Thread by @Rrrrnessa

Every year, without fail, an uncle sends me this long message thanking me for my work. Every year I try to get him to share his story of surviving genocide and this year he has allowed me to do so as long as I don't say his name. This is how he survived the Bosnian genocide:

He was only 19 years old when the war broke out and his life changed forever. He lived in a small village near Visegrad. His village was burned, looted, and destroyed. His mother killed and his father taken away. His father's remains have yet to be found.

As fighting continued and Serb forces expanded both their cruelty and ethnic cleansing, he ran where he could. When Srebrenica was declared a safe area, he found himself trekking miles to get there. He had absolutely nothing. He walked with torn clothes and was dying of hunger.

When he made it to Srebrenica, he didn't find what he thought he would. A place of refuge and safety. Instead he found thousands of fellow Bosniaks also hungry, starved, broken, beaten, and traumatised. He was still a kid but always tells me that he felt as if he was an old man.

But in the safe area of Srebrenica, for a while, until the Serb forces attacked again he said he seemed to have some respite in the form of a girl around his age too. For all intents and purposes, Srebrenica was an open air prison in many ways but in that prison he found love.

Knowing he had nothing and nobody, the girl's mother and grandmother accepted him into their own and tried their best to make him feel that they were his family too. He told me he would promise them the world when it all calmed down and how badly he wanted to marry the girl.

Hoping for a better future and trying to stay afloat, he spent his days like everyone else in the safe area of Srebrenica...praying to survive. For a while, he did. The winter was horrific and they barely made it through and spring had finally come around. Then it was July.

He's told me the story of those days in July when the shelling seemed to never end. When there was rumours that Serbs were coming. He was not a complacent person and he wanted to stand up, to fight, but they had no weapons and no strength either.

So, they like the many thousands of desperate Bosniaks made their please to the Dutchbat to no avail. He told about the chaos, the screams, the tears, the sounds of guns nearing and how terrifying it was to see Ratko Mladic there too.

In the midst of the chaos he was being told to go with the men as they tried to escape by trekking to safety through the forests and fields (now infamously known as the Death March) but also being told to hide amongst the women and children, to wear their clothes.

He join the men in the march instead, hoping he would be safe. He thought, in his own words "there is no way they could kill all of us" and he told his love to wait for him in Tuzla.

So they were split apart. And during his journey, he saw men die in the most horrific ways but he, nonetheless, kept going. The Serb forces would try to trick the men into coming down from the forest and then kill them but he stood his ground.

He saw men as old as grandfather and young men his own age, even younger, get blown up by mines and get shot down by grenades. But he kept walking.

The Death March is estimated to have started with 10,000 men but only an est 3,000 survived the journey and the Serb forces. It was a 70 mile long journey. But he eventually made it to Tuzla and he survived. Here he hoped to find his love.

But the true tragedy is that he never did. His love was taken from him too. He has no idea what happened to her. She is one of the missing women of Bosnia whose remains have yet to be discovered. She never made it to Tuzla but her mother and grandmother did.

It's been 26 years for him and for 26 years he has been mourning and waiting to find out if he will ever find the remains of the love of his life. Serb forces took her away. She is "missing" but in Bosnia that just means killed and hidden.

Whenever he tells me his story, I cry for him. For the lost youth, for the lost love, for his lost family. For all that was taken. So, when people ask why we should still care about the genocide 26 years later...I tell them it's because people are still suffering, 26 years later.

There are so many stories, so many painful & harrowing events I want to tell the world. The greatest honour of my life has been being entrusted with these stories by genocide survivors. This is our life. Not just our past, but our present too. Remember them.

Thank you to all who have read this story. If you would like to support genocide survivors & hear their harrowing stories, then please join us this evening at 5:00 pm for the UK National Ceremony of Srebrenica Memorial Day.

The event will be broadcast on Srebrenica.org.uk/ceremony

https://twitter.com/srebrenicauk/status/1413060558501330950