By: Sanela Ramic Jurich

On May 23, 1992, my mother and I were visiting my grandmother in Hambarine, not knowing that a war criminal, Radmilo Zeljaja, had given an order to the Serb army to start bombing my mother’s home town that day.

Heavy artillery, which has long been set on the hills around Prijedor and directed toward the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) and Croat (Bosnian Catholic) villages, started spitting its fire. The entire afternoon, the sky above Prijedor was rocketed and falling onto unprotected, innocent people and their homes in Hambarine.

We were surprised by the brutality and ferocity with which we were attacked. The shelling came from three directions: from the north-west in the Karane area, from the area of Urije and from the area of Topic Hill. There were two or three Serb tanks and approximately a thousand soldiers during the attack. The bombardment of Hambarine continued until about 3:00pm. The residents of Hambarine tried to defend the village, but were forced to flee to other villages or to the Kurevo woods to escape the shelling. There were approximately 400 refugees, mostly women, children, and elderly people, who fled Hambarine as a result of the attack that saw the Serb soldiers kill, rape, and torch houses. A military operation was consequently concentrated on the Kurevo woods, where we were hiding for the night.

Everywhere I looked, there was nothing but chaos and confusion. People didn’t know what to do, where to go. Children were getting separated from their mothers, senior citizens were being stubborn and didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave their homes… Somehow I ended up holding my five-year-old cousin’s hand and dragging him along pulling on his arm to try and make him run faster, while running up the hill.

My mother and I got separated and I couldn’t find her. I knew I had to stay with my little cousin and protect him because I couldn’t see his mother anywhere either. He was scared, crying, asking for his mother.

A few of my grandparents’ neighbors were Serbs. Up to this point, everyone in the village lived in harmony. They helped my grandparents harvest their crops the previous summer.

They were now shooting at us.

Still, we managed to climb up the hill and hide deep inside the woods. That was the longest and the coldest night of my entire life.

I know I will never forget Prijedor, 1992 and the brutality of the concentration camps run by the Serbs; Omarska, Keraterm, Trnopolje, etc. from 1992-1995.

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Sanela Ramić Jurich is an author and a public speaker. Born in Prijedor, Bosnia in 1976, she was fifteen years old when the war first started. Her books, Remember Me and Haunting from the Past were based on her own memories of that war. She now lives in Chicago with her husband and two sons.

“Show forgiveness, speak for justice and avoid the ignorant.”