How did your involvement with migrants, or rather, people on the move along the Balkan route, begin?
In 2016, when the first refugees began arriving in my city, I wasn’t part of any organization, although activism had always been a part of my life, from a very young age when I was in school and studying.
At the time, I had been working for ten years in a private company, in the administrative sector. I remember it was summer, but it was raining and exceptionally cold. Up until then, I didn’t know much about the ongoing migration, although I knew well what it meant to be a refugee, because it was an experience we lived during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. I was a child then, but I remember all the people we welcomed into our home, who had fled other parts of the country and come to Tuzla to seek refuge.
So one day, in front of the Tuzla train station, seeing people passing by me in difficult conditions, wet, hungry, and thirsty, I felt a great bitterness and wondered why I couldn’t help them somehow. I spontaneously went to a bakery to buy food, yogurt, and fruit juice, and I distributed them.
Back then, I didn’t even know English very well, because I’d studied German at school. I spoke it, having learned it by watching films in the original language and the like… And so every day, when new people arrived, after office hours, I would go to buy food in the shops and distribute it.
Were you familiar with the situation of these people? How did you manage to support them?
Gradually, I began to learn about Afghanistan, Pakistan… at that time, they were refugees fleeing mainly from these countries. Every day, new needs arose, like buying them bus tickets or distributing dry clothes, which I tried to do on my own. At the time, there was no organization that handled this.
When I returned home, I would send emails to institutions, organizations, and religious communities, trying to do something concrete to help these people. At a certain point, I began sharing some of the stories these people on the move told me on social media and in various networks, and I created the group “Izbjeglice dobrodošle u Tuzlu” (Refugees Welcome to Tuzla) to bring together people from Tuzla willing to support and participate in this grassroots humanitarian work.
This is how it began ten years ago and continues today. It was completely spontaneous, voluntary, without any special training, simply a humane gesture towards our guests. I’ve always called them that: guests of our city, hungry, thirsty, cold, scared, and deprived of their human rights.
Have you contacted other organizations, associations, etc. in the meantime?
At the beginning of the influx, as mentioned, there weren’t any. But then, due to Tuzla’s specific location, the number of people increased significantly. To give you an idea, Tuzla is located about 50 km from Zvornik, a border town with Serbia [in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina on the western bank of the Drina River, ed.]. Tuzla was a city that was then more easily accessible from the border, without risking deportation by the border police, but it was also large enough to have a good public transport service, allowing refugees to travel by bus to Sarajevo, Bihać, or other areas bordering Croatia. I remember that in 2016, there were neither transit camps nor structured reception facilities; refugees slept in parks, in front of train stations, and in the ruins of abandoned houses.
As mentioned, in parallel with my street work, I continued to send emails to apply pressure and engage groups and organizations. I remember that among the first to respond was the “Fondacija Tuzlanske Zajednice” [Tuzla Communities Foundation], which was involved in initiatives supporting active citizenship, inviting me to a meeting organized by the then deputy mayor and the Office for Foreigners. I went with great expectations… but the meeting came to nothing.
Meanwhile, with the great support of neighbors, friends, Tuzla citizens, and co-workers, I continued to buy food, pay for bus tickets, distribute clothes, and offer hot tea at the bar. It was all I could manage in those two hours, after four o’clock when I finished work, and before these people continued their journey. In fact, Tuzla was 90% a transit city; few stayed longer to seek asylum.
On March 11, the inaugural CESPIC Peace Award ceremony took place in Tirana. The award is sponsored by the Our Lady of Good Counsel Foundation (NSBC) of Tirana, coordinated by the European Centre for Peace Science, Integration and Cooperation (CESPIC), in collaboration with OBC Transeuropa/CCI. The prize was awarded to Nihad Suljić, a Bosnian humanitarian activist, “for his consistent humanitarian commitment and his community-based contribution to social peace.”
So you continued as a citizens’ group?
Yes, little by little, we grew in number. Also, 99% of the work was done by women, of various backgrounds: housewives, students, teachers, the rector of a university, a police officer, an actress… With them, we began cooking the food we brought to the streets in their homes – because we didn’t have enough money to buy it ready-made in stores or restaurants – distributing it in plastic containers to the refugees.
Then, as the press began to cover the situation, various local organizations emerged, like Merhmet and the Red Cross, as well as international ones. I’ve never been enthusiastic about organizations, especially international ones, towards which I’ve felt a certain resistance, with their constant invocation of the “protocol” they must adhere to…
Volunteers’ involvement is free, driven by pure humanity and not conditioned by mandates or employment contracts. And it is precisely my fellow citizens of whom I am most proud! People who, from then until today, have put themselves on the line. They raised their voices when the sign prohibiting refugees from entering appeared at the station cafe, when they were prevented from using public transportation or forced to sit at the back of the bus. While all this was happening, large organizations watched but did not act, despite having greater mechanisms and power than I and individual citizens.
How did you bear the weight of all this? Why did you decide last year to found Djeluj.ba (“Act”)?
I have shared beautiful and difficult moments, painful situations with these people. Working with refugees, in a single day you witness life and death, violence and injustice, laughter and tears, everything these people are subjected to.
One moment I find myself in a hospital, the next in a cemetery; then I hear the good news of someone being granted asylum in a European country, and perhaps immediately afterward the news of someone who has disappeared…
I realized that I had to make a decision, also for my own physical and mental health… after nine years of constant, daily volunteer work, every afternoon after work and all weekend, to continue in a more structured manner. Especially for the legal reasons required to search for the missing and identify migrants who die on their journey along the Balkan routes.
From the very beginning, spending time with those people, I was told, “My friend drowned, my brother drowned”… but when you have two or three hundred people in front of you who need water, food, and clothing, you think about these basic needs, you don’t have the strength or even the tools to act on those appeals.
But then you decided to also begin the search for and identification of the missing.
One day in 2022, an Afghan young man who had passed through Tuzla contacted me to tell me that a neighbor from his hometown had disappeared on the border between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the example of the women of Srebrenica after the war, with whom I spent a lot of time protesting in Tuzla every July 11th for thirty years, demanding that the missing victims of the genocide be found and that they be given justice, I decided to do something.
Perhaps subconsciously harnessing their strength, I went to the police station in Zvornik to seek information on this missing person whose photo I had received. Try to understand the context too: I am a Bosniak [Bosnian Muslim, ed.], Zvornik is in Repulika Srpska, a city where terrible war crimes were perpetrated against non-Serbs, and society is still very divided. On an online portal in Zvornik, I asked for the photo and the request for information to be published. I didn’t know what had become of him, whether he was in prison, drowned, or something else. Thanks to the ad, the head of the Zvornik civil defense contacted me to let me know that he had found a body and that it might be the yong man I was looking for.
I then discovered that dozens more people were buried in Karakaj, a suburb of Zvornik, in the city cemetery. I found these graves, with wooden crosses that were now half-rotten, and in some cases with tall grass, making it almost impossible to recognize the existence of a burial. Even in death, these people had not been restored to their dignity… I began clearing the graves of weeds and garbage. And with the help of the Austrian organization “SOS Balkan,” which was already sending money to buy food and other supplies, we managed to create small headstones that would stand the test of time.
The young man found by the Civil Protection was the one we were looking for. We identified him, because at least the body was well preserved in the tragedy. We managed to get the body to Afghanistan, albeit with great difficulty: there was no organized system between institutions, etc., communication problems due to the language barrier, difficulty getting the family to come…
The case was covered by the media, and little by little I learned that dozens of people had drowned in the Drina River – buried in Bratunac, Zvornik, and Bijeljina – in whose memory I decided to create headstones.
Thanks to the Facebook group “Dead and Missing in the Balkans,” created by journalist and activist Nidžara Ahmetašević, reports of deaths along the Balkan route began to be collected, along with appeals from families or friends searching for the missing.
We in Bosnia know well what it means to search, even today, for news of sons, husbands, brothers, and friends who disappeared during the war. We know what it means to be able to bury your loved ones, to finally grieve and have a grave to pray at. The pain of loss is even greater when you don’t know what happened to them, when you don’t have a grave to remember them by…
Has the search and identification effort eventually taken shape?
Knowing what it means to desperately search for your loved ones, I decided to continue, contacting the police, prosecutors, the International Red Cross, and various institutions. After a long struggle, the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) stepped in and identified thousands of victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina through DNA testing. It wasn’t an easy process, but we finally managed, at least in Bosnia, to collect bone remains, send them to The Hague, where the ICMP is headquartered, and compare them with samples from families we’re in contact with.
Of course, there’s still much to do, and we’re only just beginning. If we count those who drowned in the Drina, over a hundred have been buried so far. But let’s talk about the luckiest dead… although it may seem absurd to use this word, let’s talk about those whose bodies were found, either by fishermen, or seen by walkers along the shore, and so on. But we’ll never know the number of dead, even along this stretch of the border alone, because the river doesn’t always give up its bodies.
But if the mechanism built in Bosnia works, it could be replicated in Greece, Albania, and Italy, where people die crossing borders… I’m contacted by families of missing persons on the borders of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Croatia.
Burials and gravestones are also important for another reason: to let people know that people died, mostly by drowning, others by freezing, because they had no other option, because their passports weren’t “good enough.”
People who fled war, violence, and poverty, who followed their dreams of a dignified life, in peace and safety, who died in rivers, in the mountains, at sea. Their memory must remain.