Why I wrote Braco

When I started to write Braco, a lot of people were interested in where I came up with the idea for the book. It’s a personal story that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to tell, but the response has been so positive, I decided to include it in my readings.

Srebrenica is a small Bosniak town located close to the Serbian border about eighty kilometres east of Sarajevo. Before the war, the town had a population of six thousand with 60% identifying themselves as Bosnian Muslim/Bosniak and 30% as Bosnian Serb. (Today, the population is 95% Bosnian Serb).

When the war broke out in 1992, the town was quickly surrounded by the Bosnian Serb army and the Bosniak population in the town swelled to over 50,000. With little aid making its way through the Serb lines, a humanitarian crisis developed. Thousands lived under blankets in the streets in sub-zero temperatures. People killed each other over food. Disease was rampant, and through the winter of 92-93, the Serb army continued to shell the town from the surrounding hills. It was only a matter of time before this caught the attention of the world press.

In March, 1993, the UN commander in Bosnia, French General Philippe Morillon, accompanied a medical and reconnaissance team into the town to assess the situation. When he attempted to leave, the women surrounded his vehicle and erected barriers. They were afraid that if he left, the Serb onslaught would continue unabated. Morillon remained in the town two days and got a comprehensive view of the misery the people had had to endure over the winter. Horrified by what he had witnessed and without informing the UN, he declared Srebrenica under the protection of the United Nations.
A month later, the UN Security Council unanimously approved the plan to protect the enclave and sent out a call for peacekeepers to secure the town. Estimates said they needed ten thousand troops to do the job properly. Canada was the only nation to respond but we could only spare one hundred and fifty troops.

The peacekeepers for Srebrenica came from the unit based in Visoko, a town just outside Sarajevo. When my unit took over control of Visoko in October 1993, the one hundred and fifty peacekeepers for Srebrenica were detached from our ranks and we were responsible for supplying them. A friend of mine, Jacques, was one of the drivers who drove back and forth between the town and our camp with the supplies.

A few weeks into the tour, he came up to me and said he had met a young boy in Srebrenica and gotten to know him. He told me the boy would run along with his truck every time he arrived. One night, Jacques said he was on guard duty at the camp in Srebrenica, and the boy came up to him with a freshly baked loaf of bread his mother had made from flour provided by UN aid. Jacques realized it was a lot for them to give up but that it was the best bread he had ever eaten. It wasn’t long before Jacques understood that the civilians in Srebrenica were not getting enough food to eat despite the UN shipments, so he decided to help out the family.

He asked me if I could help him find food that he could take to the boy and over the next few months, I gave him whatever I could find from cans of ravioli to bags of jelly bears. Then in March 1994, the Dutch took over the security of Srebrenica with eight hundred of their own peacekeepers and the Canadians returned to Visoko. On his last trip into the enclave, the boy thanked Jacques for the food and gave him a two gifts – a green Srebrenica license plate for each of us.

We lost contact with the boy, and sixteen months later, the Bosnian Serb army invaded Srebrenica. The women and young children were transported to safety in Tuzla but the men fled into the woods and had to walk fifty kilometres through territory occupied by the Bosnian Serb army.

It is estimated that fifteen thousand men and boys took to the woods.

Less than half of them would make it to Tuzla.

I’m still unsure of what became of the boy, and after learning the full story of the massacre, I decided to write this book to answer the question of what may have happened to him. It’s also a story that gives a human meaning to some of the crimes Ratovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic are currently on trial for in The Hague.

This post also explains why the book is dedicated to Jacques and Atif.