I am not a man who hates.

"The Chetnik bastard that his mother left by the dumpster." This is how it is Alena Muhić, when he was only nine years old, called a friend from school in a childish quarrel. He told him that he is not the child of Advija and Muharem, who raised him in Gorazde during the nineties, but that his "real" father is a Serb who raped his Bosniak mother in war in Bosnia and that she therefore left him to die.

"It didn't hurt me that he said I was a 'Chetnik bastard' - at the time I didn't even know what that meant - but that he said I was found in a container," Muhić told "Vreme" more than two decades later.

When little Allen heard these words in 2002 - only seven years after the end of the war - he hit the boy and ran to his parents crying. They then decided to tell him everything. That's how he found out that at least the facts about his biological parents were correct. The Muslim biological mother who gave birth to him near Foča was raped by a Serb neighbor during the war, and she fled after giving birth because she could not bear the terrible burden of this act.

photo: Aleksandar Barda / Fonet

"Then I heard a story that I didn't understand. Only after a few years, when I found out what words like rape, biological parents, what it means to be a Chetnik and to be a bastard, it all started to somehow interest me, and already then I decided that I wouldn't keep silent about everything", remembers Muhić.

PARENTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS

Raising children in a small town of 20.000 inhabitants in the east of Bosnia in the early nineties was in itself very difficult. Muhić's adoptive parents, after their two children, decided to bring another baby into their home, even though they knew about the difficult background of her, as he says himself, "birth".

"My mother would hear from people on the street that when I grow up, I will be like my biological father - I will rape and kill. She used to fight with people because of that, she couldn't stand it," says Muhić. "Father was always calm, he somehow knew how to calm down, he knew his way and didn't let himself get annoyed. I'm more like my mother in that regard."

He says that today, when he has three children and knows how difficult it is to raise them, he cannot even imagine what it was like for them. However, he never started an open conversation to get answers to the questions - why they adopted him and what they had to deal with. Because he was always afraid that he might be misunderstood: "My mother was always weak towards me - and it is to this day. They look after and raise my children together. I can see that that love has never stopped. Bosnia has never changed them, no matter what ugly things happened there."

Still, he believes it took incredible courage for them to decide to adopt him in 1993.

"Imagine that time when you have two grown-up daughters, one of whom is studying in Sarajevo under siege and you don't know if she will return alive from the lecture. The other goes to high school, and you are not wealthy people," continued Muhić. "I think they simply didn't think about it. They didn't look for benefits in life, they didn't take everything into account in advance, but they were just guided by emotion."

ONE CIGARETTE AND PAIN

His parents were always by Muhić's side to support him, although at first they were not happy that he decided to star in a film about himself in his teenage years called The boy from the war movie. The film was never shown in Bosnia, but it was shown all over the world. He continued in a similar direction, so the second film about him, The Invisible Child Trap, also shown in Rwanda, where many children born from war crimes also live. He says that he was especially moved when he heard that many children of this country, which experienced the monstrous acts of war and gave birth to its victims, decided to meet their biological mothers after watching this film.

He himself forgave his wife for leaving him a long time ago, and ten years ago he met her and tried to understand how she felt. Today they are not in contact, but Muhić says that he is at peace with it because he realized how much she suffered and what she faced, as well as he became aware of one bitter fact about this woman's life - her pain never died.

A year later, he smoked a cigarette with his biological father in front of his house. Because this man still lives in Bosnia. When he knocked on his door, his biological father opened it, he remembers.

"There was no need for me to introduce myself. His eyes said it all, the two of us look very similar physically," continues Alen Muhić. "I didn't want to go in, that cigarette lasted and then I left. Not much to say."

It quickly became clear to Muhić that his struggle is actually not just an internal gap between the family he grew up in and who is always by his side and the people who conceived him. It was about the desire not to be silent about the crime and for children who were born in the same way to know that they are by no means alone.

Allen succeeded a lot in that. At the time he was shooting movies, it was already out The hunchback, a film about a girl who for years, based on her mother's story, believes that her father died honorably in the war. However, she accidentally learns that her father is a rapist and that she was actually born with this act. It turned out that this achievement was also based on the personal story of another girl, Ajna Jusić from Zenica, whose Bosniak mother was raped by a member of the Croatian forces during the war in Bosnia.

OTHER CHILDREN

photo: almira mehić

On the initiative of psychiatrist Amra Delić, these children have been gathering in Sarajevo since ten years ago. Delić came up with this idea in 2015, when she met the children of the occupation from Germany at an international conference, i.e. those born from rape committed in the Second World War.

That's how Ajna and Alen met.

"Ajna and I didn't talk much then, we didn't need to talk late into the night. We simply knew each other. That feeling was created immediately," says Muhić. "That's why we looked at things quickly, to see what we can do, so that something good can come out of that feeling. I am a child born from rape, but I am not a man who hates."

Today, Alen Muhić is the father of three children and a health worker at the Goražde Emergency Service. He is a tall and stout man who seems to be always on the move. An important part of his personality is that he became a vocal fighter for human rights who, together with Ajna Jusić and psychiatrist Amra Delić, created the world's first association of children born from wartime rape. The association accepts victims of all nationalities.

"Together we had to come to terms with the fact that we cannot change the past, but the future is up to us. That is some motive that

The association carries. The first thing we agreed on is that we must not make any divisions between the children," says Muhić. "I am no different from a child who lives in the Serb or Croat part of Bosnia and who was born in the same way as me. The only thing is that I may have gone public, and someone else is still suffering in silence."

The author of this text met Ajna in Sarajevo a few years ago and visited this Association. In it, children's drawings are plastered all over the walls. But not from a happy childhood. These are the stories of the forgotten children of the war, and the association itself bears the same name. Former children, and now adults, contact them from all over the world, because many, although born in Bosnia, were adopted in other countries. Only some of them learned the real truth about how they were conceived and wanted to talk to others as well.

Among them is Leila Damon from Great Britain. She was taken from the battlefield of Bosnia to Manchester by a husband and wife who at that moment were war reporters for the British BBC. They found her in an orphanage and decided to adopt her. After many difficult years, Lejla came to Bosnia through the "Forgotten Children of War" Association, and then in 2017, after a long correspondence, she met her biological mother. They are still visited and heard today.

A BOOK FOR A PEACEFUL SLEEP

Allen and Ajna are not just ordinary activists. They are the people who laid the foundations for the world's practice. Thanks to them, Bosnia and Herzegovina became the first country in the world to recognize the rights of these children as civilian victims of war. The legal regulations were first adopted in 2022 in the Brčko district, and then in the Federation. Recently, the state allows them the right of priority in obtaining an apartment, a scholarship, a student dormitory, which are all opportunities that mean a lot to some.

Bosnia was a turning point in general for the legal treatment of rape as a war crime. Thanks to the testimonies of raped women and men from Bosnia, wartime rape was declared a crime against humanity for the first time, by the judgments of the International Court in The Hague. Today, victims in both the Federation and the Republika Srpska receive a certain monthly compensation. It was also introduced in other countries of the former Yugoslavia - except Serbia.

Alen Muhić decided to follow the example of these brave people and devoted his whole life to exposing the perpetrators and removing the stigma from the victims, especially children born from rape. In some parts of Bosnia, women were deliberately kept in captivity after rape, which was a kind of monstrous way of nationalistic revenge, in order to give birth to children whose fathers are of other nationalities. So it turned out that the number of these children is measured in hundreds. One of Allen's ways to ensure that the crime is not forgotten and that the victims - especially those who suffer in silence - experience catharsis, is his book published this summer. I am Allen., the title of which goes with the subtitle - "The book about my birth".

"I intentionally added this part about birth, because it is important that all children who were born like me know that the way they came into the world does not determine them for the rest of their lives," explains Alan Muhić. "That's why it's important for me to explain to people that I'm not a depressed person who has been grieving over his fate for decades. On the contrary, I'm a happy person who enjoys life and his family. And someone else is responsible for how I became, so I won't allow him to transfer even an iota of hatred to me."

He also likes to say that this is not a good night book, but it is a book that some people may sleep more soundly after. He also adds that writing freed him like some kind of psychological theater, helped him understand his own feelings from a time perspective, but also the childish reactions he had. He never wanted to put national or any kind of hatred on paper: "I didn't write the book out of anger or a desire for revenge, but out of a need to find out the truth. And, primarily, for the sake of other children."

He adds that he is not surprised that many people in Serbia do not know about the mass rape of women, of different nationalities, during the war in Bosnia, but also about the children who were born from these crimes. This, he says, gives him an additional incentive to push the book because he believes that this way everyone will feel more personally what some entire families have gone through.

MARKO AND MUHAMED ALSO PROTESTED

Alen Muhić likes to come to Belgrade, he often winters in Zlatibor with his family, and he says that he sees no room for any disagreements in the Balkans.

"I was very moved when I saw how beautifully Belgrade welcomed the students from Novi Pazar and how hard they work together in the protests," says Muhić. "I was moved when I saw how well they cooperated, made friends, how much they found each other, and they even went to Strasbourg together to seek a better future for everyone. They can serve as an example to the older generations. We must be aware that young people are already full of quarrels and divisions, they do not want to live like their grandfathers, not even their fathers."

He sees the government in Serbia as very similar to that in Bosnia and Herzegovina: "Politicians who trace their roots back to the 1990s still rule there, but they are still not responsible for everything they have committed. I absolutely do not care if someone is named Marko or Muhammed. But there is no way we can change anything while similar divisions are being made. We are at odds, and the politicians are happy, they do what they want. That is why we keep having wars and repeating them."

It also provides bitterly vivid proof of this way of thinking. After he published the book, he was contacted by a girl from Novi Sad who was born in the same way as him, during the war rape in Bosnia. However, she was adopted in Serbia and lives as an Orthodox believer. That's when he realized that even today, if he had been accepted by a family from Serbia, he would have grown up in a different religion and nationality. But he is convinced that it is completely unimportant: "We don't choose religion or nationality. But we choose to be human, and this book meant a lot to that girl, wherever she was."

Allen's eldest son is now the same age as he was when he learned the terrible truth about his origin. He plans to tell him everything, but says that luckily his child is not growing up in the same conditions, so he wouldn't understand much if he told him about his own childhood at this point. But the book will be "silent" on the shelf, when he is ready for it. Because it is important that everyone knows this story.