An architect has recalled spending his first “beautiful” days in Newcastle after fleeing his war-torn Bosnian town as a schoolboy to escape the genocide.

Smajo Beso, now 36, said he heard birdsong for the first time in years after arriving in the north-east of England on July 19 1994, after Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic ordered troops to execute mostly Muslim men and boys.

Mr Beso and his mother and siblings spent a month in a Croatian refugee camp after fleeing their town of Stolac.

His father was among the many males, aged between around 13 and 90, who had been rounded up by guards storming Stolac a year earlier, before being granted refuge in Newcastle.

Local people then successfully campaigned to have the family reunited in Newcastle.
Speaking on the anniversary of the Bosnian genocide, Mr Beso, who describes himself as equal parts Bosnian and Geordie, told the PA news agency: “Coming here was amazing.
“I remember it was beautiful weather and silence, not hearing bombs and shells and screaming and cries.

“The first thing I noticed was how different it was to Bosnia.

“Coming from a war zone – that shock, the contrast, not hearing bombs and explosions, hearing birds for the first time in years – that shock was so vivid.”

Mr Beso described how his first real understanding of the impact of war was when a Serbian friend turned against him.

He then saw relatives killed, men rounded up and buildings destroyed.
“War might be an abstract concept for a young boy,” he said.
“It might be something you see in films and TV and are impressed by, but when you see the crater a shell leaves behind, or the explosion when you are a few metres away and your ears are ringing and you’re disorientated – then you know what war is.”

Mr Beso said his most defining moment was when his mother sat him and his brother and sister down, the day her sister – his aunt – was fatally wounded by a Croatian bomb, and told them to reject hatred.

He said: “She said the best way to resist those trying to kill us is not to become hateful like them.
“If my mam had chosen the easy route … the most soothing thing would be to direct all our anger to them.
“But she chose the most courageous thing.
“It had the most impact on my life.”

Kemal Pervanic grew up in a Bosnian Muslim village surrounded by Serbs. “My schoolmates were just my schoolmates and my teachers were my teachers and that’s how it was until the early 1990s,” Pervanic told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at London’s Frontline Club. But in 1992 he was in a concentration camp being interrogated and tortured by his favourite teacher.

“If you are born in peace, and raised in peace, you take peace for granted,” Pervanic said. “If you speak to anyone out there right now, they’ll tell you that they’re crazy if you tell them that something like that may happen. But now after I lived through such events, I know that it can happen to anyone.”

It’s been over21years since the war inBosnia Herzegovinaended. Pervanic has become a writer and human rights activist. He believes that the process of reconciliation has hardly begun. “Reconciliation and peace building is going to take decades and many generations,” he said. “The process leading up to the war didn’t take long, five to seven years. So you destroy peace, you destroy a normal society so quickly. And it takes such a long time to rebuild it again.”

Now a British citizen, Pervanic splits his time between London and Bosnia. He fears that people in Western Europe don’t appreciate how fragile peace can be.

“We don’t think somebody will come take it away from us,” Pervanic says. “Because it can so easily be taken away from us we all have to become educators, and we all have to become involved in politics.”

A grave digger at work, finishing the final resting place for one of thousands of Bosniak men and boys slaughtered by nationalist Bosnian Serb forces in 1995.

It’s known as the Srebrenica massacre.

One hundred and twenty seven new graves are being added to the more than 6,300 already in this cemetery.

The massacre was Europe’s worst atrocity since World War Two.

An abandoned cultural center is one site where the massacre took place. Bullet holes are still visible in the walls.

The victims’ bodies were scattered across the country to conceal what the U.N. declared an act of genocide.

Forensic anthropologist Dragana Vucetic of the International Commission on Missing Persons studies the remains of victims, hoping to identify them.

The burial has become an annual July ritual for Muslim Bosniaks, and has become a reminder of collective suffering.

The U.N. estimates that over a thousand bodies are still missing.

The Bridging Beliefs Forums were a unique series of workshops across England with Holocaust survivors and survivors of the genocide of Bosnian Muslims in 2005.

The Bridging Beliefs Forums were a unique series of talks that took place in Manchester, Leeds, London, Birmingham and Leicester.  In a unique demonstration of togetherness, survivors of the Holocaust and the genocide of Bosnian Muslims came together to share the stage and their experiences to group of students around the UK.  This was a novel project that helped to break down barriers and generate materials that supported Holocaust and genocide education in this country.

Bridging Beliefs Forums – Background

Bridging Beliefs was a two part project, the first part of which was the Forums followed by the Bridging Beliefs Journey.  The Bridging Beliefs Journey took a group of Muslims and Jews across Europe, culminating in visits to Auschwitz and Srebrenica.

The inspiration behind Bridging Beliefs was to reduce barriers between Jews and Muslims which have built up because of the Israel and Palestine issue and which continues to corrode relationships and which should not be the over-riding factor which shapes relationships between both faith groups. Therefore the project looked to show the experiences of genocide survivors, in this case, Muslim and Jewish survivors of genocide.

Linking these two experiences was not a question of making direct comparisons, but just as the Holocaust had a profound and lasting impact on Jews throughout the world, the atrocities committed in Bosnia also had significant effect on Muslims. Both communities which thought that they were ‘safe’ in Europe subsequently found out that they were not and were subject to cruel and systemised genocide.

Bridging Beliefs Forums – Concept

As a population, many in the UK have become hardened to hearing the never ending stories of large numbers of peoples that have been killed, whether through natural or unnatural disasters.  Although they may leave us appalled and upset, we seem to hear stories about unnamed individuals far too frequently to become involved and to find out more about the people who suffered and their life stories.

By having the survivors of both the Holocaust and the Bosnian Detention Camps sharing their personal stories, this project gave participants the opportunity to put faces and names to the horrific stories they had only heard about.  By having survivors of both genocides on stage together we brought forward the faces, the stories and the similarities of genocide that need to be learned so that people can become sensitized to where and how discrimination and isolation of communities takes place.  These forums also gave the audiences the opportunity to take part in a discussion which also gave them the opportunity to think about what they had heard.

Further information on this project can be obtained from Fiyaz Mughal OBE FCMI on info@faith-matters.co.uk