Zedin, Mina's only Son
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Zedin, Mina's only Son
He was 22 when he was taken, my Zedin. Always smiling, ready to help, never said no to anyone. Sometimes he would spend all day with his mechanical saw, cutting firewood for people and would come home without a penny in his pockets. I'd say: Son, you were gone all day and earned nothing? "Mother, I couldn't take their money, they had so little and the winter is coming, I just couldn't," he would say. That is how he was. He was so good with his hands, he would make money from selling cast iron grills he made. He was saving to buy a new car: "Perhaps dad will chip in a little and I will make more, and we'll buy a bigger car. When I get married, maybe our family will grow so that we will need a bigger car."
The intimacy of violence has left deep scars in Prijedor. Seemingly overnight, neighbors turned into perpetrators of incomprehensible violence. Today, twenty years since the end of the war, mothers of the disappeared often live next to those who disappeared their children. Silence and denial about the past continues to be imposed on both by the ongoing political conflict over the “prevailing truths” about what has taken place, with little space for an honest reckoning and forgiveness. With hopes dwindling that they will live to see the perpetrators face justice and refusal of the authorities to acknowledge and memorialize their loved ones, some families are breaking the silence by erecting their own memorials. Mina Delkic is one of them.
