Back in October 2013 I wrote about the Pionirska Street Live Pyre that took the lives of 53 people, mostly Bosniaks from the village of Koritnik near the town of Višegrad. Altogether some 70 people were forced into the house at gun point by Serb ultranationalist paramilitaries led by Milan Lukić and his cousin Sredoje Lukić. Among the victims of the Pionirska Street fire was a seventy-five-year-old woman, six children between the ages of two and four years old, and a two-day-old infant. Besides the Lukić cousins; Mitar Vasiljević and Radomir Šušnjar also took part in the killings along with other yet-unidentified perpetrators. The victims were forced into the house from another house in which they were staying; this house had been prepped by the Lukić cousins and their cohorts. One of the survivors who testified at the trial against the Lukić cousins recalled that; “carpets on the floor of the room were covered with a sticky substance that smelled foul and caused some persons inside the room to choke. The room was extremely crowded.” After about half an hour an explosive device was placed into the room by Milan Lukić, after he placed the device into the room he started firing bursts from his rifle into the room. Witnesses recalled that Lukić and his men shoot at the windows and threw grenades in through the windows and gunned down those who tried to escape the inferno. Nevertheless a few people managed to survive that time, escaping the burning house and the gunfire to testify against Milan Lukić, Sredoje Lukić and Mitar Vasiljević.
Two weeks later Milan Lukić, Sredoje Lukić and their partners would not make the same mistake. On the eve of 27th of June 1992 the Lukić cousins, Vasiljević and a group of armed men arrived in several cars at a house in Bikavac, a Višegrad neighborhood on the opposite side of town from Pionirska. Their car radio was blasting Serb nationalist music when Lukić together with a group of armed men entered the house of Meho Aljić and instructed those inside to stay there. If they didn´t comply they would be killed. At around 20:30 Lukić and his men came back and started knocking on the doors of several other houses in the neighborhood. In one of those houses lived the only one that would eventually survive what was to come next: Zehra Turjačanin. Lukić’s men entered the surrounding houses instructing the residents to leave, saying that a convoy had been organized to take them out of Višegrad and towards Bajina Bašta, just across the border in Serbia. According to Turjačanin: When they exited the house she noticed that there were no vehicles to transport them from Bikavac. Instead, the armed men led them, as well as many of their neighbours, to Meho Aljić’s house which was approximately 100 meters away. Zehra Turjačanin and the other women and children were instructed by the armed men to enter the house.Once in the house Lukić pulled off Turjačanin´s gold chain off her neck. Some 70 Bosniaks from the Višegrad area, most of them had fled the surrounding villages seeking shelter in the town from the mass killings taking place in the county, were barricaded in Meho Aljić´s house. Some were also local residents from Bikavac, most were elderly, women and children. The youngest child in the house was one year old. All the exits were blocked by heavy furniture, one of the witnesses from the outside saw Milan and Sredoje Lukić place metal garage door against the front door, to prevent people from leaving.
After they had barricaded the house Milan Lukić and his men started throwing rocks and firing rounds into the windows, as the bulits hit the walls the people who were trapped inside ducked for cover. Milan and Sredoje Lukić used petrol to set the house on fire. One of the witnesses at the Lukić cousin’s trial said that had never seen a fire that big, her house was some 200-300 meters from Meho Aljić´s house. Two other witnesses remember the screams of those trapped inside the house, “like the screams of cats.” As grenade fragments entered Zehra´s left leg and her clothes began to burn and her skin began to burn she could see other people burning alive, they were “wailing and screaming” shuttting her eyes tightly so that they would not burn, she managed to escape through a small opening about 65 cm under, or through the window of, the metal garage door, which was blocking the patio door. Touching the door caused severe burns to her arms and hands, leaving them permanently damaged. All the other people in the house burned to death. As she made her escape from the burning building Zehra was seen by Lukić and his men who were lying in the grass, drunk and watching the house and the people inside it burn. They tried to run after her but were too drunk and Zehra managed to escape the murders hiding in a ditch of nettles in the nearby neighborhood called Mejdan. Few hours later she returned to Bikavac going house to house warning the remaining Bosniak families that they must flee or that they would share the fate of those burned inside Meho Aljić´s house.
After she had warned all the Bosniak families she could, Zehra, exhausted with burn marks all over her body surrendered to the local Serb command post. She lied about what had happened to her, afraid that if she told the truth she would be tortured. She told the two Serb soldiers that she first came across that she had been in a gas cylinder accident at home and that since she was a Bosniak she couldn´t go anywhere in her condition, certainly not to the local hospital, she begged the Serb soldiers to shoot her, to put her out of her misery. The Serb soldiers most likely knew she was lying. One of them took pity on her and hid her in a house across the street where four elderly women lived. Day after the soldiers sent for a doctor to treat her wounds; he gave her an injection, some ointment and some pills and told her that he could not take her to the hospital, it wouldn´t be safe for her because she was a Bosniak, and that he couldn´t return to the house. After 11 days at the house where she was treated by the elderly women she set out on a 10 hour long journey on foot to the village of Okruglo where she met up with Bosnian soldiers who had come for the Bosniaks who were still hiding in the Višegrad area and set out on foot through woods, over hills and roads to Bosnian-controlled territory in Međeđa. Zehra was in severe pain and asked others to scratch her head as she could not do it herself given that her hands had been severely burned. In Međeđa she recived treatment for her wounds, later that summer a video of her while she was being treated for the wounds appeared on French TV, filmed in Međeđa showing the gravity of her wounds.
One of the witnesses at the trial of Milan Lukić that had seen Zehra in Međeđa described her condition upon arrival:
Her entire face was black, burnt. It was a wound. Both her arms were bandaged, but they were not medical bandages. Those were just makeshift bandages, five or six of them. The wounds were so infected that when I tried to change the bandages and dress her wounds on her, whilst one arm as I took a couple of layers of the bandages I saw maggots coming out. I fainted at the sight of it.
In September 2008 Zehra came face to face with Milan Lukić again, at his trial in The Hague, for the first time since he had forced her and around 70 other Bosniaks from Bikavac to enter Meho Aljić´s house. She described “what it felt like to burn alive.” She also described the the strange atmosphere in Višegrad in June 1992 as the town and it´s Bosniak inhabitants were being held hostage by Serb authorities and at the mercy of one man. According to Turjačanin “fear reigned” in Višegrad. At night, she would watch from her balcony as Bosniak civilans were being murdered on the old bridge in the center of town. Their bodies thrown into the Drina River.
“I am alive. life is beautiful and I want to live it to the full”, Zehra Turjačanin concluded in her evidence at the trial of Milan and Sredoje Lukić. She has spent years in treatment in France, her “new homeland”, where she is trying to forget what happened to her in Bikavac in 1992.
See also: THE MEMORY REMAINS. 20 YEARS SINCE THE VISEGRAD GENOCIDE
Finacial Times Magazine: Unforgiven, unforgotten, unresolved: Bosnia 20 years on.
The video of Zehra Turjacanin in Međeđa
BiH News Platform 
Reblogged this on and commented:
Skriv dina tankar här… (frivilligt)
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