Story of Jovanka Pejic, a Bosnian Serb woman who was forced to move from her ancestral hometown as a consequence of the Bosnian conflict.

Jovanka Pejic, was a Bosnian Serb woman, combatting at the front line during the conflict in 1990s. She used to live in Ilidza, a municipality in Sarajevo Canton (currently Federation of BosnianHerzegovina), but was forced to move to Republika Srpska during the conflict. She has never returned to her hometown since.

Ilidza is a place where her family had been living for several centuries and now no more. In the 1980s, authorities started to take land and make buildings until only one or two flats belonged to Serbs and all the rest were Bosniaks. As a result, Jovanka was forced to move as well.

The city of Ilidza was specifically significant for Jovanka as it was linked to the memories of the traumas the family suffered during WWII. Indeed both her grandfather and his brothers were executed in a church in Ilidza, as well as descendants of the grandfather’s brothers.

“The day after, down there in Ilijas near the Mosque, together with another 30 Serbs they lined them up in a colon, dug a hole in front of it and killed them one by one. As my grandfather was the tallest, he was the first in the colon, and his brother the shortest, so Despot was the last. (…) These are my memories that my father and mother told me, grandmother too, while they were alive and I put it on paper so I wouldn’t forget something from the story I heard from them.”

As she was about to depart Ilidza for Republic of Srpska, Jovanka decided to exhume the body of her son, who had died in the conflict. At the same time, 958 other graves were also transferred to a military cemetery in Sokolac. For her, the main injustice is to have been forced to leave her ancestral hometown, without the possibility of going back. 

Source: The Perfect Data-Marriage: Transitional JusticeResearch and Oral History Life Stories, Transitional Justice Review Volume 1 Issue 4