The War That Never Ended

This article contains descriptions of torture, violence, and sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

The warning came over the radio just as tanks rumbled into Prijedor — Enesa Krupić’s  hometown in northwestern Bosnia — 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. Krupić’s mother, calling from another city, told her the soldiers were moving block by block — tanks in front, troops behind, and empty buses in between. The buses weren’t just for show. 

One by one, men and boys were being loaded in and taken away to concentration camps. Krupić was four months pregnant. Her husband had just been fired along with every other Muslim man at his workplace. Her father-in-law’s pension had stopped arriving. Food was running low. 

And now, the soldiers were at her door.

“My husband turned around and said, ‘Be safe,’” Krupić, now 55, said. “My brother-in-law — he knew. He told me, ‘If my wife calls, don’t tell her we are gone.’”

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.

That was the last time Krupić ever saw her brother-in-law. He was later killed in the camp. Her husband, she would see again — months later, after risking everything to try to bring him home.

Three decades have passed since that morning in Prijedor, but for survivors like Krupić, the memory remains sharp, intimate and unresolved. 

On July 11, the world will mark the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre  and, more broadly, the Bosnian genocide, one of Europe’s most brutal and often overlooked atrocities 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.

According to the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the war, which lasted from April 1992 to November 1995, displaced more than 2 million people — accounting for half of Bosnia’s population — and resulted in at least 100,000 deaths. Driven by ethnic nationalism and the vision of a “Greater Serbia,” Bosnian Serb forces launched a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing, targeting Bosniak Muslims and Croats. 

Today, an estimated 350,000 people of Bosnian descent live in North America, according to the Congress of North American Bosniaks. 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.

Chapter 1: Through the eyes of the survivor

“Whoever went there didn’t come back.”

eNESA KRUPIĆ

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, these camps formed part of a coordinated system of ethnic cleansing. 

After initially being imprisoned at Keraterm, where her brother-in-law was killed, Krupić’s husband, Nijaz, was transferred to Trnopolje — 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.

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.

In Keraterm — the first camp where her husband and brother-in-law were detained — prisoners were not only starved and beaten but also systematically humiliated for their faith. 

“They would force-feed them pork and make them curse Allah,” said Krupić’s daughter, Amila Tutundžić. “They made them sing nationalist songs — songs about Greater Serbia and against Muslims. It was all about breaking them down.”

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.

“My dad doesn’t like to talk about it much,” Tutundžić said. “But I remember one thing he mentioned — that they would sexually assault men with bottles. What he went through was even more traumatic than what my mom experienced.”

Unlike her mother, who often spoke about the war, her father rarely shared his memories. The trauma, however, was impossible to hide.

“I remember vividly my dad waking up in the middle of the night for years, screaming in terror because he was having nightmares,” Tutundžić said. “That part was hard to navigate, because nobody really understood it.”

The damage was lasting. 

“Even after he came home,” she said, “he wasn’t the same. You could see it in his eyes. Something inside him never came back.”

Their ordeal was far from over.

Krupić 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 — an act so common across Prijedor that by war’s end, an estimated 50,000 Bosniak homes’ had been seized, many still occupied by Serbs decades later.

Their reunion was short-lived. 

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.

A staged photograph of Krupić, nine months pregnant, was later published by Serb media as propaganda — meant to suggest that prisoners were safe and cared for. In her time during the detention center, she did not receive any medical care.

“They came in with cameras,” she said. “Told me to smile.”

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 — illegally crossing into Slovenia with their newborn, Krupić’s elderly parents, and little more than hope. From there, they boarded a plane and never looked back.

But the past had a way of resurfacing.

“Even decades later,” she said “we live with the echoes.”

Years later, as a teenager in the United States, Tutundžić 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’s name listed among the detainees of Room Two in the notorious Omarska camp — men forced to bury the dead before being executed themselves.

Chapter 2: Through the years

Chapter 3: Through the eyes of the press

These horrors were the very ones Carol J. Williams spent years reporting on as a foreign correspondent covering the Balkans. 

Williams, 69, was stationed in the region throughout the 1990s, bearing witness to what she now calls some of the darkest scenes of her career.

In all her years reporting from war zones, she says she will never forget the little boy with only half his face in one of Sarajevo’s overrun hospitals.

“His face was missing because part of the shrapnel from the bombing at the school had taken out an eye, about half of his face, his nasal passages,” she said. “Part of the kid was just like laying there shaking. He just kept asking for his parents.”

The boy had survived a Serb artillery strike on his school — part of a broader campaign of terror during the nearly four-year siege of Sarajevo. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), more than 50% of the city’s 240 schools were damaged or destroyed during the war. Schools, hospitals, and marketplaces were frequently targeted, despite international prohibitions against attacking civilian infrastructure.

Williams had brought a couple of chocolate bars with her, rare luxuries in a city surviving on flour, water, and rationed aid. She gave one to the boy.

“To him,” she said, “It was like giving a million dollars to an adult.”

Later, she climbed nine flights of stairs in freezing Bosnian winters of minus six degrees to find the boy’s family. His father bore the same injuries as the son — his eye and face shattered by shrapnel. The family had been displaced from their home and were squatting in an abandoned apartment, its former Serbian residents long since fled. The only heat came from blankets and shared body warmth. Williams gave the second chocolate bar to the family’s three-year-old daughter, Edina — malnourished, with bulging eyes and a skeletal frame. She unwrapped the foil slowly, took a few small bites, then paused.

“I have to save the other half for my brother, because he’s sick,” the girl said through a translator. 

To Williams, the little girl’s humanity was shocking.

Even journalists weren’t spared the cold and danger. Williams and other foreign correspondents were based at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn — a once-glamorous hotel built for the 1984 Winter Olympics, turned into a shell-scarred outpost. The building was routinely targeted by Serb artillery, and not a single room still had intact windows.

“Bosnian winters are brutal — minus 20,” she said. “You’re in a hotel room with no electricity, no water, and a sheet of plastic flapping where your window used to be.”

The United Nations eventually sent rolls of thick plastic to replace shattered glass, but it offered little insulation against the bitter cold or relentless shelling. Night after night, reporters calculated the odds of a mortar hitting their room.  

The danger was real. 

At least 21 journalists were killed covering the Bosnian War, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Many more were injured or psychologically scarred by what they saw.

“I can’t tell these stories without breaking down.”

Carol Williams

“[Bosnians] were the wronged party — driven out of their homes simply because another ethnic group wanted that territory,” she said.

As the violence escalated, the United Nations declared six “safe zones” in Bosnia — including Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and Žepa — but these enclaves were repeatedly violated by Serb forces. The most notorious failure came in July 1995, when thousands of Bosniak males were massacred in the Srebrenica safe zone, despite the presence of UN peacekeepers .

Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević pursued a campaign to reshape Bosnia’s ethnic makeup, targeting Bosniak Muslims through mass displacement, systematic rape, and genocide. Under his leadership, Bosnian Serb forces sought to eliminate Muslim communities from regions they claimed as Serb territory, using terror and violence as tools of control.

Milošević, the first European head of state to be prosecuted for genocide and war crimes, died of a heart attack in 2006 before his trial at The Hague could conclude — but he is still widely held responsible for orchestrating the ethnic violence against Bosnians.

Chapter 4: Through the eyes of the world

David Phillips, who served as a pro bono advisor to the Bosnian presidency during the war, has spent decades studying and writing about genocide prevention. For him, the failure to stop the mass killing remains one of the most damning indictments of international diplomacy since the Holocaust.

“There were 63 UN Security Council resolutions on Bosnia. None of them were effective in stopping the bloodshed,” he said.

Since October 7, 2023, the United Nations has passed at least 14 resolutions related to the Gaza conflict. However, much like during the Bosnian war, these resolutions have largely failed to halt the violence or alleviate the humanitarian crisis.

In the 1990s, among the most crippling procedural flaws, Phillips pointed to the “dual key” policy, which required both UN and NATO authorization before any military action could be taken. This system made it nearly impossible to respond swiftly to atrocities on the ground. Even when genocide was unfolding in real time — through mass killings, systematic rape, and forced deportations — international forces were hamstrung.

“What I remember most was the ineptitude of the international community to stop the genocide from happening.”​

David Phillips

Meanwhile, Bosnia’s government was not allowed to adequately defend itself, he says. A UN-imposed arms embargo —initially intended to prevent escalation — ultimately disarmed the victims while their aggressors remained heavily equipped.

“It wasn’t a civil war,” he said. “It was an act of Serbian aggression, and the Bosnians were defending themselves—without adequate arms, under an embargo, abandoned by the world.”​

While there is broad scholarly consensus that the Bosnian genocide occurred, only the massacre in Srebrenica—a town in eastern Bosnia — has been legally recognized as genocide by the ICTY in 2004, a designation later affirmed by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2007.

Despite clear evidence of ethnic cleansing as early as 1992, including detention camps, mass graves, and widespread sexual violence, decisive action was delayed. It wasn’t until NATO launched airstrikes in 1995, after years of stalling, that the conflict began to shift. 

By then, most of the damage had already been done.

In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces overran Srebrenica and executed over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys, despite the presence of Dutch UN peacekeepers, who failed to intervene. This was regarded as the final horrific act adding to the over 100,000 people who had already died, according to widely cited research by the Research and Documentation Center (RDC) in Sarajevo, published in The Bosnian Book of the Dead in 2007. 

Today, Phillips sees the Bosnian genocide, which he described as “preventable,”  as a warning and symbol of what happens when the international community confuses neutrality with inaction, and peacekeeping with passivity.

“Genocide prevention is not about trials after the fact,” he said. “It’s about political leadership at the moment of crisis. And in Bosnia, the world failed that test.”​

Chapter 5: Through the eyes of historical memory 

For survivors like Krupić and her daughter Amila, memory is not confined to the past. It is relived daily — through stories passed down, names found in tribunal transcripts, and artifacts pulled from mass graves. But individual remembrance is only part of the story. What lingers, even 30 years later, is a broader struggle over whose memory becomes history — and whose trauma is erased.

Douglas Becker, an expert on historical memory and political identity from the University of Southern California, argues that Bosnia remains a case study in the political power of remembering.

“You can’t view any sectarian issue in Bosnia without thinking about the genocide,” he said. “It plays such a huge role.”

In Becker’s view, memory does not just reflect the past — it shapes the present. From regional politics to diaspora identity, how history is remembered determines how communities engage with one another.

“Families tell these stories all the time,” he said. “What happens to those stories then, in context, is what’s really fascinating.” 

That context —whether defined by justice, denial, or silence—can either foster peace or entrench division.

For many in Bosnia and abroad, forgetting is not an option.

 “The most powerful form of memory entrepreneurship is recovery of invisible communities,” Becker said.

Survivors become witnesses. Daughters become archivists. The personal becomes political —  as is Krupić’s case. 

And yet, memory is contested.

In Serbia, some political leaders have pushed to reframe the war, positioning Serbs as equal victims. This, Becker notes, is part of a larger pattern.

“We want our narratives to have white hats and black hats,” he said. “But the best you can hope for is a recognition that it’s all traumatic — let’s make sure we never go back to war.”

That contestation is playing out not only in cultural narratives, but in courtrooms.

Just this March, Bosnia’s state court issued an international arrest warrant for Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik after convicting him of undermining the country’s constitutional order. Dodik had defied international rulings by signing laws that weakened the powers of Bosnia’s constitutional court. The Dayton Peace Agreement Accords brought an end to the Bosnian war between 1992-1995. Interpol later declined Bosnia’s request for a Red Notice, citing concerns the warrant was politically motivated. The case has heightened regional tensions and underscored the fragility of postwar governance in Bosnia, where memory and legality remain deeply entangled.

Ultimately, memory work is not just about recounting what happened — it’s about building the world that comes after, Becker noted.

 “Understanding historical memory,” Becker said, “is about understanding empathy.”

This is why Krupić — now living in St. Louis, Missouri, home to the largest Bosnian population outside of Europe, estimated at 50,000 to 70,000 — continues to share her story.

On quiet days, Krupić pulls out a faded photograph of her brother-in-law, the one who never came home. She shows it to her daughter, who was born into war and raised in its shadow. Now, her daughter shows it to her own children — four and eight years old — born in America, thousands of miles from the camps and killing fields of Prijedor.

Through generations, the family keeps the memories close.

“They took everything. But we kept the truth. You can rebuild homes—but some wounds stay open. That’s why we keep telling the story.”

Enesa Krupić