14/07/1992 | Voices from the Drina

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We’re being transferred from the detention centre in Zvornik to Batković camp in Bijeljina (NE Bosnia). God knows what will happen to us there.

🧵 We do not have the food we need. People are travelling to Žepa by foot. Or whenever there is a liberation action in a village, we’d get food. The most essential objective, whenever we tried to liberate a village, was finding food.

Before the war in the 1991 census there were 4,000 people in Srebrenica. During the war there were close to 40,000. Everyone among these 40,000 fought for their own survival.

I recently told Salih, a shop owner near us, that we have no money to buy more flour. He told me, ‘it’s not a problem at all. I have an old house with about ten or twenty alder stumps in the courtyard. Pull out the stumps and I’ll give you a bag of flour.

🧵 I have joined my colleagues at Srebrenica’s war hospital. The conditions we are operating in are inhumane.

This is a hospital only in the sense that the building was formerly a hospital. We have no kind of sanitary material, no kind of medication, no medical equipment.

The hospital is full of the wounded. We make bandage material out of bed sheets. We are sterilising bandages on a wood stove, regardless of the fact that it’s the middle of July, because there is no electricity.

We are making disinfectant from industrial iodine and hydrogen. We are diluting it to a tolerable ratio in order to clean wounds.

You can smell the scent of pus a kilometre away from the hospital. You can hear the screams of the wounded from further out still. We don’t have anaesthetics, so we have nothing to alleviate their pain.

Try to imagine that you have a severely wounded person on a table who needs their arm or leg amputated. You have nothing to give them as an anaesthetic, so you ask them to be patient and endure an excruciating pain which you are certain you yourself could not withstand.