‘It’s a curse that doesn’t go away’: The Bosnian refugee leading the fight against landmines

When war came to Bosnia, Alma Taslidžan was watching it on television. Aged nine, she lived with her parents and two sisters in a comfortable new-build house in the central Bosnian town of Donji Vakuf. They had a large television, leather couches, dance lessons, Croatian holidays, everything.

Despite coming from a Muslim background, in Yugoslavia’s diverse culture, religion was very much a secondary strand of their identities. Some of their neighbours were Bosnian Serbs (who are mainly Christian Orthodox) and, until 1992, they coexisted peacefully.

But when Bosnia declared its independence from Yugoslavia that spring, the Serbs opposed the creation of a state with a Bosniak (or Bosnian Muslim) majority. Conflict broke out, though it seemed unimaginable to Taslidžan “because it meant we had to turn our weapons towards our neighbours and the other way around”.

The unthinkable was happening, not just in Sarajevo but in her hometown, where soon there were military on the streets. One day, Taslidžan’s school was completely blocked off by soldiers.

“Maybe tomorrow it will be fine,” she reasoned as she turned to go back home.

When she saw her father stashing bottles of water in the basement it made no sense. “This is the first thing that happens,” he explained. “They take away your water.”

Shortly afterwards, she was playing with her sister when a huge explosion rang out, so loud and forceful that they thought their home had been hit. All the windows shattered. Taslidžan’s father picked her up and ran to their basement shelter.

The explosion had destroyed an important bridge that connected two sides of the town. This signalled to Taslidžan’s family that the time to flee had come. Nights later they began their life as refugees from a war that would rage on for more than three years, leaving an estimated 100,000 people dead.

Taslidžan feels that she is one of the lucky ones. She is telling her story today from the Brussels office of Humanity & Inclusion (H&I), a global charity that helps those affected by poverty, conflict and disaster across 60 countries, and which The Telegraph is supporting in its Christmas charity appeal this year. Aged 41, she leads its campaign against landmines, cluster munitions and the heavy bombing of towns and cities – a mission that for her is both humanitarian and personal.

“I always felt I was in debt to the people who helped me, because from when we escaped our hometown to after we returned to our house, we were dependent on aid,” she says.

Her journey as a child refugee took her first to the nearby town of Bugojno, where she and her family stayed for about two months with family friends. They’d left home with just two suitcases, in which Taslidžan was permitted to pack three items (trousers, a sweater and underwear). During the war, they lost everything else they owned, even the radiators. “Our house that was furnished and new was completely robbed as soon as we walked out of it,” she says.

In Bugojno, they spent the evenings in another basement shelter, wrapped in blankets and waiting for the grenades to cease.

“At night, the shellings would get really intense,” Taslidžan recalls. “The house would shake, then it would stop, then [it would start] again. [Then] you’d calm down and wait for another.”

They passed the time by counting the explosions. “Oh yeah, I was scared,” she says.

Reports of deaths and slaughter began to reach them. Serbia, under Slobodan Miloševic’s leadership, was on a mission to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnia by removing all Bosniaks.

Again it was time to flee. Taslidžan’s father bundled her into the car and waved her and the rest of the family goodbye. They set off for the Croatian border, leaving him behind to fight with the Bosnian troops.

For more than a year, Taslidžan and her family settled in the Promina area of Croatia.

But they couldn’t wait out the whole war there. The conflict in Bosnia saw Serbs, Muslims and Croats locked in a three-sided struggle. Some two million people fled their homes. When Bosnian Croats started escaping to Croatia, Taslidžan’s family was among the Bosniak refugees who had to leave amid growing instability.

They had a choice between a refugee camp on the Croatian-Bosnian border – or boarding a plane to Pakistan. Taslidžan’s mother decided on Pakistan.

“We were warmly welcomed [with the idea] we were coming like Muslim refugees from Europe,” says Taslidžan. “Then all the women came out of the plane in shorts and [the locals] were shocked.”

The Bosniak refugees were taken to a camp in Rawalpindi, a place of modest concrete block buildings. Taslidžan and her family stayed there for a year and eight months. “Life there was not good, in the sense that we did not know what was happening,” she says.

They returned to Bosnia in spring 1995, some nine months before the war ended. “My mum really wanted to go back and we were hearing positive things [about] the war coming to an end,” she explains.

But the biggest massacre was yet to happen: the genocide at Srebrenica that July. More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men were detained, abused, tortured and executed, their bodies falling into mass graves.

Taslidžan’s father had survived and was still in the military, but seeing him again brought a shock. His cheeks were sunken, his hair gone. “I thought he was my grandfather, he looked so old,” says Taslidžan.

This, perhaps, was the least of her new worries. While she was gone, her country’s land itself had become unsafe, as had the objects in it. Landmines had been planted in the ground and booby traps laid in houses, often in fridges or sofas, rigged to explode when someone returned to the home they had fled. Even toys were booby-trapped.

Children had to be educated about the risk of landmines: how they looked, where they were placed, how they exploded, what to do if you found yourself in a landmine field. The sense of threat became so deeply ingrained that years later, as an adult visiting Switzerland, Taslidžan found herself overwhelmed on realising that walking in the countryside was safe there; that she needn’t worry that one misstep could either kill or maim her.

“I had embedded this fear of landmines in my head so strongly that I thought whenever I walked anywhere, I wouldn’t be able to get rid of it,” she says.

She knew the stories by then. There was the father and son her relatives knew in Bosnia, who went out gathering wood one day in a contaminated field. “The guy was killed and his son was injured,” she says.

They were just two of many. An estimated 750,000 landmines were planted in 30,000 minefields in Bosnia during the war. Between 1996 and the start of 2023, there were 1,770 casualties in Bosnia and Herzegovina caused by landmines and unexploded bombs. More than 600 died from their injuries.

Three decades after the war, Bosnia remains among the most landmine-contaminated countries in Europe. “It’s like a curse that doesn’t go away,” says Taslidžan.

All survivors have their own ways of dealing with the traumas of war. For Taslidžan, who breaks down just once while telling her story, it has furnished her with her life’s mission. A mother of one, she has devoted her career to disarmament and the protection of civilians. She chairs the board of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and listens to the painful stories of landmine survivors: of missing limbs and learning to walk again with prosthetics; of injured lower body parts; of loss.

She stresses that the consequences go beyond individual injuries and deaths – in making land too dangerous to use, landmines have a socioeconomic impact for decades.

In Ukraine, where H&I works to provide emergency care and support to the most vulnerable, much of the land is now contaminated by landmines, cluster munitions and unexploded ordnance.

The Ukrainian government estimates that nearly 29 per cent of its territory may be affected – an area twice the size of Scotland. “People don’t understand how big this contamination is for Ukraine, how much they will suffer in the future,” adds Taslidžan.

In total, almost 70 countries and territories are still affected by the presence of 110 million landmines, uniquely perilous because of their inability to distinguish between combatants and civilians, says Nato.

In 2022, more than 4,710 individuals across the world were either killed or injured by landmines or explosive remnants of war, says H&I. Civilians accounted for 85 per cent of the casualties, and nearly half of the civilian victims were children. The highest number of casualties was in Syria, followed by Ukraine.

Taslidžan knows too well the physical and psychological scars left by explosive weapons. “I’ve seen the consequences they have on civilians,” she says.

It has been decades since Princess Diana brought international attention to the horrors of landmines, when she visited survivors in Bosnia in 1997, and in Angola, where she walked through a live minefield. People are shocked and angry to hear that these brutal weapons are still being planted now in Ukraine, says Taslidžan.

“There’s not a single justification for using landmines,” she says firmly. “No context or situation where we would say ‘Okay, now that’s justifiable’. Same with cluster munitions.”

But she fears a sense of fatigue setting in, in a world that feels weary and powerless in the face of bloody and desperate conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Syria and elsewhere. “What scares me,” she says, “is people are starting to be really okay with everything that’s happening. If you’re going to normalise conflicts [like these] then we’re really screwed up as a humanity.”

However, there are moments of progress. Today [Nov 18] marks two years since 83 states signed a landmark agreement to better protect civilians from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.

Meanwhile, in conflict-torn countries like Ukraine, more immediate assistance is needed. As well as providing humanitarian aid, H&I helps rehabilitate landmine survivors, enabling them to heal after amputations, walk again and thrive. It is educating Ukrainians on the risks.

“That’s what saved my life,” says Taslidžan, “and the lives of many in Bosnia.”

Humanity & Inclusion is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are Teenage Cancer Trust, Alzheimer’s Research UK and Army Benevolent Fund. To make a donation, please visit telegraph.co.uk/2024appeal or call 0151 317 5247