Watching the suffering in Gaza under the relentless genocidal attacks by Israel brings back memories of the Bosnian war. There is so much that reminds me of my own suffering and struggle. But nothing has broken me so far as the constant images, videos and stories of Palestinians’ hunger and starvation, and the barbarity of much of the so-called ‘international community’ and the demeaning politics of humanitarian aid.
I’m originally from Goražde, a city on the banks of the river Drina in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. I was twelve when the war broke out in May 1992. My sister was ten. Goražde was under siege by the Bosnian Serb forces for three-and-a-half years. When these forces were on the surrounding hills in the beginning of the war, the city was under constant bombardment, attacks and sniper fire. When they were pushed away, they continued to bomb the city from a distance. Apart from this, deciding when humanitarian aid could come into the besieged city was one of the most powerful, and most brutal, tools of war. Just like in Gaza today.
My family struggled in the city like all other residents, under constant bombardment and sniper fire, without electricity, water and sufficient food. We are also Bosnian Serbs, like the forces who were attacking the city, now populated largely by Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) from the city and tens of thousands of Bosniak refugees who fled their homes in the region and came to Goražde seeking some form of safety. Being the same ethnic group as those attacking the city created additional problems for us. We were attacked and shot at numerous times; my parents were taken by armed men to be killed but somehow made it back home; we spent weeks in hiding, protected by our friends; we were arrested and detained in brutal conditions for months; and a lot more. After two years in the city under siege, we escaped by swimming some three kilometers down the freezing river Drina in April 1994.
Memories of a siege
My first experience with hunger was in the summer of 1992. We were arrested by police in the middle of the night and told to pack only a few small plastic bags of basic necessities and some food for a few days. We had no idea where they were taking us. We were detained in an apartment building next to the police station in the city center. We stayed there, eight to ten of us cramped in each room of four apartments, for months. Soon, the little food we had was gone. For weeks, the police did nothing to assist us.
We improvised, asking Bosniak residents in the neighborhood to help us. My dad had a pack of cigarettes, which were of high value during the war, and exchanged them for water and food. A cigarette could get us some water or a loaf of bread. A few weeks later, the brutal head of police was wounded by rocket shrapnel, and his replacement eased strict conditions and provided some food rations to us.
Right around this time, the first United Nations convoy carrying humanitarian aid arrived into the city. I remember the hope we felt when we saw the UN trucks and soldiers with blue helmets on their heads, driving outside the building where we were detained. That day was quiet and peaceful, a first since the war broke out. We could even get out on the balconies and stand at the windows without fear of being bombed or killed by snipers.
We watched as the food aid was taken off the UN trucks and stored into a building linked to the apartment building where we were detained. After this, UN trucks left the city. What followed the hopeful and peaceful moment after months of bombardments and other forms of brutality was one of the most horrific memories of the war.
Bombings began as soon as the night fell. The target was the area where the humanitarian aid was delivered and stored. And we were in the middle of it. As the rockets began hitting the buildings around us, we ran to the basement. We found a small room where someone used to store coal for winter heating, and stayed there for a week, sleeping on pieces of cardboard placed over the coal, in complete darkness. For the entire week, bombing did not stop. We barely ate anything during this time. A week or so after the bombardments ended, we were visited by local Red Cross officials who brought us some flour, rice and cooking oil. They said this food was part of the UN delivery. They salvaged some of it. Much of it was destroyed.
A month or so later, the Serb forces were pushed away from the hills surrounding Goražde in a military offensive from within the city. The siege didn’t end, though, and the Serbs still surrounded the broader area. But the situation in the city improved somewhat, and soon we were released from detention and allowed to go home. After months away from our apartment, we got back to find it looking as it was when we left. But one thing that was missing was the food we had. All of it was taken in our absence.
Hunger and expired food
The winter of 1992-1993 was brutal. We had no food and relied entirely on humanitarian convoys that now somewhat regularly delivered aid to the city. But there were also weeks when the blockade would intensify, for whatever reason, and the Serb forces would not allow UN convoys to get to Goražde. Those were the weeks we suffered. At some point, US and NATO forces began air dropping humanitarian aid over Goražde, in an aim to break the blockade. In most cases they dropped big pallets of food. The air drops took place at night, landing in the hills surrounding the city. Many people went to the hills in search of air drops. A number of times the palettes killed the people on the ground. In some instances, the planes would fly over the city and drop small, one-meal-packages all over the place. We would go out, like many other people, searching for packages. Once we found a few.
When we got the food aid portions, distributed in the city by the local Red Cross, we received some grain or flour, rice or beans, milk powder, cooking oil, and sometimes feta cheese and a can or two of canned beef. In most cases, the food aid was packaged in bags with American flags and a big USAID logo on them. Many bags with rice and grain had labels saying that the expiration date was back in the 1970s or 1980s. Often, we had to throw away half of the grain or rice rations we received as much of it would be dirt, dust and dead bugs, especially when it came from the bottom of a bag. We carefully went through it, cleaned the dirt and ate anything we could salvage. There was nothing else.
I know we are supposed to be grateful for the food aid that kept us going and saved our lives time and again. I wouldn’t be writing this today if it wasn’t for it. But I also have to ask: Who sees other human beings as animals, even worse, deserving to be given long expired food at their gravest time of need, deserving to be given the garbage they would otherwise have to dispose of in the landfills?
The canned beef provided to us was called Ikar. It smelled terrible when opened and tasted as bad. On rare occasions we had an onion and whatever spices to add to it, we would make a somewhat decent meal. But in most instances we ate it just as it was, in all its grossness. We often joked about eating dog food, but also hoped we had more Ikar. Again, we were lucky and grateful to have something to eat. But I have to wonder today about those who gave us dog food-like and in many instances expired food aid rations, thinking that’s what we deserved. And I can imagine they bragged about their generosity and humanness to their constituents and media.
After the war, a Bosnian artist built a monument to Ikar in Sarajevo, in an attempt to ridicule the so-called international community which sent these inedible and often expired yet at the same time life saving supplies in our time of need.
The spring, summer and fall of 1993 were somewhat tolerable. Apart from the humanitarian aid, there were all kinds of fruits and plants we could find outside and eat. We walked many kilometers to abandoned villages around Goražde in search of fruit and wild mushrooms. We ate apples as they began to form from the flower, green and bitter. It was a luxury when we would find any fruit in summer or fall, ripe and ready to be eaten. But it was difficult to find anything ripe. Many people were hungry, doing the same as us.
We also ate grass. Lots of grass. Mainly stinging nettle and dandelion. With stinging nettle, we would cut it, add just a bit of flour, salt and water to bind everything together, and bake. Those were the days we would be full and happy. We ate dandelion primarily as salad. Lots of it, to fill up our stomachs. Like cows and sheep do.
Real humanitarians
Today, when I think about my wartime experience and hunger, I rarely remember the food aid. What I remember are many ordinary people from Goražde, some of them our friends, some acquaintances, and sometimes even strangers, who, when finding out we were starving, would share what they had with us. In the beginning of 1993, upon finding out that my dad was sick, a friend who was one of the few doctors working in the city hospital came to visit us. He was shocked when he saw my dad. By this time, both of my parents lost half of their body weight. My dad, who used to weigh over 90 kilograms eight months before, was now wearing my clothes. At this time, I was thirteen, and very skinny. The doctor went home and sent someone with two full bags of food. He saved my dad’s life.
On another early spring day in 1993, we woke up one morning and there was no food at home. The feeling of hopelessness and misery, and the inability to do anything about it, was particularly crushing in moments like this. My grandpa went out in hope of figuring out how to find some food somewhere, but possibly also to just get out of the apartment and not have to see his grandchildren, miserable and starving at home.
As he was crossing the pedestrian bridge over the river Drina in the city center, he came across a man he knew, and his wife. They greeted each other and spoke briefly. The man told him he and his wife were going to a village in the hills where they had some land, to begin clearing and preparing it for growing food. He then told my grandpa he heard we were struggling and wished he could help, but his family was also struggling. As he and his wife were saying goodbye and leaving, he handed a small plastic bag to my grandpa. He said it wasn’t much, it was all they had at the moment, but they wanted him to take it home to his grandkids. They left, giving my grandpa no chance to refuse. In the bag was a loaf of bread. This was the only food they had with them, on the way to the village, on foot for many kilometers, planning to be there over a weekend. We ate the bread for days.
The thing is, they, and many others, didn’t have to help us. They were struggling just as we did. But they went above and beyond the hateful wartime rhetoric that made us and them enemies, and shared with us what they had. These were the real humanitarians. Not those sending us their long expired food.
Crumbs and bombs
Today, I’m watching much of this and more happening to Palestinians in Gaza. They have been under a brutal siege for many years under Israeli terror and apartheid. Over the past few months of genocidal bombardments and attacks, we have seen much of Gaza razed to the ground, with people’s homes, hospitals, schools, bakeries and food stores completely destroyed. We have also seen Israeli soldiers film themselves and post multiple videos online of them destroying food in the Palestinian homes and stores. The brutality and barbarity of it all, on display for everyone to watch, seems to be the point they want to make and want everyone to see.
The brutal siege of Gaza also means that no food aid convoys have been allowed for most of the past few months. When a few trucks are allowed in, it’s grossly insufficient. Hunger and starvation in Gaza are used as a powerful weapon to destroy and kill as many Palestinians as possible; those who are not killed by Israel’s bombs and bullets, supplied by the United States, Britain and many European countries.
I’m not surprised to see the food aid being used as a tool of war in Gaza. This is not the first, and unfortunately won’t be the last time this is done around the world. I’m not surprised to see Palestinians posting photos of expired aid rations. Starvation during a war is clearly a great moment for some countries to clear out their storage facilities filled with expired food. Taking this to a landfill would be a waste of an opportune moment to help, humiliate and disrespect suffering people – all at the same time – while scoring public relations points at home. There must be a playbook somewhere that they all follow.
I’m also not surprised to see the food aid, and particularly the air drops, being used to score political and propaganda points at home by countries such as the United States and its depraved political leaders. Instead of putting political and diplomatic pressure on their close ally to let sufficient aid get to Gaza, they are dropping crumbs from the air. Proudly bragging about air dropping some thirty thousand meals to more than two million besieged people in Gaza – in-between the delivery of bombs and other weapons to Israel to kill those same people – is nothing but sadistic. The same goes for Israel’s targeting of food convoys to kill starving Palestinian civilians.
I wish I could say something hopeful at the end. I wish I could say to the hungry, scared and hopeless kids in Gaza that things are going to be ok. But there is nothing that comes to mind at this moment. There is nothing remotely positive to say. The orgy of brutality unleashed on Palestinians in Gaza and other occupied Palestinian territories by Israel, directly aided and endorsed by many so-called Western democracies, is sickening and seemingly unstoppable.
The only thing we can do is organize, protest, speak out and call out the hypocrisy and brutality of all of this. I don’t know if a better world is possible. It doesn’t seem like it, most definitely not right now. But we have to keep speaking out, writing, calling out the lies of politicians and mainstream media, and supporting Palestinian and other suffering peoples – in Sudan, DRC and elsewhere – in any way we can, with our words, voices and actions.
