, whether they would shoot at you,“ explained Semsudin, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
