Entry 3: Victims

Victims of the Bosnian Genocide

  

Bosniac Refugees

      During the Bosnian Genocide there were only two major ethnic groups targeted, the Muslims and the Croats. In ancient times, when the Ottoman Turkish Empire invaded Bosnia they told the residents currently living in Bosnia to convert to Islamic faith or be persecuted.  At the time, most of the people who lived in the region were Christian, and they majority of them chose to convert to save their ways of life.  This was an outrage to the Christians who stood firm in their faith, and the hatred of the act was passed down through the generations.

  
  Hundreds of years later, Yugoslavia was about to break up.  The Bosnian Serbs saw their chance to not only reclaim what was once theirs, but to get revenge on the Muslims who ravished their lands centuries before. Could it have been fear of the unknown that drove the Serbs to committing ethnic cleansing?  Perhaps they felt they should rid Bosnia of all Muslims before they would be forced to convert like their ancestors were. Regardless of motive, ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity and goes against everything that both the Bible and the Koran teaches. 
   

Bosniac Concentration Camp

   More than 200,000 civilians were killed in Bosnia during the war. Tens of thousands of women were raped, some over 100 times.  “Rape victims’ sons and husbands were beaten and tortured in concentration camps like Omarska and Manjaca” ( Danner, “Faces of Sorrow”).  Omarska is found in northern Bosnia, it was used to hold men and women after the Prijedor Massacre. 5,000-7,000 Bosniaks and Croats were held in terrible conditions for 5 months. Manjaca is a concentration camp found on Mount Manjaca. There were estimated 5,400- 6000 people in the camp also in horrific conditions. When the camp was captured by Bosnian police in 1995 there was 85 dead bodies due to the killing going on in the camp. 

Mass Grave

As horrific as all that is, that’s not the worst of it. The Srebrenica genocide, is the worst in European History since WWII.  Nearly 8000 Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica as part of the Serbs ethnic cleansing.  After all is said and done, the entire country was victimized by these cruel people. Now instead of them living together in one proud country, their country was split in two: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina control 51% of the country for the Muslim and Croats, and the Republika Srpska  make up the other 49%, for the Serbs.