Life is as fragile as the flip of a coin

Aug 12 2008 by Nadina Osmani, Liverpool Daily Post

As Radovan Karadzic stands trial for war crimes, Crosby student Nadina Osmani recounts her own family’s escape from war-torn Bosnia 16 years ago, and how she has come to regard Liverpool as home.

MY STORY starts in Brcko, Bosnia, in 1991. I was born on July 3 of that year, in a city on the border of Bosnia and Croatia.

According to my mother, Samira, corr it was the hottest summer the city had ever had but, she says, you could already hear the fighting going on in Croatia. Brcko is a border city and received conflicting news reports of what was going on from all sides, and although we knew fighting was getting closer, nobody thought it would come to Bosnia.

In their worry, my parents decided to take precautions. My father, Safer, corr was the only one of us with a passport as he worked on ships in Serbia, so he tried to get me and my mother included on his, but met with no success at the police station.

Fortunately, he bumped into a friend, Mehmed Murselovic (Meho), on the stairs on the way out. Dad explained what was going on and with a confident smile Meho said: "Just give that to me and go sit in the cafe across the street." Five minutes later, Meho emerged from the station with a fully stamped passport.

Two weeks had passed and Dad was now on his way back from work in Serbia. The radio was playing the news on his bus, telling of how bridges had been blown out in Brcko and the city couldn’t be entered.

The driver, a Serbian man, stood up at the front and said: "If you want to get off, now’s your chance, but I’m going into Brcko. If I don’t get in one way, I’ll get in another." He was stopped at checkpoints several times, but he just kept going. Nobody knows why he was so determined to get in, but for some reason he was.

When he made it in, the city centre was deserted. Not a single soul outside, on what was usually the busiest day of the week. The bus rolled through empty streets and halted at the station, where a swarm of hundreds of people suddenly appeared, eager to get on where my dad was getting off. When he reached our flat, he spotted a barricade had been set up. He approached the row of armed men alone, carrying only his backpack. What could he do but keep walking? They could have opened fire on him, but for some reason they didn’t.

My mother and I were nowhere to be found. Dad rang his parents to check if we were at their house and got no answer several times. He tried the people across the street and finally got through. Grandad came to the phone, jabbering frantically: "You can’t get into town! You can’t get into town, where are you?" "I’m in bloody town!" Dad replied. That night he was on watch, sat outside my grandparents’ house with a handgun and six bullets, not that it would help against the 150 Serbian tanks that came the next day. "What on earth was he doing?", he thought.

There were three ways out of Brcko, two were in the middle of Serbian-occupied territory, and the other was through a Serbian village. Shelling had already begun, so no route was ideal, but neither was staying where we were. It was a situation where you had to take a chance, and any chance you took could end in your death.

They decided to go through the Serbian village – as they knew most of the villagers, it was the safest route for them. The goal was Tuzla, but when they got there it was evident that it wasn’t wise to stay in Bosnia at all.

So, where does a group of Bosnians trying to escape the Serbian military go? Serbia, of course. Since dad worked in Belgrade, we had a perfectly valid excuse for going there. And who would expect that kind of move?

We made it out of Tuzla, but that was another scrape. The coach was stopped at a checkpoint, where people were asked for ID and tickets. My father is a Bosnian Muslim with an Albanian surname, a lethal combination when travelling into Serbian territory. A soldier checked his tickets, and asked him why he was travelling.

His reason was work, and passage was allowed. My father says that "if he’d thought a bit more about it, then maybe we would have been in serious trouble", but for some reason he didn’t. They could have taken us off the coach and shot us there and then, they could have killed my father. They could have killed us all. But they didn’t. The day after we reached Belgrade, all communications with Tuzla were cut.

For a while, we lived with my uncle’s family in Panca, but six people and four children in a tiny one-bedroom flat was ridiculous, so we stayed with a nearby friend of ours called Vera Isaka. We thought the war would blow over and we’d eventually be able to go home, but some of the locals began to trouble Vera because of us. It was only a small handful in a generally welcoming community, but that was more trouble than we wanted to cause, so we had to move again.

Our next available options were Hungary and Austria, because we didn’t need a visa to get there. By now it was October, and, although things had gone well so far, we were soon to be struck by tragedy. News reached us that my grandma on my mother’s side had died of a heart attack on the day we’d safely left Brcko. Mum was distraught, the last time she’d spoken to her mother was when the first bridges were blown and Grandma had rang to check that we were OK. She was dead, and we hadn’t even known.

Even with this news, we had to keep going for the sake of our own lives. With our remaining money, we got the train to Salzburg, with the plan of eventually reaching England. There, we were stopped by German customs and made to get off the train. They stamped our passports with "zuruck" (return) and walked us back to the Austrian side of the border.

We weren’t getting in. Several families were denied entry, their tales just as heartbreaking as our own. One woman was forced to take her children and leave her whole family behind because they believed the news stories of Serbian liberation over her own about their evil – they’d made her husband drink motor oil. It was a mishmash group and, despite the war, backgrounds and beliefs didn’t matter. They were all just people who needed to get out.