On the fifth and sixth of May, members of the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo – Belgrade, in cooperation with the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, attended the commemoration on the Day of Remembrance for the Killed Children of Besieged Sarajevo.
The fifth of May is a day of mourning in Sarajevo. On that day, associations of parents of killed children, politicians and other organisations lay wreathes and flowers at the monument to the killed children of Sarajevo in Veliki Park in Sarajevo.
On the following day, the sixth of May, the same park is filled with children dressed in white. Thousands of them, from pre-schoolers to the final years of primary and secondary school, stood around the monument singing “Samo da rata ne bude” [“For There to Be No More War”].
Rows would alternate crouching. Choirs would take turns, the voices rippling through the park, and the people standing around the choirs were in tears.
The bronze ring around the monument was made of casings of shells and ammunition fired at the city. It bears the marks of footprints from some of the relatives of the killed children. Enclosed within the ring are two glass shapes that lean on each other and represent a mother seeking to protect her child.
As the children were singing, I recalled how some consider that song to be defeatist. Because it is a plea made with humility instead of a demand or an accusation, as if you are begging for peace and not naming the one who took it away.
The criticism is difficult to understand. It is particularly difficult to maintain when you see thousands of children dressed in white, singing about there being no more war, in the very place where their peers were killed. At that moment, the analysis imposes a distance you are simply unable to hold, and what hits home is the plea for there to be no more war.
What left the strongest impression, however, was not the song or the monument or the tears of the people around me. The commemoration was hosted by the parents of the killed children.
They hugged and kissed us. Even though we came from the same community as those who took their children’s lives.
Holding me, one mother said that Marija was her favourite girl’s name, right after Jasmina, which was the name of her daughter. She said it in passing. As if speaking about something she carries every day, something that is part of her.
At that moment, I didn’t know what to do with my hands, or what to say exactly. It felt like no word was big enough for that encounter.
After the commemoration programme, the parents of the killed children invited us for lunch. I didn’t know how to act at that table. They asked me where I was from, what my family was like, whether I had any brothers or sisters. I answered and felt something strange, almost like shame for having “normal answers”. One mother took out her phone and asked if we could take a photo. When I was leaving, they packed food for me to take for the trip.
On the way back, it seemed like the entire space between Sarajevo and Belgrade could fit into an embrace. With everything that was said, left unsaid, denied or never mourned.
And maybe that is precisely why the encounter did not seem like something big and historical, but like something quite small and human. A few words exchanged. A touch. The name of a girl. Jasmina.