As former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is arrested for genocide, one refugee from the Bosnian war hopes to find peace, writes Fiona MacGregor
'IT IS not possible to forget what happened there, especially because people didn't expect it," says Mile Gazic. "We thought we were all almost the same and had been living together for years (with] no problem. Then it started. It was very hard to be
lieve what was happening. People suffered so much and lost everything."
The war in Bosnia left more than 100,000 dead, and around 1.5 million people were forced to flee their homeland. So the news earlier this week that the former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, had finally been arrested for genocide saw passionate celebrations break out in streets across Bosnia Herzegovina – but there was much joy in hundreds of Scottish homes too.
Gazic, now 66, a Catholic Bosnian and former politician who now lives with his wife in Leith, is amazed but delighted that – after 13 years on the run – the man responsible for the murder of his friends and relations, and for forcing him from his homeland, has finally been captured.
"I am very, very happy. I'd lost hope this would ever happen," Gazic says. "The most important thing this arrest will give people is that justice will be done. I hope that (Ratko] Mladic (Karadzic's army chief] will also be arrested."
For years Gazic, who was mayor of Banja Luka, Bosnia's second biggest city, and an MP, couldn't walk more than a dozen steps along the bustling streets of his home town without someone greeting him. A qualified engineer, his job as director of distribution of electrical energy for the region of North Bosnia had made him a well-known and popular figure in the city where he lived a comfortable, middle-class existence with his wife, Amira, and teenage son, Goran.
But within months of Karadzic taking power, those city streets had become a no-go zone for Gazic. On the rare occasions he needed to venture out, the trip would be a frightened dash along bullet-marked streets where violence lurked around every corner. When he passed people on the street, most of them averted their eyes.
"My area was mainly Serb," he explains. "Catholics and Muslims couldn't stay in their houses; we couldn't work, we didn't have any rights. We were just second-class citizens in the city. I am Catholic, my wife is Muslim – it was a very bad combination."
He never knew when the Serbs who made the phone calls threatening to kill him and his family might strike – killing them in their own house, as they had done to his niece's husband and many of his Catholic and Muslim friends, or forcing them to leave their home in the dead of night.
"When the war started some of my (Serb] friends turned away from me. They felt in my situation they couldn't have a relationship with me. Others, those in the military forces and on the front, were very violent. They killed people like it was a festival, a celebration."
The bitter ethnic divisions and the atrocities between former friends and neighbours were unimaginable before the outbreak in the early 1990s of conflict over Bosnian independence.
This was a sophisticated country in the heart of Europe, where ethnic and religious differences were considered of little importance – about 35 per cent of marriages were mixed.
The majority of the population of Banja Luka were Serbian, but the fact that Gazic was a Catholic of Croatian descent and married to a Muslim woman was not an issue when they chose him as their mayor. All that would change in early 1992, after Bosnia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia – a move bitterly objected to by much of the region's Serbian population, represented politically by Karadzic, who was soon using violence to make his point to non-Serbians living in Bosnia.
"When I got the phone call I wasn't surprised, because I knew it was happening to others in my city," says Gazic of the first of many threats he received. By then he had already been removed from his job.
"They told me, 'We will come to kill you if you don't leave your house and go.' I would say, 'I can't go, this is my country as well,' but they would say, 'No, you're Croat, it's not your country'.
"We couldn't call anyone for help, the door or lock was not enough, they would just break in. I knew a lot of friends in that situation. Someone had broken in and killed them or beat them, forced them to leave everything in the flat and go. A lot of people suffered in that way."
It's still painful for Gazic to try and talk about the violence he witnessed.
"It's hard to put in to words," is all he says in response to questions about the violence he saw and the friends he lost. He is quiet for a moment, then eventually adds: "My sister's son-in-law was killed at home, because he was Catholic and they killed him in his house.
"People (in Scotland] don't know much about the suffering of the people in the city and the villages, in their homes. They know about Srebenica and the siege of Sarajevo, but there were lots of murders happening everywhere."
Gazic considers himself lucky. Although he lost his home, he and his immediate family survived – "I know people who lost almost their whole family; 17 members of their family killed."
And it wasn't only Gazic's life that was under threat: his son was 15 and the military had taken to rounding up non-Serbian boys of that age and taking them to the front lines to act as human shields.
"They started to catch all young people from 15 and 16, just children, and a lot of students were sent to fight and they lost their life. We had to go, to escape persecution for us and for my son from being sent to the front."
The family went to Croatia, but at 55, Gazic couldn't find a job and without support they struggled. Eventually they turned to the UN Committee for Refugees for help. They were flown to Heathrow, where they were told they were to go to Edinburgh. After three months in a refugee centre in North Berwick, they eventually got a flat in Leith.
Gazic's then-poor English (now much improved) and age made it impossible for him to get a job, but he found other ways of contributing to the community – he is a board member of the Scottish Refugee Council and works with an adult learning project in the capital. Following in Gazic's footsteps, his son went on to gain a masters degree in civil engineering from Heriot-Watt University and is now working in Aberdeen.
Gazic misses Bosnia, but he would never go back. While he still has friends in his homeland and has been back to Banja Luka, much has changed and the life he had there has gone. So have many of friends. Lost either as victims of the war, or because they supported, or at least turned a blind eye to the atrocities of that time.
"A lot of my Serb friends did suffer because they wouldn't take part (in Karadzic's regime] and were seen as treacherous. When I go back to my city I see them and my other friends and we remember the good times together."
But there are plenty of people he won't see: "When the war stopped they said they hadn't known what was happening, but they all knew what happened. They could have helped if they'd wanted. They accepted that war and the very worst things and they (achieved] their result. They had ethnic cleansing and now some areas are very, very 'clean' from other nationalities and religions. I have nothing (to do] with these people now. When I go back I see the people that used to live together before the war are all living separately. The divide between Muslims, Croats and Serbians is much bigger. People have lost trust."
It will take more than the arrest of Karadzic to rebuild that trust, and Serbian nationalism is still strong in parts of Bosnia, but for Gazic and everyone else whose lives were so damaged by that bloody conflict the knowledge that justice will finally be done might help them find some peace.
BACKGROUNDTHE Bosnian war took place between March 1992 and November 1995. By the end of the war more than 1.3 million Bosnians were living in exile or as refugees. Immediately after the war, the Bosnian government estimated around 200,000 people had been killed, however research by other organisations since then has put the figure closer to 100,000.
More recent figures suggest more than 55,000 civilians died (about 38,000 Bosnian Muslims and Croats and 17,000 Serbs). Of the 47,000 soldiers believed killed, 14,000 were reported to be Serbs, 6,000 were Croats, and 28,000 were Bosnian Muslims. Research into the number of dead continues.
The full article contains 1545 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
