More than eight thousand people who were killed in five days. The fall of the Bosnian city of Srebrenica was exactly thirty years ago this Friday. Bosnians are still looking for recognition and a place for their story. Including Goran Trkulja, a journalist from Bosnia Banja Luka, whose life was at stake. Nowadays he lives in Rosmalen.
“I get goosebumps if you say so,” says 66-year-old Goran, who ended up from his home country in Brabant after the flight. We are talking about his childhood in Yugoslavia. His birthplace.
Goran was a typical Yugoslav, who studied both Dubrovnik and Banja Luka and Novi Sad. “Yugoslavia is a country that no longer exists, but it really was a kind of supernation. With six national states in one.”
Staying in the past makes no sense, he thinks, but when Goran tells about Yugoslavia, you feel the melancholy. About how boundaries did not exist, everything was mixed together. Everything could. People were good for each other. “But when the umbrella dropped out, everything became different.”
Leader Tito turned out to be the binding factor that the club held together. When he died, ‘Supernation’ Yugoslavia fell apart. Suddenly your last name mattered. There were national borders. If you were pushed into a box by means of a religion and the exclusion began. It became the start of a horrible war. The start of a genocide.
“The prison turned out to be a concentration camp for people who were not Serbian.”
Suddenly Goran was no longer a Yugoslav, but a Bosnian Serf*. Goran was then in the early thirty and worked as a journalist at a regional newspaper in Banja Luka. “I was invited to come and look in a prison, near the city. War crimbers would sit there. But that turned out to be a concentration camp for people who were not Serbian.”
He went there to interview prisoners. Only everyone was whispered in advance. “I asked the people if they were being tortured.” No, no! “They cried.” We exercise every day and get two meals and life is fine. “” They were afraid of the consequences, afraid of torture, afraid of their loved ones. Afraid of their lives.
He no longer knows what Goran then wrote down. But the local minister of information didn’t like it. He received a height of the journalistic work of Goran and in no time the Trkulja family rang the phone.
“I can tell you: if a country has a minister of information, you know it is wrong,” Goran laughs triumphantly. “You are Serf, right?” The minister asked him. “Then you know what you have to do. I only have to point to you with one finger and you’re dead.”
“On the street it was as if a few eyes always looked at us.”
The words made a deep impression. On Goran, but also on his family. “On the street it was as if a few eyes always looked at us. We had to leave there,” said his wife. In 1992 he fled with his family to the Netherlands, where he gone. Fast.
“Bosnians are like stones. If you bounce them over the ground, they bounce a few times. But if he stylizes, the stone will stay there too.” Goran refers to his arrival in Rosmalen, where he still lives since his arrival. It feels like home.
Once in the Netherlands, Goran started working as a reporter at the Yugoslaviëtribunal. There he stood face to face with the criminals from his home country. He kept it up for two years, he says in the podcast of the VPRO About the fall of Srebrenica.
“If you are confronted every day with the crimes and stories of criminals that you look in the eye, you should be able to take a distance in a way. I wasn’t good at that. Then I thought: I have to stop because I am going crazy.”
“We always tend to put people in a box,” he explains. “I am an ethnic Serf, but I feel Bosnian. And Dutch. Not a Bosnian Dutchman, but a Dutchman. This is my history, just as good as this is Dutch history. Just like all of us are Dutch.”
He hopes that the stories from Bosnia and Srebrenica will be heard. Certainly now that it is thirty years ago that the enclave fell, on July 11, 1995. So that people can respond to the mourning. In the Netherlands and in Bosnia. Recognize the stories. And see how smart, talented and beautiful are the people who tell the stories.
“Maybe we can build a bridge together, between the Netherlands and Bosnia. Connect. That is my goal.”
*At the request of Goran we use the word Serf and not the more common Serbian. In Dutch there is no difference in these words, but for Goran this indicates the distinction between Serbian ethnicity and someone who comes from the country of Serbia.
Exhibition and podcast
National Monument Camp Vught commemorates the fall of Srebrenica with an exhibition with portraits of Dutch people who have fled from former Yugoslavia. The exhibition ‘The 11 voices of Srebrenica’ can be seen until October 26 this year.
A podcast was also made for the VPRO in thirty years after the fall of Srebrenica. In this, refugees from that time tell their story, including Goran Trkulja.