"This is where I found peace," said Zejnil Halilovic, standing in front of his former neighbors' abandoned house. The building was now just a concrete skeleton, slowly being swallowed by vegetation, and it still bore a gaping hole left by a shell that fell more than 30 years ago. Halilovic, a 61-year-old former journalist, was visiting his old neighborhood in Visegrad, in mid-July 2025. This sad town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina still bears the scars of the war that tore the Balkan country apart from 1992 to 1995.
Halilovic, a gentle man, clad in a polo shirt and carrying a brown satchel, was one of the few Bosniaks who had chosen to go back to live in this town, where war crimes had been committed against his community. Today, it is almost exclusively populated by Serbs. "My house was in even worse shape than this one," he said. He gradually rebuilt it with his meager savings. "No one else lives around me anymore, but I have always been nostalgic for this town," he added, while watching the sumptuous waters of the Drina River flow by.
During the war, Serbian militia groups used the turquoise river to dispose of their Bosniak victims' bodies. According to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), these armed groups massacred around 3,000 people of Muslim background in Visegrad, while thousands of others were forced into exile. "My wife and I managed to hide in the forest for several months before fleeing on foot," said Halilovic, who was fortunate not to have lost any immediate family members in the massacres. He later lived for several years in Sarajevo, located 100 kilometers away, before returning to Visegrad in 2019.
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