The Last Refuge

This book would make a great film. The story of Srebrenica is well known and we need not dwell on details here. Over 100,000 Muslim civilians of Bosnia were displaced by ethno-religious violence in 1992 and over 8000 Muslim males were massacred in the space of a few weeks in July 1995. Among the flood of literature about Bosnia over the past two decades, the deluge of war memoirs by journalists in particular, there has emerged one very different account. This is the tale of a young Bosnian Muslim, a recent university graduate, who escaped mounting persecution with his family and found himself struggling to survive in the besieged town of Srebrenica during the early 1990s. Like a modern-day Demosthenes, the experiences of Hasan Nuhanović were those of a survivor with a keen intellect and insightful skills of observation and rhetoric. His education gave him a modicum of advantage over other residents and refugees in the encircled pocket – mostly farmers, loggers, shepherds, highlanders and the general inhabitant of rural areas of eastern Bosnia – and his judgement of events and personalities remained sharp. Nuhanović avoided unnecessary risks for instance and was quick to appreciate the value of studying English so that when the United Nations did eventually arrive, he was able to secure employment as an official translator. It was such a small step but one that ultimately saved his life.