Yeah I Said That

August 1, 2008

I remember hearing about the war in bosnia back in, oh, about 1992 I guess it was. it wasn’t that they taught it in school or that I was particularly new savvy, the reason it caught my attention was that I was daring a Croatian boy at the time and I fancied myself in love with him.

Knowing what I know now, I wish I had paid more attention back then.

The thing that got me interested in the subject this was was the news of Karadzic’s recent capture. I was so excited to hear that they caught a war criminal who had succeeded in hiding out for over 13 years and I had to learn more about him and what he was accused of doing. I didn’t realize it would change my life.

Turns out that this was one of those subjects that I lost myself in. Obsessive on a good day, I buried myself in stories from the Bosnian war, the players involved and even the politics surrounding it. It was shocking to me that I didn’t hear more about these stories back in the day, the horror was so huge and so real, I still find it amazing that it’s not more well known. How is it that Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and Naser Oric didn’t become a household name?

The very first thing I looked up was Srebrenica and the massacre that took place there in July of 1995. It was shocking, not surprising per se, I have read a LOT of stories of the evils we can perpetrate against each other, but even with all of that ugly knowledge this managed to all me in brand new ways.

Of course most, if not all of the things I learned that first day centered around the slaughter of Bosniaks at the hands of the brutal and blood thirsty Serbs, or as they call them, Chetniks.

The pictures that accompanied the various articles were enough to make the bile rise up in my throat and again, keep in mind I have seen violence, I have watched videos of innocent captives beheaded by Al Qaeda, but still these images were sickening.

(I feel I need to interject something in my defence here. The reason I watched the terrorist videos was because I figured that if others can experience these painful, horrific events the least I can do is watch them and try to understand as much as possible the hand they were dealt.)

As soon as I began reading up on the plight of the Bosniaks in Srebrenica, I knew I had to write about it. I didn’t want to write a non-fiction book, that has been done to death, no, I wanted to educate people who wouldn’t even deign to open the flap of a non-fiction book. Making the decision to make it a fictional account of these true events was an easy one for me, actually narrowing down the plot was not going to be so easy.

The first incarnation I came up with was born from the stories of the “column.” Reading the stories of survivors brought tears to my eyes and more than one lump to my throat. I couldn’t wrap my head around the cruelty of the Serbs, how they would trick the men into calling to their families hiding in the hills. They convinced them that if they called their sons and fathers, wives and daughters down, and they surrendered they would make sure no harm came to them. Unfortunately, this was an empty promise that they never intended to honor.

As soon as the families showed their faces they were all whisked away to be tortured and executed.