While the final preparation for the first taraweeh in 2018 were made, Women’s Social Organisation “Maryam” hosted very special guests at Kyiv Islamic Cultural Centre.
Ms.Munira Subašić, President of the Organisation “Mothers of Srebrenica” (Bosnia and Herzegovina); Ms.Dima Moussa, a Syrian-American lawyer and Human Rights activist (originally from Homs, Syria), and Ms.Nalan Dal, IHH Humanitarian Relief Foundation International Fundraising Manager (Turkey) were on a visit to Ukraine to take part in a number of high-profile events for the Mother's Day, and were kind to meet the activists of WSO “Maryam” and other women interested in hearing their stories.
Ms.Subašić spoke about the horrible massacre of Srebrenica, which happened in July 1995 and took the lives of about 11,000 Bosnian men, women and children (some as young as several days after birth) while about 20,000 of girls and women were brutally raped. Ms.Moussa and Ms.Dal spoke about the current situation in Syria, particularly about almost 7,000 female prisoners tortured and raped in jails by the soldiers of the Assad regime.
— I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina, where there was a war in the 1990ies. During three days, over 10,500 people were killed: our children, husbands, elderly people; over 20,000 women were raped. 22 members of my family were killed: my father, my husband, my son, my two sisters, three brothers, my father in law, his two sons and their families. 23 years have passed, but still it hurts. We still have to struggle for the truth to come out, and to bury the bones of our children.
Those criminals — Slobodan [Milošević], his ministers and police — those who tortured our close ones are still walking free, and we still have to face them in the streets.
We erected a big memorial in Srebrenica where over 8,000 people were killed, and it became the first memorial for Muslims to attend as the mass grave of their close ones.. Because in the massacre, they didn’t just kill people and bury them in one place, they divided their victims in several groups and killed them in several locations.
We were there in High Tribunal, the mothers of the victims of Srebrenica. There is 61 court verdicts from different courts regarding that genocide in Srebrenica.
We educated our children of what happened in that genocide. Again, we did our best to make sure that many of our children got their degrees, for educating our youth is actually the best response to what happened in Srebrenica. We didn’t raise them to be overwhelmed with hatred, but we still made sure that they knew and remembered the truth.
Any mother, no matter what her name is, what faith she is (a Muslim, a Serb, a Horvat, a Roma, a Jew) — any mother is just a mother. Being mothers is something that unites us all over the world, we cooperate even with mothers whose children killed our children, because nobody can understand a mother better than another mother. So we, as mothers, let the whole world know of what happened in Srebrenica. We held different demonstrations, wrote letters to the UN Security Council and the USA and to Putin, and to your former President to tell what really happened and make sure the truth prevails. US President Bill Clinton attended the opening of the memorial on the mass grave, and we asked him why his country didn’t react.
The world is full of injustice, so we should pray that God helps us and do our best to prevent something like that from ever happening again. We can’t revive the dead, can’t bring back the ones we’ve lost, but we, the living, should do something. We should build peace for the following generations, based on truth and justice.
