A Voice For the Voiceless

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The Advocacy Project seeks to help community-based advocates produce, disseminate and use information, and so become more effective advocates for human rights and social justice

Quilt displayed here is a tribute to Bosnian victims

After leaving a special service at the Islamic Community Center in St Louis, these Bosnian girls viewed a quilt made of squares woven as traditional Bosnian carpets. (Photo credit: Wayne Crosslin/Post-Dispatch)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch
By Michele Munz

7/09/2007

ST. LOUIS – A memorial quilt woven in Bosnia-Herzegovina was unveiled Sunday at a commemoration of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica. The weavers chose St Louis not only because it has the largest number of Bosnian refugees in the country, but also because it has the largest number of survivors of the Srebrenica massacre.

The quilt has 20 panels containing the names of genocide victims, all relatives of the five female weavers, who live in the city of Tuzla. The women want others to order panels for their loved ones who died, so the quilt will grow into a powerful memorial.

"It is very comparable to the AIDS quilt in how it raised awareness," said Nihad Sinanovic, who was 11 when he escaped from Srebrenica in 1993. "It will bring a lot of attention to how 8,000 men and boys were killed."

One of those was Sinanovic's father, who stayed in Srebrenica, a UN-declared "safe area," until it was invaded by nationalist Bosnian Serb forces on July 11, 1995. Over the next several days, an estimated 7,800 people, most of them Muslim men and boys, were massacred.

An estimated 5,000 survivors of the massacre live in the St Louis area, according to the Association of the Srebrenica Genocide of St Louis. The total Bosnian population here is estimated at between 35,000 and 40,000.

The quilt was brought to St. Louis by the Washington-based Advocacy Project, which recruits graduate students in the United States to volunteer with community-based groups around the world. One project volunteer works with BOSFAM, founded in Tuzla in 1994, during the war, as a way for refugee women to gather, knit and talk. The women decided to make the memorial quilt, and Iain Guest, director of The Advocacy Project and a professor at Georgetown University, flew it to St Louis.

Guest hung the quilt outside the Islamic Community Center in St Louis, where a special religious commemoration ceremony was held Sunday. He snapped pictures while women dressed in traditional head scarves laid roses underneath it.

"The weavers thought this would be a very sensitive constituency, in a sense, and would really understand the message behind it," Guest said. "Their idea is to take their message outside Bosnia to people who went through the same trauma, and understand."

Guest said the weavers wanted to add more panels, which they will do for $40 to cover their cost, and to show the quilt at cities all over the country so no one will forget the lives lost.

Their goal is to also bring attention to the lack of prosecution for those responsible for the war crimes, especially the wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who have been indicted but remain at large. They also want to highlight the need to identify an estimated 40,000 people missing since the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995.

"It's a perfect idea," said Rusmin Topalovic, vice president of the local group of Srebrenica survivors. "We are going to work as much as possible to get all the names on it."

He said he envisioned the quilt resting at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – "to stay there forever."