In October 2024, Carole Ferguson Walker, joined a Beyond Srebrenica delegation to Bosnia. Here she writes of her experience.
I found myself sitting at Loch Leven’s Larder having a coffee one morning after the school run in September, escaping for a few moments into Neil Lancaster’s book Going Back, where the main character Tom Novak is sent back to his childhood home, Sarajevo, and learning about Bosnia and the wonder of the Sarajevo Tunnel. Looking up for a moment, I had a message on the platform which I’ll always refer to as Twitter, from someone I was connected with there, but had never met, asking if I would be interested in taking part in a charity delegation to Srebrenica in Bosnia in November. I think it will go down as one of the most random moments I’ve experienced. I wondered if it was a hoax, and indeed I told David Hamilton that when we spoke days later and he explained a bit more about the charity arranging the trip, Beyond Srebrenica. And so, that’s how, I ended up flying with a group of people I’d never met, to Sarajevo on 3-6 November. I grew up in a small village outside Oban, I’m not hugely well-travelled, and I’ve not travelled in a long time without my children, so really it was all very odd and I was a bit discombobulated, but I was so interested in the opportunity to learn about what had happened in Srebrenica that I felt I just had to throw myself into it.
Since I came back, people have asked me how it was. I’ve found it really difficult to answer the question and indeed to set my thoughts down. Its December as I write this. One of the reasons why it’s a difficult question to answer is that there were, for me, two very different aspects to the trip, the first was the beautiful bustling city of Sarajevo, the old town of which I really loved, and I actually really liked the Bosnian people I met – very no nonsense and sensible. Whilst they want to educate others on the genocide that happened in Bosnia, they are also keen to show you and tell you of their wonderful country and culture. The buildings were wonderful, the food was amazing, the smells in the old town of Bosnian coffee (a seriously dark, thick affair) and spices and smoke from cooking were completely captivating.
On the other hand, our day spent in Srebrenica was nothing short of heartbreaking. One of those moments where you really question humanity and the depths of horror that human beings can inflict on each other. We went to the memorial centre there to learn about what happened, local young people work there and do tours to tell of the unimaginable horror which culminated what happened there in July 1995, when in the course of a few days over 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically killed by Serb Forces. The stories of what happened to them are full of trauma. Many had gathered in Srebrenica where a UN base was situated, seeking safety. They were taken from there and the men and boys separated from the women and girls, and loaded on to buses and trucks. After horror involving moving them around, keeping them in different places, inhumanity and torture, they were systematically killed and their bodies buried in mass graves. Later those graves were dug up and reburied elsewhere to seek to avoid detection of the crime. Those activities ultimately meant that when the ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons) tried to identify the missing, using dna, they would have to ask families to agree to a burial of in some cases, only a finger bone, such was the state of the bodies and skeletons after the barbaric process of seeking to cover up those crimes. One of the standout moments for me that day was looking at a picture of a digger, with all its technical specifications. A digger used to dig up mass graves and further dispose of bodies. The lack of humanity in all of it is staggering and it left me wondering what it was that would lead humans to treat other humans in that way, though we know from what we hear daily in the news that these types of actions are sadly never too far away.
One of those responsible for the actions of the Serb Forces during those days was Radovan Karadzic. He had trained and practised as a psychiatrist. He studied neurotic disorders and depression at Naestved hospital in Denmark in 1970 and then underwent further training in Columbia University in New York. After his return he worked in a hospital in Sarajevo. He served from 1991-96 as leader of the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina and president of Republika Srpska. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia sentenced him to 40 years in prison in 2016. He was found guilty of genocide for the massacre at Srebrenica, which aimed to kill “every able-bodied male” in the town and systematically exterminate the Bosnian Muslim community. He was also convicted of persecution, extermination, deportation and forcible transfer and murder in connection with his campaign to drive Bosnian Muslims and Croats out of villages claimed by Serb forces. It is difficult to fathom how someone who had studied and practiced psychiatry found himself brutally leading forces seeking to exterminate other humans. You may also wonder what the UN was doing when all this happened, initially from their base, and from what I learned, it appears the answer was nothing very effective..
At the cemetery we met some of the Mothers of Srebrenica, who explained to us first-hand the enormity of the loss they had suffered, being left with only their sanity. It was heart-breaking but they are resolute in their mission to tell others of what happened there. It was unbelievable to hear from them that even now, cars drive past and throw bottles of alcohol at the Muslim cemetery walls, toot their horns and throw pigs heads, and it becomes clear that hate is still not far from there.
We met and heard the stories of two survivors of the genocide. The story of the sheer horror of being on one of those trucks, which moved the Bosnian Muslim men and boys around before they were systematically killed (and perhaps tortured too) and being part of a group that were shot, and lay where they fell, and then… finding that in fact you were in fact not dead. That was the story of Nedzad Avdic, a survivor of the genocide and now an amazing activist in raising awareness of genocide. He and another man in the group had not in fact died but were injured. As they heard the next truck full of men arrive, they managed to escape and hide, and they survived. It was an incredible privilege to hear him tell his story. He wants to tell his story and for others to hear it.
We saw video footage of another group of men being taken to a field and asked to kneel, and some of the group were shot and killed, with others then being asked to move the bodies, before they themselves were shot. It was difficult to see any humanity in the deliberate additional trauma the Serb Forces inflicted – there were plenty of them there to have moved the bodies themselves. School pupils who were visiting the memorial centre on the same day as us, had to leave the video presentation and we saw them sobbing outside.
I wanted to try to make sense of it, and really, I couldn’t. I read a quote afterwards from a holocaust survivor, Irene Weiss who said “man can turn into an animal in no time. All he needs is permission. As soon as the permission is given from higher-ups, from the government, it accelerates.” And maybe that is it, maybe the permission and indeed instruction from the former psychiatrist Karadzic and his brutal colleagues was enough to set those events off. Human beings drove those buses and those trucks, they did the killing, they moved the bodies and tried to cover it all up. In some way, they felt they had been given permission to behave in that way. Human beings were there from the UN. I was told there is a view that they did nothing to stop this.
I’ve not said anything yet about the women and girls. That’s not because there is nothing to say, its more that there is too much to say. I’m not sure there is the data or statistics that there are for the men and boys, but the horrors of war are there. Rape was used as weapon of war; women were killed and their bodies discarded afterwards. Some were forced to carry the babies which resulted as a part of the genocide. Some then died by suicide.
The charity Beyond Srebrenica is doing wonderfully important work to help the Bosnian people tell their story so that we can learn about it and in the hope that we will then talk about it and that it may in some small way have an impact. It certainly has had an impact on me. Hopefully I’ve explained why it is that the question – how was your trip to Bosnia – is such a difficult question to answer, but here’s the perhaps slightly surprising thing – if you ever have the opportunity to travel there, and to experience the brilliantly resilient, no-nonsense Bosnian people, their culture and the bustling city of Sarajevo – I’d wholeheartedly encourage you to go. I am so glad I had the opportunity to go. I’m a little bit different because of it. Each of us in the group, because of our backgrounds took something different from the experience. It was really enjoyable to travel with a group of strangers and to get to know them and have this experience with them. I’m glad I didn’t put that first random twitter message down as a hoax.
Carole Ferguson-Walker is an experienced Scottish solicitor/legal counsel, having grown up and trained in Argyll she came to work in Edinburgh and has been an in-house lawyer for over 20 years working with City of Edinburgh Council, the Faculty of Advocates, Registers of Scotland and she has spent time in private practice. She is a legal convener with the Mental Health Tribunal for Scotland. Carole is the chair of the board of Perthshire Women’s Aid and sits on the board of the MSA Trust. She has been a committee member of Women in Law Scotland, and ICAS’s authorisation committee, delivered training in privacy law, qualified as an advanced mentor with the Law Society of Scotland and is the Child Protection Officer with her local rugby club.
