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This article contains descriptions of torture, violence, and sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The warning came over the radio<\/a> just as tanks rumbled into Prijedor \u2014 Enesa Krupi\u0107\u2019s  hometown in northwestern Bosnia \u2014 on a gray April morning in 1992. All Muslim men and boys aged 12 and older were ordered to leave their homes and line up in the street. Krupi\u0107\u2019s mother, calling from another city, told her the soldiers were moving block by block \u2014 tanks in front, troops behind, and empty buses in between. The buses weren\u2019t just for show. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One by one, men and boys were being loaded in and taken away<\/a> to concentration camps. Krupi\u0107 was four months pregnant. Her husband had just been fired along with every other Muslim man at his workplace. Her father-in-law\u2019s pension had stopped arriving. Food was running low. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now, the soldiers were at her door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cMy husband turned around and said, \u2018Be safe,\u2019\u201d Krupi\u0107, now 55, said. \u201cMy brother-in-law \u2014 he knew. He told me, \u2018If my wife calls, don\u2019t tell her we are gone.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their IDs were checked and their rooms were searched for weapons. Despite finding nothing, the army took her husband and his four brothers. The five men were loaded onto a waiting bus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the last time Krupi\u0107 ever saw her brother-in-law. He was later killed in the camp. Her husband, she would see again \u2014 months later, after risking everything to try to bring him home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Three decades have passed since that morning in Prijedor, but for survivors like Krupi\u0107, the memory remains sharp, intimate and unresolved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 11, the world will mark the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre  and, more broadly, the Bosnian genocide, one of Europe\u2019s most brutal and often overlooked atrocities<\/a> of the 20th century. The massacre was one of the most horrific chapters in a war that began after Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia<\/a> (ICTY), the war, which lasted from April 1992 to November 1995, displaced more than 2 million people \u2014 accounting for half of Bosnia\u2019s population \u2014 and resulted in at least 100,000 deaths. Driven by ethnic nationalism and the vision of a \u201cGreater Serbia,\u201d Bosnian Serb forces launched a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, targeting Bosniak Muslims and Croats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, an estimated 350,000 people of Bosnian descent live in North America, according to the Congress of North American Bosniaks.<\/a> In 1991, there were about 15,000 Bosniaks in the U.S. In other words, four out of five people from this community are refugees of the Bosnian genocide.
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Chapter 1: Through the eyes of the survivor<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After soldiers arrested Krupi\u0107\u2019s husband, she had no idea where they were taken. It wasn\u2019t until whispers began circulating that Muslim men were being held in a ceramics factory on the edge of town that she got on a bicycle and rode across Prijedor. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

“Whoever went there didn\u2019t come back.”
<\/p>eNESA KRUPI\u0106<\/cite><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n


The factory was Keraterm, one of three major concentration camps established by Bosnian Serb forces in the Prijedor region in the spring of 1992. Along with Omarska and Trnopolje<\/a>, these camps formed part of a coordinated system of ethnic cleansing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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After initially being imprisoned at Keraterm, where her brother-in-law was killed, Krupi\u0107\u2019s husband, Nijaz, was transferred to Trnopolje \u2014 a different type of detention center. Left behind, Fahim was forced to help bury corpses. When he was no longer needed, he was buried alive with the other victims, she learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trnopolje functioned less as a killing camp and more as a transit site, used to detain civilians before expelling them or redistributing their homes. In Prijedor alone, an estimated 30,000 people were detained, and more than 3,000 were killed, most of them Bosniak civilians, as documented by the UN Refugee Agency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Keraterm \u2014 the first camp where her husband and brother-in-law were detained \u2014 prisoners were not only starved and beaten but also systematically humiliated for their faith. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey would force-feed them pork and make them curse Allah,\u201d said Krupi\u0107\u2019s daughter, Amila Tutund\u017ei\u0107. \u201cThey made them sing nationalist songs \u2014 songs about Greater Serbia and against Muslims. It was all about breaking them down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some of the most disturbing acts were designed to psychologically destroy prisoners. Guards would identify fathers and sons held together, hand them metal rods, and force them to fight to the death while soldiers watched and laughed. In other horrific instances, detainees were coerced into sexually violating each other under threat of execution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy dad doesn\u2019t like to talk about it much,\u201d Tutund\u017ei\u0107 said. \u201cBut I remember one thing he mentioned \u2014 that they would sexually assault men with bottles. What he went through was even more traumatic than what my mom experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike her mother, who often spoke about the war, her father rarely shared his memories. The trauma, however, was impossible to hide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI remember vividly my dad waking up in the middle of the night for years, screaming in terror because he was having nightmares,\u201d Tutund\u017ei\u0107 said. \u201cThat part was hard to navigate, because nobody really understood it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The damage was lasting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cEven after he came home,\u201d she said, \u201che wasn\u2019t the same. You could see it in his eyes. Something inside him never came back.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their ordeal was far from over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krupi\u0107 believed she and her husband would be free after she was forced to sign over all family property to Serb authorities to secure his release \u2014 an act so common across Prijedor that by war\u2019s end, an estimated 50,000<\/a> Bosniak homes\u2019 had been seized, many still occupied by Serbs decades later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their reunion was short-lived. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deceived by promises of safe passage, the couple was instead taken together to Trnopolje, a second detention center where they slept on a school stairwell, surviving on sporadic deliveries of powdered milk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A staged photograph of Krupi\u0107, nine months pregnant, was later published by Serb media as propaganda \u2014 meant to suggest that prisoners were safe and cared for. In her time during the detention center, she did not receive any medical care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey came in with cameras,\u201d she said. \u201cTold me to smile.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was December 1992 when she and her husband were finally released from the detention camp. The very next day, she went into labor and gave birth to their daughter. Less than a month later, the family fled Bosnia \u2014 illegally crossing into Slovenia with their newborn, Krupi\u0107\u2019s elderly parents, and little more than hope. From there, they boarded a plane and never looked back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But the past had a way of resurfacing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven decades later,” she said “we live with the echoes.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years later, as a teenager in the United States, Tutund\u017ei\u0107 as the daughter of survivors began searching for answers about the uncle she had never met. That search led her to a war crimes tribunal transcript. In it, she found her uncle\u2019s name listed among the detainees of Room Two in the notorious Omarska camp \u2014 men forced to bury the dead before being executed themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Chapter 2: Through the years <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n