Suljagic was born in 1988 in the village of Voljavica, near Bratunac in eastern Bosnia. When the war in Bosnia broke out in 1992, she fled with her mother, brother and grandmother to Slovenia, then to Germany.
Her father, Sakib Suljagic, remained behind, along with both grandfathers and other male relatives. All of them were taken away in front of the UN peacekeepers’ base in Potocari, where they had sought safety while fleeing the Bosnian Serb forces that overran the UN-declared “safe zone” of Srebrenica.
“We came to Australia in 2001,” she says. “But Srebrenica never left us.”
Cehic, born in 1991, was taken to Germany as a baby when her parents went to visit her grandparents. When the war began, the family stayed in Berlin, believing they would return home in a few weeks. They never did. Her grandfather was killed when Serb forces entered the town in July 1995.
Both families arrived in Australia as refugees, joining a Bosnian refugee community scattered across Melbourne’s western and south-eastern suburbs. Mosques became the community hubs for these people – places for prayer, language, and mutual support. The children learned English quickly. Parents worked long hours. Trauma was rarely spoken about aloud.
“Our parents were in survival mode,” Suljagic recalls. “They were trying to put food on the table, learn a new system, and cope with what they had lost. There was no space for structured memory, for historical explanation.”
The turning point came when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recognising the Srebrenica killings as genocide in 2024, followed by a similar motion in the Australian parliament. For the first time, the genocide was formally acknowledged by institutions that mattered in their new country.
“That legitimacy changed something,” Suljagic explains. “It meant we could invite professors, politicians, teachers. We could say: this is not just our story. This is world history.”
Children of Srebrenica Melbourne was born from the need to fill the gap between private grief and public education.
Their first major commemoration looked nothing like the earlier mosque gatherings. Alongside speeches, they created an exhibition of personal objects: a grandfather’s scarf, a father’s wallet, family photographs with handwritten testimonies.
“When people saw Medina standing next to a photo of her murdered grandfather, it became real for them,” Suljagic says. “Not numbers. Not headlines. A human being.”
Among the audience were Australians who had studied genocide in textbooks but never met its descendants. The impact was immediate. “You could see it on their faces,” Cehic recalls. “Shock. Silence. Then questions.”
