Young Muslims visits survivors of Bosnia genocide

Else Kvist, Reporter Wednesday, June 29, 2011
4:09 PM

Eleven young British Muslims travelled to Bosnia and Herzegovina this week to spend a month living and working with genocide survivors.

The group aged from 17 to 28 will be staying around Srebrenica, the site of Europe’s worst genocide since the Second World War. More than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and bodies are still being found to this day.

The five young women and six men will be living with survivors of the genocide, as part of a project run by MADE in Europe called The Journey,

Working with the villagers, they will be setting up strawberry farms, which will become a source of livelihood for local families who lost everything during the conflict.

Volunteer Halima Begum, was only 5 at the time of the Bosnia conflict. She said: “This is the forgotten massacre. Young people like me don’t even know about it yet it was our brothers and sisters who were killed. I want to go and tell the Bosnian people that they are not forgotten, we are one global community and their suffering will not go unheard.”

The volunteers are travelling as ambassadors of the East London Mosque and the Muslim Community and Education Centre in North London. Both mosques have supported them in fundraising for the strawberry farms.

A delegation from the East London Mosque will join the volunteers for the 16th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre on July 11.

The volunteers will be taking part in a peace march over the three days before the anniversary. They will be joined by thousands of people from around the world to remember those who lost their lives and the families they left behind.