Fatima Muhić: A Child Born in Potočari, the Youngest Buried Victim of Srebrenica

Birth in Potočari

In July 1995, after the fall of Srebrenica, thousands of expellees took shelter in Potočari, on the grounds of the former battery factory, where the base of the Dutch battalion of UNPROFOR (Dutchbat) was located. Among them was Hava Muhić from Trubari near Srebrenica. In those days she gave birth there to a baby girl.

The sources differ regarding the date of birth. According to a Radio Free Europe report published on the day of the burial, 11 July 2013, the child was born on 11 July 1995. According to a text on the portal genocid.ba, she was born on 12 July 1995 at the UNPROFOR base in Potočari.

The Child Her Mother Never Saw

Hava Muhić stated that she was told the child had been born dead. They did not show her the baby girl but took her away to be buried. "I gave birth to a dead child," said Hava Muhić. The circumstances of the child's death have not been clarified: while the mother was told that the child was stillborn, a literary text published on the portal genocid.ba states that the girl was killed a few hours after birth.

According to the same text on genocid.ba, the child's mortal remains were found in a mass grave on 10 December 2012. The Radio Free Europe report does not state where the remains were found.

A Family from Trubari

The father, Hajrudin Muhić, never saw his daughter. According to statements from 2013, he was buried at the Potočari Memorial Center about two years earlier. The sources do not state when and where he was killed.

Hava's brother Zahid Hasanović described how the Muhić family from Trubari was almost completely wiped out – from one house, as he said, there are five graves.

Name and Burial

On 11 July 2013, the girl was buried at the Potočari Memorial Center, together with 408 other identified victims, as the youngest victim of the genocide in Srebrenica. The name Fatima was given to her by the burial organizing committee. Hava Muhić, who now lives in France, learned of the name from a journalist and agreed with it.

A Voice Given by Literature

In 2019, Anes Berbić, a seventeen-year-old secondary school student from Sanski Most, wrote a literary text in which Fatima speaks in the first person; the article on the portal genocid.ba is also based on it. In the first, fictional part of the story, Fatima is a twenty-four-year-old philosophy student in Sarajevo who, after her last exam, takes a bus home to Srebrenica to surprise her parents – but she finds the streets quiet, the neighbors do not respond, and the door of the house is unlocked. Then the story reveals that the narrator never grew up, and that she is the girl whom her mother did not have time to name, and whose life could never begin. The text ends with a plea not to forget her, because to forget her means to forget Srebrenica: "My dear ones, do not forget me, for the love of Allah."