FROM KARABAKH TO BOSNIA: MOTHERS UNITED IN GRIEF OVER LOSS OF CHILDREN IN WARS AND CONFLICTS
FEATURES | 02.04.13 | 15:01
Photo: Gohar Abrahamyan/ArmeniaNow.com
By Gohar Abrahamyan
>From Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina
Editor’s Note: The Caucasus and the Balkans may be separated by more
than a thousand miles and may be having different views of modern-day
world affairs, but there is still one thing in common between the
two mountainous regions that makes them strive to know each other.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern communist bloc in
general triggered conflicts and wars in areas where problems between
different ethnic groups remained for decades. The Armenian-Azerbaijan
war over Karabakh as well as the Bosnian war between Serbs and
Croats in the multiethnic area began and ended almost simultaneously,
claiming tens of thousands of lives – both soldiers and civilians.
Almost two decades after the end of the war in Karabakh, a trip has
been organized for a group of women from Armenia and Azerbaijan to
Bosnia & Herzegovina to share their grief with local woman who had
lost their loved ones in the bloody conflict.
ArmeniaNow correspondent Gohar Abrahamyan has been in Sarajevo during
the past week to attend the events organized as part of the visit. She
singles out one particular trip to a monument to children killed
during the Balkan war that was erected in the Bosnian capital. It
was organized for Armenian and Azeri participants as part of a joint
project by the Center of Humanitarian Studies in Azerbaijan and the
Civil Society Institute in Armenia.
A glass monument located in the heart of the capital of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Sarajevo, has for several years been a place where
representatives of different social and religious groups of the
country’s population have been gathering.
This small state with a population of some 3.8 million that was part
of the former Yugoslavia and had its current borders shaped at the
cost of tens of thousands of lives, has not yet fully overcome the
heavy legacy of the 1992-1995 war.
Traces of bullets are still seen on buildings almost everywhere in
this Balkan country recovering from a major ethnic conflict. While
modern tall buildings are being erected alongside shabby houses in
Sarajevo and while the city’s business center with its posh hotels,
beautiful shops and restaurants is as busy as anywhere in major
European cities, there are still people who bear noticeable sorrow
as they struggle yet with the loss of their families and loved ones
in the war. Many of them say they are still waiting for justice to
be administered on war criminals.
Zlatka Inanovic, a 47-year-old resident of Sarajevo, has lived with
this expectation for 20 years now.
She tells of how her five-year-old son and mother-in-law were killed
before her very eyes after someone threw a hand-grenade into their
house in 1993.
The woman still keeps an album with her little son’s photographs, and
her two daughters born after the war continue to keep memory of him,
bringing fresh flowers to the monument to killed children situated
not far from their house.
The glass monument built in one of the central parks of Sarajevo
in 2009 commemorates more than 1,600 children who were killed or
are presumed dead during the years of the conflict. It has become
a sight for many mothers who lost their children in the war to come
and commemorate them.
All around the monument are footprints of brothers and sisters of the
killed children, and not far from it are seven pillars, on which the
names of 540 are engraved.
These columns make a subtle sound of clanking when rotated. Creators
of the monument say they had designed it so that people could associate
this sound with children’s souls.
Last weekend a group of women from Armenia whose children were killed
by Azeri snipers or saboteurs after 2000 also came to see the monument
in Sarajevo. Along with them were also a group of Azeri women whose
husbands and relatives were killed in the Karabakh war in the early
1990s.
Aghavni Ghukasyan, 56, says she lost her 20-year-old son Narek
Margaryan, a conscript in the army, in 2010, as an Azeri sniper hit
him near the frontline. She says that nothing could ease her pain
of losing a son, but seeing other mothers who suffered the same fate
she understood that she wasn’t all alone.
“I would like to be in your land, to see the beauty of it, its numerous
monuments, but I’m sorry that I have come here to share your pain,”
said Ghukasyan addressing Bosnian women at an event. “No mother in
the world wants a war, all mothers want their children to be raised
in peaceful conditions, but, unfortunately, our children did not have
such an opportunity. We need to do one thing now – to oppose wars.”
Azerbaijani journalist Piruza Sadulaeva, who also lost family members
during the war, stressed her belief that all women have the same
feelings when it comes to war, as they all love their children the
same way. It is mostly men who die during wars and conflicts, but
women bear most of the suffering, she argued.
“I don’t know who invented the first weapon, but I know that its very
first bullet must have hit a mother’s heart,” said the Azeri woman.
Like her counterparts in Armenia and Azerbaijan, Bosnian Inanovic,
too, hopes that the war will not resume in her country and that other
women will not have go through the same horrors as she. The woman,
who says she has many friends among both Serbs and Croats, doubts
she will ever be able to forget what happened to her, but she says
perhaps she will be able to forgive.
“I hope that this conflict will never happen again, and other people
will not have to live through this pain, but I want to see the one
who killed my child, look into the eyes of this criminal and see his
child,” Inanovic said.
http://www.armenianow.com/society/features/44938/armenia_azerbaijan_bosnia_herzegovina_sarajevo_war