Siege of Srebrenica 18 April 1992 – 11 July 1995

My first is in country but not in land,
my second is in communism, post-war Partisans.
My third is in Hungary living next door,
my fourth is in Europe but not USSR.
My fifth is in Serb and Slav but not Croat,
my sixth is in Split, Belgrade and Ljubljana (twice).
My seventh is in Balkans, lands torn apart,
my eighth is in Kosovo and my violent past.
my ninth’s inside Tito, internment, barbed wire,
     Milošević, Karadžić, Mladić, Bosniak genocide,
and my last is in breath exhaled in death

as my whole exploded, ripped asunder. One became four,
then five, six and seven
after war
through the nineties. And crimes unveiled in the noughties
when no-one could forget
refugees and IDPs* and the slit throats of babies,
siege, starvation and massacre,
camps for concentration and raping and ‘cleansing’ the nation 
of Croats and Muslims (Bosniaks) and Albanian Kosovars,

human tissue splattered from columns, bombed,
driven out in their hundreds of thousands,
mass graves, murders the ‘worst since second world war’.

In a decade of dread: a hundred and forty thousand dead,
four million uprooted, seeking shelter in safe areas or abroad.
Bombing from UN supposed to be friendly, then NATO
killing and bankrupting Kosovo,
United Nations trying its impotent best
to protect – failed –
     and deter – failed –
                 and care for refugees – not enough.

Until finally an uneasy peace spawned,
scarred and scathed,
Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia,
Montenegro, Kosovo, Bosnia-and-Herzegovina.
An uneasy peace 
blighting the fate of the Balkans since the First World War,
then invasion by Hitler cleansing the Roma,
then a one-party state for 45 years,
until internal republics boiled over
and fought for control,
fought dirty and long, executing
crimes against humanity
and carnage judged to be genocide.
An uneasy peace.

*IDPs – Internal displaced persons

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Jo Somerset (she/her) is a LGBTQ+ writer based in Manchester, UK. She is the founder of Chorlton Writers’ Cafe. Her published work features in online LGBTQ+, literary and academic journals, and her debut children’s novel will be published in 2024. In 2020 she won the Leanne Bridgewater Award for Innovation and Experiment at Salford University (UK), where she completed a MA in Creative Writing.