The air in the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s Centre of Memory in Houghton was thick with emotion on Friday, 11 July 2025. It was the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, a date etched into history as Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Second World War.
For Jasmina Colic-Khan, a survivor visiting South Africa from her home in Canada, the memories are not distant history; they are a visceral, daily reality. Visibly emotional, she recounted a story of unimaginable loss and the enduring fight for a world that refuses to learn from its past.
“I never recovered,” she stated, her voice heavy but firm. “As I’m aging, those memories are stronger.”
The Bosnian War, which raged from 1992 to 1995, shattered a nation where diverse communities had coexisted for over half a century. The conflict culminated in the systematic murder of more than 8 000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys in the supposed UN “safe area” of Srebrenica in July 1995. For Jasmina, then a young mother, the war arrived with a sudden, terrifying warning.
“I just heard the voice, loud warning voice on 24th of May. ‘Run! Run!'” she recalled. “I grabbed my baby who was eight months old and started to run without shoes.”
What followed was a desperate flight for survival, a blur of hiding in forests and basements as bombs fell. The illusion of safety was shattered when Bosnian Serb forces, under the command of figures like Ratko Mladić, began their campaign of “ethnic cleansing.” An order came over the radio: Muslims were to wear white armbands and mark their homes with white sheets, making them “easy targets.”
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A Brutal Separation and a Haunting Image
The true horror began on June 11th. “They separated old men, husbands, fathers and all the boys,” Jasmina explained. Her husband, his brothers, and father-in-law were among a group of 60 men taken away. “They killed them in front of orthodox church in my town… They put them in a mass grave.”
Soon after, soldiers came for her 73-year-old father. A customer of his prosperous business, now a soldier, led them. “As they were taking him, I ran… and asked, ‘Where are you taking him?’… He said, ‘He will come back.’ But he never did.”
The family had been wealthy, making them a target. The soldiers forced her father to reveal where the family’s gold and money were hidden. After he complied, they murdered him. “After that, they beheaded him in front of our house,” she said, the words hanging in the silent room.
Three weeks later, a Serbian friend, unaware the body was still there, led her to the spot. The image is one she can never escape. “I would find him… in a front alley… I managed to take one headache tablet from his pocket and his decomposing body and one cigarette.”
She begged for a proper burial, but it never happened. “They throw him one of those mass graves. That picture stuck with me for the rest of my life.”
This personal anguish is the key to understanding the sheer scale of the atrocity. As moderator Shannon Ebrahim noted, we can become desensitised to numbers, but the “image of your beheaded father in the front of your home… is absolutely chilling.” This is the kind of picture sticks in the mind, forcing us to confront the human cost of hatred.
For Jasmina, the trauma manifests in nightmares of searching through mass graves, a constant, subconscious reliving of her search for loved ones. “My husband, second husband Dr. [Ashraf] Khan, he’s the witness how much I’m suffering from nightmares.”
Her explanation for the hatred that fuelled such barbarity is chillingly simple. She asserts this was not the first, but the tenth genocide against Muslims in Bosnia, part of a long-held dream of a “Greater Serbia.” Previous atrocities went unpunished and were silenced under the former Yugoslavian regime. “They never punished, they kept repeating,” she said. “And we never were allowed to do the services like this.”
From the moment she escaped to a Red Cross centre in Germany, Jasmina channelled her pain into action. It became her way of coping. In Germany, she formed a women’s group, sending aid back to Bosnia and establishing a library to educate people about her culture.
After moving to Canada in 1998, her activism intensified. She educates Canadians, works with concentration camp survivors, and ensures the genocide is remembered annually in her city of Edmonton.
“Every year I do this special service, memorial service, in the last 15 years,” she said. Her work ensures that the atrocities remain in the public consciousness.
Today, Jasmina Colic-Khan is a real estate agent, a teacher of the Bosnian language to children in her community, and a tireless activist for justice, not only for Bosnia but for Palestine and other regions scarred by conflict. Her life is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a story of turning profound grief into a powerful voice for the voiceless.
Image credit: TR724
