In July 1995, Fatima Huseinovic was virtually the Bosnian equivalent of India’s untouchables, the lowest of the low. She was hungry and homeless, camping out in a squalid tent city of wailing women and shrieking children.
A year later, Huseinovic has meetings with royalty and ambassadors. She gets letters of support from President and Hillary Rodham Clinton and from Margaret Thatcher. Bosnian politicians regularly come knocking at her door seeking support in advance of the September elections.
Huseinovic, 49, is president of Women of Srebrenica, a group representing the more than 20,000 Muslim women who lost husbands, sons and fathers in the massacres at the Bosnian “safe haven” last summer. Trying to ensure that their cause is not forgotten, they are enjoying surprising success with a combination of cajoling, mild violence and a knack for tweaking the guilty conscience of officialdom.
In January, about 1,500 of them wielded rocks and bricks to force their way into the International Red Cross’ Tuzla headquarters in protest of delays in obtaining information about the 8,000 missing men.
In July, Queen Noor of Jordan and Swanee Hunt, the socialite U.S. ambassador to Austria, joined the Srebrenica women here to mark the first anniversary of the massacres. Taking a cue from the famous AIDS quilt, thousands of the Srebrenica women embroidered pillowcases with the names of their missing men and displayed them for the television cameras.
The meeting yielded a $5 million pledge in U.S. aid, plus $2.5 million from the European Union. Hunt also announced a fund-raising appeal with a star-studded board of directors that included Sophia Loren and Tipper Gore.
Only a handful of men were permitted to attend. Organizers of the event went so far as to refuse requests to speak from male Bosnian politicians.
“It was fine for them to sit and watch. We wanted them to see our power and courage,” Huseinovic said in an interview the next day. “They know that elections are coming and they want to use us for their own purposes. They won’t succeed. We’ve had enough of being manipulated.”
If the women sound tough, it is because of the treachery that lies behind their personal tragedies. They were betrayed first by the United Nations, which failed to protect its own purported “safe haven.” New evidence suggests that NATO refrained from using air strikes to deter the Serbs because of a hostage-release deal made earlier in the summer.
The refugees also suspect their own government. The Bosnian Muslim army commander in Srebrenica, Nasir Oric, was conveniently out of the city when it was stormed, giving credence to the widespread belief that the government had secretly traded away Srebrenica for other territory.
“These Srebrenica refugees have been treated as pawns at every stage of the game,” said Randolph Ryan, a spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Tuzla. “Now, the government is afraid of these people because they know they are potentially a powerful political force.”
Tuzla has the largest concentration of Srebrenica refugees, about 30,000 and predominantly female. Most of them originally come from rural villages near Srebrenica, not the city itself, and they wear peasant clothing, shawls and wide trousers that make them conspicuous outsiders.
Their isolation is compounded by their precarious living conditions, either in refugee centers or partially destroyed weekend houses on the outskirts of town. They live on monthly distributions of rice, flour, oil, beans and sugar. Few have jobs or any marketable skills that would allow them to work in an urban setting.
Huseinovic is rather atypical. She worked in Srebrenica’s department store before the war and dresses Western style, albeit usually the same print blouse and skirt, since she has few changes of clothes.
Women of Srebrenica was founded in May 1992, the first month of the war, as a group of volunteers to help tend the wounded. Huseinovic was its president; after she became a refugee, she started it up anew in Tuzla.
Her immaculate office is adorned with cheerful handmade rugs and wall hangings, the handiwork of refugee women. A mother and daughter were sitting pensively in a corner gazing out the window, and Huseinovic commented bitterly: “That little girl. She is only 10. Whenever she sees a bird, she says to her mother, `Look, it is Daddy. He’s come back as a bird to visit us.’
“We need answers,” Huseinovic continued, sliding straight into her pitch. “They have to look to find survivors if there are any. If there aren’t, they should tell us about the dead, dig up all the bodies and identify them so that we can get on with our lives.”
The Srebrenica women are still vulnerable to political machinations. Indeed, with Bosnia scheduled to hold elections Sept. 14, the ruling Muslim party has bused thousands of refugees to Sarajevo, many suspect with hopes of bolstering the Muslim majority.
“Right now, the women are very popular because of the elections,” said a skeptical Razija Pasagic, a Srebrenica refugee in Tuzla. “Because we are stupid and naive, they think we will vote for them and after that, they’ll forget about us.”
