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WOW2: June 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 6-9 thru 6-15 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-06-10  

June 12, 2021 –Naming the Nameless: i n July 1995, during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a photograph made newspaper front pages around the world, showing a woman in a white skirt and red cardigan hanging from a tree in a wood outside Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia. The caption read: “The Hanging Woman.” Her photograph became the symbol of Srebrenica, where the worst genocide in Europe since WWII happened just before the photograph was taken. She was one more nameless victim in a conflict that left 100,000 dead, 20,000 to 50,000 women and girls raped, and about 2.7 million people displaced before running its barbaric course. In June, 2021, former Bosnian Serb warlord General Ratko Mladić, “the butcher of Bosnia,” who instigated the Srebrenica massacre, lost his appeal against a life sentence for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and Guardian/Observer newspaper reporter Kim Willsher was moved to recount again her search of many months to discover who “The Hanging Woman” had been. Her name was Ferida Osmanovic, the daughter of farmers, and she was 31-years-old. Her husband Selman, a locksmith, was one of the estimated 8,000 men and boys taken from Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces to be slaughtered. In April 1996, Willsher, with photographer Lynn Hilton, travelled to a village just outside Tuzla in north-east Bosnia. There they found Ferida and Selman’s orphaned children, Damir, 13, and Fatima, 10, who were staying with their paternal grandmother and other relatives. Willsher said it was one of the saddest interviews she ever did. Fatima told her: “We know our mother hanged herself. We went to her grave, but it had no name, just ‘Hanged’ on the wooden headboard. So we wrote her name on it in felt-tip pen.” Damir remembered the hours before his mother disappeared: “It was our second night at the camp and our mother put us to bed. We were sleeping on the Tarmac with blankets. She said she loved us, said good night, and lay down next to us. Then I woke up at midnight and she wasn’t there.” Ferida, overcome with grief at losing her husband, had slipped away to the nearby wood, and plaited her black cloth belt and brown shawl into a noose. At 7:30 the next morning, her body was found by a group of children. The photograph was taken by freelance Croatian photographer Darko Bandic, who did not find out who she was until much later. Emir Suljagić, director of the Srebrenica Memorial and a former Bosnian education minister, had taken refuge in Srebrenica in the early 1990s and only escaped the slaughter because he was employed as a UN interpreter. He welcomed the Mladić appeal ruling, but said it did not “close the chapter” for Bosniaks. “He did not carry out the cleansing of Srebrenica alone. When are we going to deal with the people who did his bidding? Everyone knows who they are, the Bosnian judiciary knows who they are,” he said. “These guys are mass murderers, they are knee-deep in blood and they are walking about as free men. It means that Bosnian people still don’t feel entirely safe – and who can blame them?” Willsher ended her report, “ There were so many other horrors in the country; this story was not even the worst that Lynn and I reported on, but it was one of the most heartbreaking and it felt important: journalism is, after all, about naming the nameless. She was not ‘The Hanging Woman’: her name was Ferida Osmanovic.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/10/2174280/-WOW2-June-2023-Women-Trailblazers-and-Activists-6-9-thru-6-15

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