‘It was a lightweight at the hours of darkness’: how a bakery reworked lives in war-torn Mostar

Jasmin Elezović was six years outdated when his residence turned a warfare zone.

It was 1993 and the historic metropolis of Mostar, straddling the Neretva River in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, had turn into the centre of among the most vicious preventing of the Bosnian warfare, which had begun greater than a 12 months earlier.

Elezović and his mom have been dwelling with two different households in a small flat within the east of the town, the frontline barely 200 metres from their door. For 9 months that 12 months Mostar was underneath siege, cut up in two by brutal preventing, with 60,000 folks within the jap a part of the town underneath relentless bombardment by preventing forces figuring out as Croats.

His recollections of that point are scattered and bleak. His father, Emin, was a soldier away for weeks at a time. His dayto-day life was the fixed thud and screech of artillery assaults, journeys all the way down to the river to attempt to discover water throughout breaks within the preventing, and enjoying with lumps of red-hot shrapnel together with his associates when he might escape the home.

“I’ve only a few reminiscences of earlier than the warfare. Even now I see myself as a survivor of battle as a result of in case you reside via warfare, your life is formed by it for ever,” he says.

Out of that bitter battle would come the Conflict Baby charity and a bakery challenge that at its peak would feed a ravenous metropolis, and rework the lives of Elezović and his household. Conflict Baby, supporting youngsters caught up in conflicts throughout the globe, is considered one of this 12 months’s Guardian and Observer charity enchantment companions, together with Médecins Sans Frontières and Parallel Histories.

Earlier than the warfare, Elezović and his mother and father, Ermin and Alma, lived a traditional life. They have been hard-working and enterprising. Ermin was an engineerand the household had opened a espresso store. “We had plans, we had desires similar to everybody else,” says Ermin. “Then hell got here to our lives.”

When the siege of Mostar ended with the Washington settlement, a ceasefire deal that briefly halted the preventing within the metropolis in March 1994, the household have been in a determined state of affairs.

“It had been probably the most horrible 12 months,” says Alma. “We have been so drained, we had misplaced so many associates, so many household, we had struggled with starvation, we had no electrical energy, no water. We didn’t recognise ourselves.”

Alma fearful continually about Ermin, who was combating despair from his time on the frontlines. Then she heard about some folks from England who had come into Mostar after the ceasefire to attempt to assist these made destitute by the preventing. “Lastly! It was a lightweight at the hours of darkness, I instinctively knew that this might save Ermin,” she says.

She inspired Ermin to see what they have been doing. He discovered just a few foreigners combating the practicalities of organising an industrial bread oven in a warfare zone. This was the beginnings of Conflict Baby, the organisation established by the film-makers Invoice Leeson and David Wilson and the social entrepreneur Willemijn Verloop to attempt to assist youngsters affected by the violence and ethnic cleaning that they had witnessed in war-torn former Yugoslavia.

“That they had simply arrived with the equipment to arrange a cell bakery and I might see instantly that I might assist,” says Ermin. His expertise as a machine technician, his grasp of English and the very fact he knew precisely the place and the way folks wanted speedy assist in his metropolis proved invaluable.

“They didn’t see me as a sufferer or need me to inform them how unhealthy issues had been,” he says. “They only wanted assist and concepts, and I might do this. They have been sensible, passionate individuals who wished to get issues finished.”

Inside weeks, Ermin was integral to operating the bakery, spending hours with the challenge when he might discover time away from the frontline, serving to get bread and different necessities comparable to remedy to hundreds of refugees who had flooded into the jap a part of the town after the ceasefire, in addition to native folks.

By November 1994, when a photograph was taken of a seven-year-old Elezović in a Conflict Baby T-shirt standing on a brief bridge constructed by the Bosnian military to exchange the town’s Ottoman bridge, felled by Croat weapons the 12 months earlier than, the bakery was at its peak, making as much as 5,000 loaves a day. “We helped feed a ravenous metropolis,” says Ermin. “We confirmed folks that life might start once more.”

Conflict Baby had additionally turn into interwoven in his household’s life. “The household have been Conflict Baby in Mostar,” says Lynne Kuschel, who labored for the charity throughout that interval and was in shut contact with the household. “None of what we did in Mostar would have occurred with out them. We turned a household.”

For Elezović, the arrival of Conflict Baby in his life was “just like the Renaissance after the darkish ages”.

“I used to be actually a warfare little one,” he says. “My complete world had simply been the warfare however their arrival modified my life. It had been gray and now it was Technicolor. They introduced all these fantastic issues on the earth into this horror we had been dwelling. In addition to all of the onerous work I bear in mind evenings in our condo by candlelight with everybody speaking about artwork and tradition and above all, music.”

It was the success of the bakery in Mostar that helped get the assist of the musicians and artists who would make Conflict Baby’s Assist charity album of 1995 and led to the inception of music remedy tasks to assist heal Mostar’s traumatised youngsters. In 1997, the Elezović household have been concerned within the charity’s final massive challenge in Mostar, the Pavarotti music centre, which nonetheless supplies music classes and remedy to youngsters within the metropolis.

Nowdays Elezović is an achieved musician, with expertise discovered within the early days of the music centre, and has spent his life engaged on social justice tasks.

“I’d not be the particular person I’m at the moment with out Conflict Baby,” he says. “I’ve an intolerance of injustice, and this sense of by no means being a bystander however somebody who is not going to simply discuss however do issues to make a distinction – and that is the legacy Conflict Baby has had on my life. They confirmed us that you simply simply want to indicate up and get issues finished and try to depart issues higher than the way you discovered them.”