Brutal Memories: One Man’s Life in Detention in Wartime Bosnia

When the first barricades went up in Sarajevo at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, some of the Bosniaks living in Kucice, a village near the town of Hadzici, not far from the capital, fled their homes in fear.

Almin Djelilovic’s family was among the ones that stayed – until May 13, 1992, when local Serbs separated the men from the women, and began to take the men away from the village at gunpoint.

But then an elderly woman known as Grandma Stevinica intervened. “She stood in front of us and told the people who held us at gunpoint: ‘Take these men back home, you are not taking them anywhere,’” Djelilovic recalled.

She then lay down in front of the men to stop them from being seized, until most of them were returned to their homes. Djelilovic later found out that his grandfather had saved one of the woman’s relatives during World War II.

But Grandma Stevinica’s intervention only managed to preserve the Bosniak men’s liberty for a few weeks. The village was surrounded again on June 22, 1992, houses and barns were burned and the locals were taken into captivity in a sports centre in Hadzici.

Djelilovic, who was 21 at the time, was among those who were seized: “When we entered the hall, it was already overcrowded. Around 300 men were already there. Some minors were among them. As for women, only those who had come from our village were in that place, around 20 women with children,” he said.

According to Djelilovic, the men were then transported to East Sarajevo that evening by buses. In the buses, they were beaten by armed men. They were eventually brought to the Slavisa Vajner Cica military barracks.

“As we got off the bus, we saw two lines of people waiting for us… we had to pass between them. While we were walking, they hit us with their fists and weapons and kicked us,” he said.

Djelilovic was placed in a dormitory room in the barracks, along with his father, grandfather, uncles and cousins. In the afternoon, a large group of people in uniform entered the barracks and beat the prisoners up.

“In the evening hours of June 23 they called out 46 people and separated them from the others. They transferred them to another room,” he said.

“Throughout the night we heard screams from that room – it was horrible, it froze my blood in my veins just to hear it, let alone see it,” he added.

The next evening, three younger uniformed men entered the dormitory room, beat up some of the detainees, and took Djelilovic into the toilet.

“As we were entering the toilet, I inadvertently glanced at one of the guys’ hands. Blood was still dripping from his hand,” he recalled.

“At that moment I thought: ‘It’s over.’”

Djelilovic said they then began beating him, until the assault was halted by a lieutenant, who told them to take him back to the dormitory room. However, the beating was so bad that he had swallowed seven or eight of his own teeth.

“I looked so bad my own father did not recognise me. People gathered around me, he watched and stood in front of me, looked at me and asked: ‘Who is this?’ A neighbour told him: ‘This is your Almin.’ My father was stunned.”

Bosnian Serb forces started rounding up hundreds of Bosniaks in the Hadzici area in May 1992 and imprisoning them in improvised jails and detention centres. Dozens of them have never been seen again, and many of the perpetrators have not been prosecuted.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, some 160,000 people were held captive during the war at around 600 detention sites across the country, according to research published in 2016 by the Coalition for RECOM, a campaign group that advocates setting up a truth-seeking commission for the Yugoslav wars.

As for Djelilovic, on June 25, 1992, he and other men were transferred to the Kula detention facility in East Sarajevo, where he spent more than five-and-a-half more months in captivity.

During this time, he dug trenches and cut down trees on the frontline for Bosnian Serb forces, carried the dead and wounded, and was even forced to pillage Bosniaks’ houses in Gornji Kotorac and Grbavica.

He was eventually freed as part of a prisoner exchange in November 1992. While in detention, he lost more than 30 kilogrammes.

“Later on, when I put all these things together, I realised that each day I spent there – the physical mistreatment, the forced labour, the things I saw – was like attending a school of life,” he said.

“You learn to appreciate a slice of bread when you have nothing to eat, when every day you are waiting for someone to lose his temper and kill you, because you do not have control over your life,” he added.

Djelilovic now lives in Hadzici and is the president of a local association of wartime detainees called Don’t Forget, Don’t Let It Happen Again 1992-1995. He also works with children at a basketball school.

“I have a roof over my head, the best marriage in the world, a family… That means the world to me. No money can buy that,” he said.

He credits his family and his work with helping him get over the suffering he went through and the brutality he witnessed during the war.

“Some people who I speak to through my engagement with the association tell me they cannot sleep, that they have traumas,” he explained.

“I do not dream about those things at night, thank God.”