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Srebrenica Anniversary Prompts Reflection by Bosnian-Americans

Kulsoom Khan

   CHICAGO - Behidin Piric never had the chance to know his maternal
   grandfather.

   In 2009, the St. Louis, Missouri, resident received a phone call from
   his native Bosnia informing him that his grandfather's body had been
   found in a mass grave with his hands tied behind the back with barbed
   wire. He had two bullet wounds in the back of his head.

   "I had the task of telling my mother who came home from work that they
   found her father, so that was a pretty tough thing to do," said the
   27-year-old American student.

   Piric's grandfather was one of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim
   civilians, mostly men, who were killed in the town of Srebrenica during
   the Bosnian war.

   "The genocide began in Srebrenica in July of 1995 and was a
   catastrophic uprooting of multiple generations of Bosnian Muslim
   families," said Ida Sefer, president of the Chicago-based
   Bosnian-American Genocide and Education center, in an e-mail interview
   with VOA.

   She said Bosnian Serbs backed by neighboring Serbia used torture,
   sexual assault, forced impregnation, concentration camps, rape camps,
   ethnic cleansing and murder against the Bosnian Muslim population in
   the three years after Bosnia declared its independence from the former
   state of Yugoslavia in 1992.

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