BOSNIAN GENOCIDE SURVIVOR SHARES STORY WITH PENN STATE DICKINSON LAW STUDENTS
October 2024 — It is one thing to see reports about an event on the news or read about it in a textbook. It is quite another to hear a first-person account from someone who lived through it.
With that in mind, Penn State Dickinson Law Professor of Law and Harvey A. Feldman Distinguished Faculty Scholar Dermot Groome held a special session of his “International Criminal Law” course on the evening of September 26 in the Apfelbaum Family Courtroom and Auditorium.
The event, which Groome opened to everyone at Penn State Dickinson Law, focused on the Bosnian genocide in the 1990s. It began with a screening of the 2019 BBC/PBS “Frontline” documentary “The Trial of Ratko Mladic.” It closed with a discussion between Groome, the lead prosecutor in the Mladic case, and Carlisle resident Almedin Salkić, a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre.
“I know going back to these times is quite difficult,” said Groome at the end of their talk. “But we really, really appreciate that you shared with our students your story and the story of your family. It is so important that this generation learns the lessons of what happened in Bosnia.”
“I believe people need to hear from somebody who was actually there,” said Salkić. “The message is for something like this not to happen again. It is hard to believe that things like this are still going on around the world after we went through all this before.”
Ezeck Warren ’27 went to the event to learn more about the Bosnian genocide, which he said his history classes touched on only briefly. “When I saw this event advertised, I thought, ‘I have to attend eye-opening things like this,’” said Warren. “As awful as that history was, knowing it is very important. I saw some definite relations between what happened in the documentary and what is happening in our current political situations. Hearing from Almedin gives us a more holistic idea of what happened.”
Experiencing ‘The Trial of Ratko Mladic’
Before Groome started the movie, he detailed the breakup of Yugoslavia leading to the Yugoslav Wars, civil conflicts sparked by the secession of Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 and continuing through 2001. More than 100,000 people (a majority of them Muslim) died during the Bosnian War alone, when troops committed crimes against humanity including ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Groome spent more than a decade at the International Criminal Tribunal, serving as senior war crimes prosecutor for the former Yugoslavia. He led the prosecution of five international criminal trials, including investigating and drafting the first genocide indictment against a sitting head of state, Slobodan Milošević.
The “Frontline” documentary followed the trial of Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of over 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995. Groome said the documentary team described its style as a “fly on the wall,” aiming to record what went on unobtrusively. “I thought about it and agreed to let them film so that people understood our work as international prosecutors,” said Groome.
The documentary captured Groome and his team from the opening witness through Mladić’s outburst when the tribunal’s verdict was handed down. The trial took four and a half years, calling 600 witnesses and entering 10,000 exhibits in evidence.
‘We felt the love of the Carlisle community immediately’
After the documentary screening, Salkić joined Groome onstage. Groome stated the importance of understanding what Bosnia was like before the conflict, inviting Salkić to share his earliest childhood memories. He, his parents, and four brothers lived in a small village on a mountainside, and he recounted how his Bosnian Muslim family befriended fellow Bosniaks and Serbs alike, often spending holidays together. When the Bosnian War broke out in 1992, 5-year-old Salkić still believed nothing could break those bonds of friendship.
Eventually, fighting approached the family’s village. After bombs killed his grandfather in a neighboring village, Salkić and his family fled to Srebrenica, which the United Nations had declared a “safe area.” Conditions were crowded as tens of thousands of displaced Bosnian Muslims descended on the city. Food became scarce and hospitals overrun. “Our parents dressed us for bed with our clothes and shoes on, so we would always be ready to go. We learned in the beginning of the war that you never know if you are going to stay here tonight or have to run,” said Salkić.
One morning in July 1995, shooting began at 6 a.m. Bombs dropped from the sky. Salkić’s mother woke the boys and told them to run across town to the U.N. base. Seven-year-old Salkić arrived before his family and climbed onto a high wall to watch for them. During his half-hour wait for his mother, father, and brothers, he witnessed Bosnian Serb soldiers kill people in the streets.
His father, a Bosniak soldier, told his wife and sons to join the U.N. evacuation. He said he loved them and would catch up with them later. It was the last time Salkić saw his dad. “I never understood what that goodbye must have been like for him until I had my own kids,” said Salkić, now a father of two.
He, his brothers, and his mother managed to escape after spending three terrible days in a warehouse with others fleeing the city. Salkić recalled Serbian soldiers collecting everyone’s jewelry and money before letting them leave. The family traveled to Tuzla, the largest Bosnian-controlled city at the time, and stayed there until leaving for the United States in 2002.
Salkić’s mother died of stomach cancer shortly after she and her sons reached the U.S. Salkić and his brothers initially settled with an uncle in North Carolina, but they later moved to Carlisle, Pa., where an estimated 1,500 survivors of the Bosnian genocide live. “We enjoyed it a lot because the Bosnian community is so large,” said Salkić. “We felt the love of the Carlisle community immediately.”
Salkić said he chose to share his story with students because he wants people to consider the impact of conflict. “Living through the war, you realize what it does to both sides. It is not about one side; it is both sides. At the end of the war, two mothers cry, one on one side and one on another, because they both lost their kids,” said Salkić. “People do not always see it that way. It is really hard how we as humans do not learn the lessons from millions of people dying around us.”