Mehmed Husić

CAPTIVITY AND EXCHANGE

My flat was under sniper siege for three days, so that I couldn’t go anywhere. They shot at the window as soon as they felt a change in the lighting. On the evening of July 18, they began to bang at the door. They threw a bomb and that’s how they opened the street door to the house. Four families lived in that house. They collected us all and took us to prison. There was terrible shooting and those are horrible details. My son was 7 at the time, my daughter 12, and it was probably all that excitement that made her get her first period. While we were going out she held the hand of her mother, my wife, who’s a doctor. And, I’ll always remember, she asked, ‘Mummy, if they don’t kill us, do they have any pads there?’ We were taken to Kula under a shower of bullets. In Kula they separated us. They took my wife and children to the upper floor. They put me in a room where there were already 27 prisoners. People from the airport estate. They’d been caught a day earlier and they told me the real truth about the airport estate, about the massacres that had taken place. Civilians were killed. I first heard those horror stories from a child of 14, a boy whose father had been killed in front of his eyes, and then his grandmother. They put us in a small room, it was as hot as it is today, and it was exactly 5 years ago that the prison hell began. Then there were interrogations. The people who’d been caught on the airport estate weren’t much good for exchange. When we had already begun to lose hope, and when we were at the end of our strength, Ratko Lalovic, the prison commander, came one day and said that there’d be an exchange. Not for all, but for some. He began to read the names of people who would be exchanged; it was about 5-6 in the afternoon. When he had read about 20 names he stopped and turned to me and said you too, Husic. We started off, we were placed in a van, but as a man from UNPROFOR came he asked me to sit in front because I knew English, so that I could translate in case there was a misunderstanding. We passed through Lukavica. I saw for the first time then that there really was a tank in every garden. This was on July 5. We passed through the destroyed Vraca and Grbavica to the approach to Vrbanja Bridge, but the bus we had come in couldn’t be seen. The Serb guard who was leading us gave me the list and told me to go first. They aren’t expecting you. They were expecting you at 12 o’clock for the exchange. It was dark already, eight thirty. I started off and as soon as I stepped out of the van shooting began from the Jewish Graveyard. Then the guard got out and waved his gun, and said, ‘There, these won’t shoot now, but I don’t know about your lot.’ Cross the bridge slowly and what happens will happen. I started off and I saw that the Wilson’s Promenade was completely covered with branches, because that was the only possibility of camouflage that our soldiers had at that moment. When I was near, on the second half of the bridge, two soldiers ran out from the buildings beside the Assembly and shouted, ‘Halt, don’t move!’ Then I shouted that I had to, shoot, but I have to go on, it’s an exchange. Then Filip Vukovic appeared, who was president of the Exchange Commission, and my colleague Rajko Zivkovic, who was reporting about it? They looked and recognized me and said, run, run. I ran up to them, shaking, of course. Later the exchange started, another five or six people passed through, then two shells fell from the Serb side on Suada Dilberovic Bridge. The exchange was broken off, and the other prisoners were returned to Kula.