Introducing Untold Killing: Episode 1 - The Siege
48:35 Share

Dear listener, hello there. Thomas here, coming to you once again from deep undercover. That's right, the COVID crisis rumbles on, and so here I am, still sitting on my bed with a blanket over my head.

Speaking of COVID, here's something else you can blame it for. Given the strictures in London, you'll have to wait a little longer for season three than we hoped. Don't worry, we will most certainly be back. And in the meantime, my brilliant producers at Message Heard have something new for you, something that I'm sure you'll love. Untold Killing.

Untold Killing is an exclusive new podcast that tells the absolutely harrowing story of the Srebrenica genocide, the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

In July 1995, at the lowest point of the brutal Bosnian War, Bosnian Serb separatists massacred over 8,000 Bosnian Muslims, an unthinkable act of inhumanity and a lingering stain on the conscience of Europe and the UN. Now, in the course of Conflicted, we've talked a lot about the Bosnian War. You'll no doubt remember that it was Bosnia where Ayman first fought as a jihadist.

From us, you've been given a bird's eye view of the forces at play and how the conflict links up to the past and the present. But untold killing takes it a step further, going much deeper. I'm telling you, you won't fail to be moved by this story. Intimate eyewitness interviews with ordinary Bosnian Muslims paint a picture of growing fear and desperation as their former friends and neighbors turned on them with unimaginable clinical ferocity.

a profound tragedy, the memory of which still haunts the survivors. Untold Killing weaves their memories into a gripping narrative. It'll inform you, but more than that, Untold Killing will leave you changed, aware as never before of how Final Line divides the human from the inhuman.

Here's the first episode of Untold Killing, hosted by Alexandra Bilic, a Bosnian-born documentary maker whose family fled Sarajevo to the UK at the start of the war. To hear the rest of the series, subscribe to Untold Killing in your podcast app. Before we begin, this is a quick warning that this podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence, mature themes, and it may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion.

So this is a difficult story without a happy ending. I'm just going to tell you that now. It takes place during the Bosnian War in the 90s, but it isn't really just about the war. It's about the darker sides of humanity. It's about hate, incomprehensible hate, such that even those who lived through the story still struggle to understand it.

I ask myself, what is the psychology? What is the way to entice people to such crimes? What did my loved ones do wrong? They all had very close friends who were Serbs. Overnight, they became the enemies of their friends. How? Why? Someone had to convince them.

This is Kada Hotic. She doesn't speak English, many of the older generation of Bosnians don't. That's why for her and two other women in this story, you will hear English voices narrated over theirs. Kada is an old woman now, but when the story took place in 1995, she already had a son in his early 20s. At the time, there were many women like her, with entire families of their own to lose.

They were all strangers to each other then, but something would end up connecting them forever. The main thing they have in common is that they are all Muslims. That's why during the war in the early 90s they had to flee their homes and they all made their way to Srebrenica, a small town that was meant to be a safe haven for them. Over the course of this six episode series we will tell you the story of how they lost almost everything in Srebrenica in July 1995

and survived the last genocide to take place on European soil. From Message Heard and Remembering Srebrenica, this is Untold Killing. I'm Alexandra Bilic.

This story is really important to me because it all starts with the war that broke out in Bosnia in 1992. A war that I also could have got caught up in. And if it wasn't for the decision that my parents made at the start of it, to flee Bosnia with the whole family to the United Kingdom, my life would be very different. I was born in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, in 1988. And I lived there till I was four, when we left in 1992.

I spoke to my producer, Jake Atayevich, who isn't Bosnian by the way, he just has a Balkan name, about my memories of leaving. Okay, so Alex, what do you remember about leaving Sarajevo with your family when you were a kid?

Well, my dad, he was a journalist, so he'd actually gone to London in sort of '91. By that point, the Balkan War was kind of well underway in other parts of former Yugoslavia. Bosnia hadn't yet been affected directly anyway. So he'd been called over to come to the UK to work for the BBC. However, while he was there, he actually, he kind of was getting a bit more inside information about what the next movements of the conflict might be and

So he actually tried to come and get us to leave Sarajevo, but obviously my family were like, "You're crazy, you know, this is the 90s." Like, you know, it was a modern place in Europe. People had normal lives and it's like someone coming to you now and saying, "Oh, you've got to leave your home now, there's about to be a big war." And then within a few months, actually Sarajevo was besieged. So, you know, we didn't have electricity, running water, etc.

And also I remember, you know, there'd be the sound of like shelling and snipers and stuff. And then my family would say, oh, it's just fireworks. You know, they try to sort of protect you as a kid. So but then I remember one day walking into the living room and there was kind of a big commotion and

And everyone was like, oh, we're going to go and see your dad in England. So that's kind of how they presented the situation to me. And then what had happened was my granddad, I think he'd heard some information about some flights going out of the city. Bearing in mind, at that point, the airport hadn't been functioning at all. So this was kind of like what turned out to be the last flight that flew out of Sarajevo, which we actually managed to get on. But

I could see that my grandma especially was very grey and afraid. And, you know, even if you're a kid and you don't understand what fleeing a war is, you're like, something's wrong. Everyone's upset and frightened. And then I remember the day we did get on the plane, there was basically like a riot at the airport. It was just a very crazy situation. I remember they were kind of like lifting my little brother over to give him to someone. And then we, I don't even know how we got on the plane because there were so many people at the airport.

When I look back, it must have been absolutely terrifying for my mum and my grandma because the airport was no man's land. So essentially the flight would be taking off in the middle of a war zone. So that in itself is kind of terrifying. And so you've lived in London ever since? Well, we came to London and then we sought asylum, so stayed.

I think I got my dad's flair for storytelling, I guess. Yeah, he's a good storyteller. So I work in documentary. You know, most of my work is to do with where I'm from, I guess. You can't really escape it. And I know that like the reason my mum left was because of me and my brother. She always says she wouldn't have left even though there was a war, you know, because she loves and she still loves her.

Home city, it's just that now, you know, she doesn't live there anymore. But before the war even started, people mostly agree that it was a good life in Bosnia. My family and I lived in harmony until the war. This is Kada Hotic again, who you heard at the very start of the show. Kada was born in eastern Bosnia in 1945. She describes her childhood as fateful. Fate and premonitions, by the way, are very common with Bosnians.

She describes it as fateful because her father went missing a month before she was even born. He was fighting against the Croat fascists in Yugoslavia during World War II. His body was never found and Kada grew up without having even a grave to honour him. But she lived a decent life and in 1963 when she was 18 she moved to Srebrenica. She got married there and started a family.

It was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious town. We didn't think of people along ethnic lines. We were all one nation together. Some people would go to a mosque, some people to a church, some people nowhere. Ethnicity, religion and identity is important because Bosnia was a melting pot.

The people were mostly either Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Serb or Bosnian Croat. So they were all Bosnian but their religious and national backgrounds are all different. Kada herself is a Bosnian Muslim. Now Bosnian Muslims are often of Muslim faith but they are also considered ethnically Muslim, meaning even those who don't practice the religion are considered Muslims.

That's because they historically come from a line of Bosnians who converted to Islam all the way back in the Middle Ages, during the Ottoman rule in Eastern Europe. So Bosnian Muslims have lived in Bosnia for centuries, but this history has been used against them time and time again as a tool of propaganda to incite hate and violence. That distinction between religion and ethnicity is why they are now often referred to as just Bosniaks.

We'll use both those terms in the show, Bosnian Muslims and Bosniaks, but they mean the same thing. All that to say, ethnicity is at the core of this story and it influenced everything that happened later.

So, throughout the early 90s, Kada was working at a textile factory in Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb women were working alongside Bosniak women for years without any issues. But at some point, Kada started to notice something strange happening at the factory. Tensions bubbling up under the surface.

Women who were Serbs started grouping together, separating from the rest of us and talking about how they were endangered. And I think to myself, well, who were they endangered by? It wasn't exactly clear to me. The same thing started happening across Bosnia, which was then still part of Yugoslavia, a communist federation of six different republics.

In Bosnia, Bosnian Serb nationalists decided to establish an unconstitutional parallel breakaway state and government within the country called Republika Srpska. Essentially, something like the women in Cadiz Factory were doing. Bosnian Serbs joining together in preparation for the breakdown of Yugoslavia. And in 1991 and 92, the different republics in Yugoslavia started holding independence referendums. First, Slovenia and Croatia.

leaving Yugoslavia bareboned and dominated by the Republic of Serbia. Then in March 1992, it was Bosnia's turn to claim its own independence. When the other countries started separating, why shouldn't Bosnia too? It could be an independent country with all the different ethnic groups. I voted in the Bosnian independence referendum.

As did many other Bosniaks and some Serbs and Croats living in the country. A lot of Bosnian Serbs actually boycotted the referendum because they wanted a Bosnian Serb state. But Bosnian independence passed overwhelmingly. The leaders of Republika Srpska, the parallel Bosnian-Serb breakaway state, they were not happy. It was because they felt they were losing control of the region and it was going against their vision of an ethnically cleansed state.

So pretty much straight after the referendum, the forces of Republika Srpska took up military positions around Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. This is when most people agree that the Bosnian War began.

So, Republic of Serbs co-initiated the war, but why? The key moment would be the moment when the Bosnian Serb elites decided to establish, instead of a state in which all Serbs lived, which was Yugoslavia, to establish a state for Serbs alone. And that could only be implemented through actually removing non-Serb populations from large trades of that country.

And that naturally had to involve violence. Emir Sulegich is the director of Srebrenica Memorial Centre and an academic expert on what happened in Srebrenica. He's also one of the people who lived through it. Emir has a Balkan air about him. He's very charming in a confident and intellectual sort of way. Just before we started recording our interview, he asked us if we were recording video as well. And when we said no, he said...

He said, good, that means I can drink my coffee and smoke a cigarette, which is Balkan through and through. But back to Republika Srpska. Basically, the Bosnian Serb breakaway state wanted to take control of Bosnia and force out anyone who wasn't of Bosnian Serb ethnicity and establish an ethnically cleansed Serb state.

So the war was fought throughout all of Bosnia between the Bosnian Serbs, the Bosnian Croats, who in some parts of the country fought alongside the Bosnian Serbs and in others against them, and the Bosniaks.

And the issue that would, at the very start, influence how the war would go for years to come was that until then the only military power in the region was the Yugoslav army, which was considered to be one of the most powerful armies in Europe. So whoever controlled the army would have the best chance of winning the war. And the Republic of Srpska leadership knew this very well and did just that.

Can you explain the distribution of military power in Bosnia? Where did their resources come from on each side? If you were the Bosnian Serb military, you'd be getting your resources from the army of Yugoslavia. They've inherited their entire apparatus from the Yugoslav People's Army. If you were the Bosnian army, you would have to get the weapons either by capturing them from the opponent or smuggling them into the country through Croatia.

We were left without weapons. The Serbs took all the weaponry from the Yugoslav National Army. They had a long-term plan. We Muslims in Srebrenica didn't know what was coming. As Yugoslavia started disintegrating, we had never hoped it would come to war. Republika Srpska had the upper hand in the war from the beginning and everyone else was reduced to essentially self-defence.

Srebrenica, where Kada lived, became strategically important to Republika Srpska

That's because in eastern Bosnia there were several towns and areas around the towns that were under Bosniak control. And if Republika Srpska wanted to create a state of only Bosnian Serbs in eastern Bosnia, they had to conquer these Bosniak-held areas. The siege of Srebrenica started sometimes in May '92. And for that first year of the war, it was

Hell, we were hungry, we were literally being hunted down, we were being shot at every day. Kada Hotich still vividly remembers the first time Srebrenica was attacked. She says that that spring seemed like it would be a good one. Nature was reviving, fruit was swelling, and the weather was meant to get better. But then, all of a sudden, it started snowing again. A premonition of what was to come, according to Kada.

Kada wasn't going to tempt fate or the troubling situation in the country. She moved her family into her brother's house, which was nearer the woods, in case they needed to escape. It was there she met a man called Drago, a friend of Kada's brother and a Bosnian Serb, who seemed to know more about what was happening. One day he invited Kada and her family to stay at his house, so they went and spent a night there. They trusted him.

I could hear a car at night. And in the morning, I asked Drago, "Drago, what was that?" He says, "Niva brought me a mortar." "What do you need a mortar for?"

We want to hit Srebrenica from here. Kada also noticed that Drago's wife was baking a lot of bread, so much that she became curious enough to ask why. She said the army will need it. I was puzzled why she mentioned the army and thought there would be problems if the army was involved.

As we got up in the morning, they even offered us some breakfast. Some eggs were being fried. I told my brother, "Let's go home, who knows what will happen?" We got back home and just as we arrived in Old Town, it was attacked with mortar fire. There was a big apple tree at the front of the house and as the projectile touched the branch, it exploded.

We were being hit by shrapnel. We took refuge in the basement of my brother's house and there was terrible shooting. When the shooting calmed down, I said to go around the back of the houses, up and over the hill into the woods, and that's how we left. Kada's family and a group of over 50 others ran to the forest, just like she predicted.

At night, I snuck home to bake bread. Soon the electricity went out. The water was shut off. In fact, it was gone entirely. They had already bombed the reservoir that was above Srebrenica and destroyed it. Telephone communication was cut off. We saw that a war had started. In the woods, in the heavy snow, children started crying. Their bare feet were freezing.

I got the children's feet to be wrapped with some bags I had with me, to keep their feet warm as I had done for myself. That calmed the kids down a bit. We spent 11 nights in the woods. And after the 11th day, we heard that Srebrenica was burning. We actually saw from the hill. All Muslim houses had been set ablaze.

Some of the group went ahead as scouts and then returned saying that for whatever reason the Serb soldiers had actually left Srebrenica after they'd set it on fire. So Kader and her family returned and spent weeks repairing their burnt down home. But Srebrenica was only one of many towns that the Bosnian Serb soldiers started occupying in the spring of 1992.

One of the decisions that was taken by the Bosnian Serb Assembly was that Drina River Valley should no longer be the border between two states. Drina is a crystal blue, beautiful river that runs along hundreds of kilometers of the eastern border of Bosnia alongside the state of Serbia.

Srebrenica is one of the many towns that lies in the valley of the Drina and Bratunac was another. And the only way that that decision could have been realized was to have literally dozens of cities literally purged of Bosniak or non-Serb population and one of those towns was Bratunac. It was hit very hard in April and May, 1902.

They had blockaded Bratunac in April. We were completely surrounded and we couldn't get out. That's Kadefa Rizvanovic.

Kadifa was a young woman when all this took place and speaking to her really touched me because my mother was about the same age as her when we were fleeing Sarajevo. And one of the most striking things about Kadifa was just how much love she has for her country despite everything. Bosnia was and still is a beautiful country with wonderful people. It's full of soul, beauty and hospitality.

everything you could wish for in life you could find in our Bosnia. That April, Kadefa was already nine months pregnant and living in Bratunac with her husband whom she'd married just the year before,

and within weeks of the Bosnian Serb occupation of Bratunac, she went into labour. My mother-in-law and her mother-in-law were beside me in the house and they helped me give birth. My husband was in front of the house. Although he was unarmed, he was keeping guard in case the Serbs broke into the village. The situation in the towns around was getting serious. Villages were being burnt and the Bosniaks were being killed or driven away.

In Brtunac it was going the same way. And everyone knew that Srebrenica was one of the last Bosniak-held towns that the Bosnian Serbs had not yet conquered. After two days of giving birth, they told us to surrender ourselves and our weapons.

We didn't want to surrender because we knew what would happen to us. And then we decided to go towards Srebrenica. So it was two days after my birth. I was with my husband, brother-in-law, mother-in-law, and later my parents joined us. Because the entire region was crawling with the Bosnian Serb soldiers, to get to Srebrenica they had to cross behind their lines.

As I had just given birth, I was in no state to make the journey. I begged my husband to leave me because I couldn't go. I didn't want them to be killed because of me. I wanted him to take my child and go. My husband told me he wouldn't leave me.

He told me he would carry me, but he wouldn't leave me. As we were struggling to make it through the Serb lines across the woods, I would often get a fever. I was so cold. And then somehow we managed to complete the rest of that awful journey to Srebrenica through the heavy shelling and gunfire.

Kadafer and her family arrived to the same burnt-down Srebrenica that Kada and the others were rebuilding after their return from the forest. In May, people expelled from Bratunac came and they entered those burned-out apartments and patched and furnished them for themselves so that they could somehow stay there. And little by little, Srebrenica filled up like a matchbox.

By this point, the Bosnian Serbs who had lived in Srebrenica had left, and it was one of their empty houses that Kadefa and her family made a home out of. There were 17 of us there. My whole family only got one room. Even now, it's difficult to even begin to describe what the town of Srebrenica was like. It was sad. It was heavy.

I didn't feel like there was any life in that Srebrenica. We had no food, no water, no electricity. What food there was, was all eaten in two months, all spent, nothing.

and we started to move at night between their observation camps, between each hill where the Serbs had their position. From there we passed into territory under their control where the spring sown fields were abandoned. And so, 19 times I personally carried 25 kilograms of corn over the hills.

There was no other food. Whatever else food there was, was picked up by the Bosnian Serbs. We had nothing but that corn.

Sneaking into enemy territory on foot at night and lugging back tens of kilos of food was so dangerous that Kada wouldn't even let her grown-up son do it. No, I wouldn't let my son go looking for food. He would sometimes go into defence as much as he could, but I didn't let him go look for food because often entire families went and would not return.

And what's worse, even though the Bosnian Serb soldiers had left the town, they remained in the surrounding hills, constantly watching, doing everything they could to make life a living hell for the Muslims in Srebrenica. The Bosnian Serb army eventually cut off Srebrenica entirely. No food, no running water, no electricity. Kada compared it to living in the Middle Ages. But the thousands of families living there still had to find a way to survive.

We found ways of adapting. We would find pig lard, set alight a little cloth and use that as a source of light. When there was no food, we wouldn't eat for a few days. We were trying everything. People would get the cob of a sweet corn, grind it and eat it.

But cutting off basic resources was only one part of the Bosnian Serb forces' plan to terrorise Srebrenica. Every day they would also rain artillery shells over the town. There were days when they shot so much that I didn't have two hours to breathe, two hours to rest, two hours to lie down to get some sleep. If I lay down in the kitchen, I had to run to the other side of the building from where they were not shooting.

And were you trying to create a sense of normality despite the siege? We were trying as best we could. We can't really call it normal because we were in constant fear. The fear takes over and you don't even know what you're feeling. You're just waiting for the moment they kill you, for when they break into your house and slaughter you. It went on like this for months, almost an entire year.

But then, in March 1993, it seemed like things might finally improve. More on that after the break. It was March 1993 and the Bosniaks in Srebrenica have been living in hellish conditions for a full year now. They were hungry, tired and constantly reminded by the earth-shattering shelling from the hills that their nightmare wasn't going to end any time soon.

Only things finally changed for the first time since the siege began. Due to a British UN commander who was determined to get his soldiers to Srebrenica and the Bosnian Serb sphere of directly attacking the UN, a United Nations humanitarian convoy was allowed to enter Srebrenica with French General Philippe Morillon at the helm. Here's Kada remembering that day. I lived near the post office.

by the hospital, there were about 30 or 40 of us women who came to greet General Morillon. We were glad because his arrival meant that the world would know about us. We didn't have any other communication. Only we knew what was going on. It was a secret to the outside world. We really pleaded for him to stay and we made a human wall to stop him from leaving. This is a video of the crowd of women preventing General Morillon from leaving.

The woman is saying, "Why should you go home? I haven't been home in a year. The West could have helped us long ago." The women are crying and yelling and General Morion is trying to climb on top of a car to calm the situation down.

He was standing in front of the post office building. He then went up into the post office. He probably spoke to someone whilst he was in there. He then came back down and climbed onto the convoy and told us he will stay with us. I have now decided to stay here in Serbarica. You are now under the protection of the UN forces.

The problem was that General Morion didn't actually have the authority to declare Srebrenica under the protection of the UN. So his declaration caused a frenzy at the top of the UN command chain, who only after a month declared Srebrenica a safe area. They knew that it was packed with Bosnian Muslims and they knew that they were in danger. But even then, UN's protection was not straightforward. Here's Emir again.

A resolution was adopted at the UN Security Council declaring Siberian a safe area. Now, not a safe haven, but a safe area. Safe haven is a kind of concept where the UN would actually have to assume actual responsibility to protect the area. Safe area was just another one of those creative solutions

that existed as a sort of a legal fiction, but without the actual muscle to turn them into reality. It meant that while there was going to be UN military presence in Srebrenica, they did not have the mandate to engage the Bosnian Serbs in combat, unless the UN soldiers themselves were under direct threat. In other words, only shoot if you are shot at.

First, there was a battalion of Canadian soldiers designated to protect Srebrenica, who arrived there straight after the declaration was made. By the time the Canadian battalion came in full force, an agreement was signed to demilitarize the area. In other words, the few defenders that we had, even they had to hand in their weapons. And they stayed there until February 1994. Now, that's when the Dutch came in. And interestingly enough,

the Dutch saw their main mission not as protecting the enclave, but as disarming the Bosnian army soldiers who may have not handed in their weapons. You know, a lot of them say that on the record, that their instructions from their officers were not to escalate with the Serbs. In fact, and I'm speaking from my direct personal experience,

It was sometimes humiliating to see the Dutch officers kowtowing to the Serb officers around the enclave. All of this, the difference between a safe zone and a safe haven, and the disarming of the Bosniak defenders, would go on to play a huge role just two years later in July 1995.

But in the moment, in 1993, the UN presence in Srebrenica meant that the Bosnian Serb forces withdrew their constant direct shelling of the town and more food and resources found their way in. Here are Kada and Kadefa talking about how life changed. The people relaxed a bit. At least we weren't being attacked. But the humanitarian situation was really tough.

Food wasn't allowed to be delivered in convoys, so they would drop food supplies by parachute. And that was never enough. But we were hoping the world would do something to bring the war to an end and bring our lives back to some sense of normality. We didn't have the basics. Babies were being born in that period and they'd never seen a banana or an orange.

We had some protection. Life became a bit more normal, so we could try and relax. We thought we would be able to sleep better, because at least they'll protect us if the Serbs broke into the town and tried to kill us. Things settled into a calmer routine, even if people still lived in tough conditions. But in the rest of Bosnia, the war raged on. And for a lot of Bosniaks who were still on the run from Republika Srpska's persecution,

Srebrenica became a place where they could be relatively safe and it became their best chance at survival. And I remember it was AIDS holiday in May 1992 when my uncle came all panicking and frightened, screaming and banging at our doors saying "you have to leave, you have to leave, they are already close to Drinaca, we have to leave the house".

And I remember that we kind of fled from the table full of the feast. My name is Jasmin Jusufovic and when the war started, I was chased over all of the Eastern Bosnia. Jasmin is young. He's about my age. So that means that when he had to run from his home, he would have been about the same age as me when we left our home. And that really made me feel very connected to him when we were speaking.

He's a lovely guy and immediately warm and friendly. Oh, please don't miss a coffee together. Coffee for Bosnians means a lot more than a coffee. Whenever you're here, you're most welcome. In 1992, when his family were being expelled, Jasmin was five and living in Drinacem, which is another town in the lovely Drina valley.

For the age he was, he has a remarkably vivid memory. He says he felt like a record-keeping machine, noting everything that was happening around him. From the beginning of the war, I remember my family discussing stuff in a very serious manner. They had all these dark and solemn faces, and all that I could pick up was the word war popping up in the conversation more and more.

After their town also got taken over by Bosnian Serb soldiers, just like Srebrenica and Bratunac around the same time, Yasmin's entire family had to run to the nearby woods at a moment's notice. At that time, aggressor forces were already in our village, bombing us into the forest, knowing that we ran away into the forest. And I remember seeing from the top of that hill, which is above the village,

I remember seeing houses being in flames. The whole scenery was dark, was grey. It was as if somebody just threw a bucket of grey over everything. Just like in Srebrenica, the only way to get food was to sneak back into their village, which was now under Bosnian-Serb control, and to try and bring food back into the forest.

When the people were sneaking into our village to pick food, some of the elder teenagers, which included also my youngest uncle, they were running into the village to defend the village. So I remember him and his group, my uncle and his group,

running down the hill on several occasions and coming back with all these frightening stories which would make my parents feel increasingly worried and last time when he ran down the hill I remember the leaves which were on the forest ground kind of creating this cloud around him he was like a thunder like a wind running down the hill and he never came back

The people surrounding us were, you know, whispering that he might have been killed or he might have not been killed, he might have been just captured, he's going to be exchanged.

But my grandmother, his mother, she seemed to me like somebody turned her off. She kept so silent. She was a woman who was constantly aiding everybody else, trying to console everybody else. She was always communicating. But the moment when the youngest son of hers never came back, it was like she turned into a complete opposite of herself.

She was constantly having this look which was lost into distance. Over the next year and a half, Yasmin's family lived in another East Bosnian town called Konjevic Polje. In January 1994, though, the Bosnian Serb army got there as well. Already a UN-declared safe area, Srebrenica became their last option and final refuge.

We fled to Srebrenica at night and it was the harshest winter ever in my life because the moment you would exhale your breath would turn into ice particles and it was so cold in the night. I remember that possibly because during the day we were constantly walking during the afternoon and my clothes were soaking up my sweat

During the night they froze and I remember walking like a robot at the end of this ordeal. Yasmin's family began trying to make a home in Srebrenica and he was just a kid so to him it was a normal childhood. He didn't know any other kind. He went to school, he played with his friends and he spent time with his mum and dad.

There were thousands of families like this. The town was swelling up with refugees as the years went on. Srebrenica as a town was built for maximum few thousand, three, four thousand people. At the time when it was proclaimed safe zone and all those refugees came into Srebrenica, it had over 30 000 people.

squeezing into the capacity for three or four thousand. So it was very, very crowded. My school was split in half. Half of my school was inhabited by people who were seeking refuge and half of my school were us having classes.

Throughout this whole time Srebrenica was still a safe area. The Dutch UN soldiers were in the town, but the Bosnian Serb soldiers, they didn't want the Bosnian Muslims to forget that they were still there, positioned around the town and waiting. A grenade would fell here and there on the outskirts of the town. I had experienced sniper shots, which were like, it was like a terrorizing campaign.

We were walking down the street towards the fields where we were growing our food and from the surrounding mountains you would hear one or two bullets being shot at the closest object that they could find which would produce the most noise.

So it was, for example, a thin door of an abandoned hall or a factory. They wanted us to know that it was a bullet being shot and that they are watching over us. Life carried on like this and as much as was possible people got used to it. They didn't have a choice. But the intensity of the situation was building, the war was developing and Srebrenica was overflowing with refugees.

There was never enough space, there was never enough food or water. The Bosniaks' relationship with the Dutch UN soldiers was strained and everyone knew that the Bosnian Serbs were waiting. Srebrenica was a pressure cooker. And then, out of nowhere, the steam was let out. We were woken up by a rumble in a distance. The sound of shells was not coming through air, it was coming through the ground.

It felt like the ground was trembling. The attack on Srebrenica on the 6th of July 1995 was the start of weeks of horror for the people who were seeking refuge there. More on that next time on Untold Killing. Untold Killing is a co-production of Message Heard and Remembering Srebrenica. It's written, produced and edited by Jake Atayevich. Kate Williams is the producer for Remembering Srebrenica.

Sandra Ferrari is the executive producer. Our consultant producer is Nadan Hajic. And a huge thank you goes to Elmina Kulesic for consulting on the show and working closely with the survivors. And of course, also to the women who provided English voices for Kada and Kadifa, Kim Sadiq and Avi Carter. The theme music is by Matt Huxley.

If you'd like to see all the video footage that we mentioned in this episode or read accounts of more Srebrenica survivors, go to srebrenica.org.uk forward slash podcast. My name is Alexandra Bilic. Untold Killing will be back next week on Thursday.