Mila Jankovic was 17 years old when life as she knew it changed forever. She discovered that everything she thought she understood about herself was wrong — and it made her want to die.
Raised in Belgrade as a Serb girl since the early 1990s, Mila — whose name means “sweet” or “kind” — was told she was really Senida Becirovic, a Muslim girl born in eastern Bosnia who had been reported missing since the start of Bosnia’s bloody 1992-1995 war that pitted Serbs, Muslims and Croats against each other.
She had always known she was a foster child, but the reality of her origins came as a shock when she finally met her biological father.
“My father Muhamed came and told me my real name, that I was not Mila, that I am Senida,” the girl said, recalling the episode in 2008.
It was Serbian social services that matched her DNA samples with that of her real father. She was told they would meet only a few hours before it happened. When they were face to face, the man told Mila who she really was.
“At that moment I felt I’d rather be killed than to be told this,” said the girl, now 19 years old.
She is one of more than 2,000 children estimated to have gone missing during the conflict in Bosnia, according to Bosnia’s Institute for Missing Persons. Remains of “approximately half of them were found, many in mass graves,” Lejla Cengic of the Institute said.
Mila is the only case they know of of a missing child found alive.
For the teenager, dealing with the brutality of her past is difficult.
“I do not know what to feel. I blame Serbs because they left me without my mother and sister. On the other hand, the two people who raised me and gave me their best are also Serbs, and I am glad to have met them,” she said.
As a nine-month-old baby, she was found alone in a burning house when Bosnian Serbs conquered her home village of Ceparde in eastern Bosnia in April 1992. Dozens of Muslim civilians, including women and children like Mila’s mother and three-year-old sister, were taken from the devastated village and have never been found.
In Mila’s case, a Serb soldier rescued her and took her to his mother in a nearby village. After a few months of being moved around from one person to the next, a Serbian reporter wrote a story about the foundling for the Belgrade-based Politika daily. The Jankovics, an elderly, middle-class couple from Belgrade, read the article, came to Vlasenica to offer themselves as foster parents, and named her Mila.
Her mother Senada, just 24 years old at the time of the attack, and her sister are still missing. Her father Muhamed survived by chance, because he was in a different town at the time of the attack.
Mila set out to discover what happened during the war and found that the Serb soldier who rescued her, Milenko Vidakovic, was killed a few months after taking her to safety.
Mila has since chosen to move to Sarajevo with her biological mother’s family to get to know them better, but has failed to establish a close relationship with her father, who lives in Germany.
Her mission is to find out the fate of her mother and sister.
She confesses that she misses her foster family, the Jankovics, whom she calls grandmother and grandfather.
“It does not matter who your biological parents are, but who raises you,” Mila said, smiling warmly as she talked about the Serbian couple.
“I would like to be cloned so one Mila can stay here in Sarajevo and another one can go to Belgrade and take care of them,” she said sadly. “The truth is you should be a good person. If you are a good man your nationality is not important.”
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