David Pratt: Listening to the victims of war – and learning lessons

I’ve often wondered just how many ordinary people I’ve met over the years’ who have been unfortunate enough to find themselves caught up in war’s grip.

In the more than three decades I’ve worked as a war correspondent, I could have been busy somewhere on the globe with hardly a day’s rest such is the prevalence of conflict in our times.

Sometime during that period – a very long time ago – I came to the conclusion that war happens to people one by one. There is no sweeping panacea for those caught up in conflict. Each person deals with and processes the pain and suffering in their own way and on their own terms.

It’s four years ago now since I stood in the centre of the Potocari Memorial Centre that houses the huge cemetery for the victims of the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War.

In every direction, row upon row the white obelisk-shaped headstones run, more than 8000 in all. The scene is reminiscent of other huge war graves like those at Bayeux in Normandy or Arlington in the United States.

At Potocari, though, there is one crucial difference – those who lie there, mainly men and some women, are civilians.

It was back in July 1995 that Serbian forces commanded by General Ratko Mladic and his paramilitary units systematically massacred the townsfolk of Srebrenica. Most were Bosniaks – Bosnian Muslims – but some were Croats.

Most were killed with bullets or grenades in fields, warehouses and football pitches. Their bodies, many dismembered and mutilated, were piled into mass graves and even now are still being uncovered, and the forest of gravestones at Potocari grows ever more widespread.

Today I still find it difficult to comprehend the horror that engulfed that part of Europe not so very long ago. In happier years before then, many of us had taken our summer holidays on the Istrian and Dalmatian coastal resorts that run the length of the former Yugoslavia, and as events unfolded, people wondered how such things could happen here, on our very doorstep, after the lessons of the Second World War.

For so many of us wars are still meant to happen in far-off lands where people look and act very differently from us.

It was at Potocari that I met 69-year-old Kada Hotic (pictured below), a Mother of Srebrenica activist, and listened as she recounted horrific memories of those dark days back in July 1995 and the fate of her son.

“I know that Samir, along with other boys, was tied and probably kept waiting a long time to be killed,” Kada told me.

“It was a very hot day – so hot that some of the Serb soldiers couldn’t keep up with the pace of the shooting,” Kada continued, as we stood among the rows of headstones, four of which belong to the men of her family.

“As the boys waited to be shot one Serb woman, seeing they were so thirsty, stepped forward to offer them some yoghurt, but was prevented by a Serb soldier who then also pushed her into the line to be killed simply for offering a drink,” Kada recalled.

That afternoon, as I accompanied her from the grassy compound of the cemetery, she asked me to ensure that I walked only along the base of the graves and not across the head, as that would be disrespectful.

Passing each gravestone, she gently caressed the marble tops, stopping once to hug the stone above the grave of her son, Samir, as if it were the boy himself still here and alive.

“When I gave birth to my son, I was the happiest woman alive, and now I think of him thirsty and afraid having to wait in line that day to be killed,” Kada reflected, before telling me of another atrocity she herself witnessed at Srebrenica that day after the women were separated from their menfolk.

“As we waited for the buses that would take us away from the men, one woman gave birth on the ground right before my eyes,” Kada began her story before it tailed off.

“The baby just born, not even a name, and a Serb soldier came over and crushed it under his boot ... What can I say – genocide.”

Perhaps this is the most terrible thing about war. Despite all the drivel spoken about smart bombs and precision weaponry, war up close remains grisly and obscene. How right the American writer Ernest Hemingway was when he once reminded: “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

As anyone who has ever been caught in the cauldron of conflict will attest, war is the ultimate debaser, often reducing people to barely recognisable shells or versions of their previous selves.

Would that Serb soldier months or years before have even considered committing such an atrocity? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely.

The lack of empathy such people show in wartime is not confined to those on the battlefield. We too, the global bystanders, through turning the other way, acquiesce in such a process.

It’s always baffled me, this apparent lack of empathy on behalf of so many people. Suffering, after all, is a common denominator of individual experience – surely it is not beyond almost every one of us to relate to the suffering of someone else, no matter how different they are or far away their war is?

These days we hardly ever bother to notice minor wars, revolutions and uprisings that kill countless people every day. Even suffering of an enormous scale and intensity seemingly fails to garner the attention it should.

As I write, millions are facing famine in Yemen because of the war there. The vital port of Hodeidah through which crucial food and medicines arrive has become the epicentre of the fighting.

Should Hodeida be further damaged, destroyed or blocked, the toll in lives could be even more catastrophic.

But who really cares when we have other more pressing things, like complaining ad nauseam on social media about trolls or the like?

Part of the problem and explanation for such a prevailing attitude of course is that war is a horrible repetition.

God knows I’ve felt the weight of this repetition myself, that moment when hungry wounded children in Somalia in 2013 and in Iraq in 2017 become one and the same.

That instant when the shapeless slump of a corpse or body bag lying in the rubble of a Syrian city becomes like any other corpse in any other country.

Then there are those refugees dragging themselves and whatever they can carry from war to what passes for safety, in the process blurring into one picture and one people all over the world. The real challenge in all of this of course is to constantly remind ourselves that war continues to happen to individuals, one by one. It helps us process the gravity of what we witness by seeing each person and their story in its own right.

LAST year in Iraq, I met a young couple called Salim and Shaima. Both were in their 20s and seven months earlier Shaima had given birth to their son, Abdu Rahman. It was not an easy birth in more ways than one, not least given that it happened while the family were trapped in Mosul under the rule of the Islamic State (IS) group.

Salim with his son Abdu Rahman. Photograph: David Pratt

It was raining outside the tent when we spoke that day in the Hassansham camp for those displaced by the fighting that had ravaged Mosul for months.

The patter of the raindrops on the canvas of the tent roof, and the occasional buffeting by the wind sweeping off the barren desert plain, acted as rhythmical accompaniment to the story the couple told me. Both had suffered terrible hardship and privation and saw things no human being should ever see.

One day Salim had watched as IS executioners prepared to throw a man to his death from the top of a building “I just wanted to rescue him, but I couldn’t, there was nothing we could do,” Salim said, shaking his head, the image of that terrible day clearly still indelibly etched in his mind’s eye. On another occasion they had watched as a man was “slaughtered” with a knife.

The use of that word, “slaughter”, is significant in the Middle East, implying as it does the ritual slaughter of livestock carried out with a single cut to the throat and the animal dying slowly of blood loss.

“My cousins too were slaughtered,” Shaima interrupted momentarily. She described how her cousin and his young brother were one day tied to a pole. On their chest hung cardboard signs declaring their alleged crime of “telling the Americans where to bomb” IS fighters.

They too met their grisly end in the Mosul neighbourhood where previously they grew up happy and carefree like Salim and Shaima, until IS and its cruel cadres came into their lives.

As Salim and Shaima spoke, they cast the occasional glance down at tiny Abdu Rahman who lay on his back burbling. He was wearing a brightly coloured one-piece jumpsuit adorned with pictures of Minnie Mouse, and his huge brown eyes were like mocha-coloured marbles.

He’s safe from such horrors now, his parents’ looks seem to say. If there is one consolation for Salim and Shaima from their harrowing ordeal, it’s that Abdu Rahman will remember nothing of what he and they went through. The same, sadly, cannot be said of his young parents.

“We are always thinking about what happened, both when awake and in our nightmares when sleeping,” admitted Salim. “We cannot wipe out the sight of all those we saw killed in front of own eyes.”

What do they hope for now, and will they have more children I asked – will little Abdu Rahman have brothers and sisters?

Smiles at last broke out across their faces, and this time they laughed.

“We wish we will have a good life and a good life for our baby, and maybe two more children, then ‘Khallas’, finished”, Shaima joked.

And what of the little boy whose first seven months of life were spent in the shadow of war and death, what of Abdu Rahman, I enquired?

“When he is old enough we will tell him our story,” they explained to me quietly, still smiling.

Listening to them speak was to be reassured that behind the grim statistics about war, individual hope for something better always prevails. Just as war creates desperation and debasement, so too is this matched by resourcefulness and love.

As we pause today and remember those who bore arms and fell in battle, please stop too and consider those civilians today caught in a maelstrom not of their making and over which they have no say.

For many of these innocents, just like soldiers, war does not always end on the battlefield. For those of us looking on meanwhile, we cannot be reminded too much or too often about how obscene war is.

As Martha Gellhorn, the great war correspondent of WW2, once observed: “Memory and imagination are the greatest of all deterrents.”