Born, hated, trapped. Locked in a house with mum and 70 other people, and burned alive. So went the only two days in the life of a nameless baby from Višegrad, Bosnia. Nameless because the little girl didn’t live long enough to have a birth certificate, and because her entire family – everyone who could say what her name was – were also burnt alive.
Today she would only be in her early thirties because it happened in 1992, right at the beginning of the genocide against Bosniaks and the war of aggression against Bosnia. Around 13,000 Bosniaks, i.e. Bosnian Muslims, lived in Višegrad before the genocide. More than 3,000 of them were murdered. Thousands more were raped or displaced. The only Bosniaks still alive in Višegrad after the genocide in 1992 were isolated women and girls who were held captive and tortured in rape camps.
Bosniaks were burned alive in many places. The so-called living pyres of Višegrad are particularly well-known. Living pyres, or ‘Žive lomače’ in Bosnian, are the names given to the crimes in which Bosniaks were burned alive during the last genocide. Anyone looking for information on this in German will search in vain. The term ‘living pyres’ is not mentioned anywhere in the context of the genocide in Višegrad, although it is deeply engraved in the souls of Bosniaks. The culture of remembrance, media, and politics are failing once again to even know what was done to Bosnian Muslims. Even as I write this, my laptop is drawing red lines under the names of these brutal mass murders as if they were spelling mistakes because they do not exist in the collective memory of the ‘West’.
On today’s anniversary, we remember the living pyre of Bikavac. There, 70 people were crammed together and forced into a house that had previously been stolen from its Bosniak owner. The house was then set on fire, as were the people inside. The majority of the victims were women, children, and elderly people. Only one woman survived – Zehra Turjačanin. With completely burnt skin and missing fingers, she had to flee through the woods for days to avoid falling back into the hands of the Serbian troops. She survived. Despite her severe trauma, she found the strength to testify against the murderers before the UN tribunal.
Less than two weeks before Bikavac, on 14 June 1992, the same murderers carried out another living pyre in which over 60 people were murdered. Elderly, exhausted people, women and children were also trapped in Pionirska Street. Some of them were raped. They were locked in a house, into which their murderers threw explosives. The house burst into flames. People who tried to jump through the windows to escape the fire were shot. The charred bodies of the victims revealed the two-day-old baby burnt to death, in the arms of her mother.
The living pyres of Višegrad are among the most atrocious crimes of the last genocide against the Bosniaks, and thus of the 20th century. This is also how the judges of the UN Special Tribunal in The Hague view it: ‘In the entire, too long and too sad history of human misery and man’s inhumanity to man, the pyres in Pionirska Street and in Bikavac must take pride of place. Towards the end of the 20th century, marked by wars and bloodshed on a gigantic scale, these terrible events are engraved in our memories. Because of the particular cruelty required for murder by fire, because of the obvious premeditation and calculation inherent in them, and because of the sheer callousness, monstrosity, and brutality of forcing the victims into two houses that became traps that rendered them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and because of the amount of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims who were burnt alive.’
If Zehra Turjačanin, despite all her trauma, had the strength to look her family’s murderers in the eye in The Hague and testify against them, then we too can find the strength to lift up her voice and the voices of other survivors. Many of the Serbian murderers, rapists, and war criminals remain on the loose. Serbia has not paid any reparation, and denies the genocide to this day. Most Serbs also deny the genocide or even celebrate war criminals as national heroes. That is why our voices must be all the louder and stronger when we remember Višegrad and the rest of the genocide.
