New Galway Utd man tells of family’s flight from genocide
It was one of the few dry days in close to three months when Galway United unveiled their new Swedish centre-back, Armin Aganovic, in the Connacht Hotel recently.
The 21-year-old had returned to Galway two days earlier, having previously spent a week in the city, getting to know his new team-mates and his new ‘home’, and he laughed when asked what he thought about the near horizontal rain he endured on his first trip to the wet and windy west.
“The positive thing is I will never need sun cream, it’s a money saver straight away! I was surprised by the weather, I have never seen that much rain in my while life, but it’s okay, I don’t mind. My family has a saying – after every rain comes the sunshine . . . though I am not sure that happens in Galway.”
He laughs as he says that, but there is a more serious note to the origins of those first six words, which trace back to a time just before he was born. His parents, dad Emir and mother Asima, along with their young son, Adi, were forced to flee their home in Bosnia as war – and genocide – swept through the region following the break-up of Yugoslavia. They fled to Sweden, where Armin was born a few months later.
“My family, like thousands of others, was forced out of our home in 1993, and my parents and my older brother, Adi along with other members of the family – they fled to Sweden, and I was born there in 1994,” he explains.
His family are originally from Sanski Most, a town in the north west of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a region that was one of six constituent republics that were joined together to form the new country, known as Yugoslavia, after the end of World War I.
There were constant ethnic tensions within Yugoslavia, and these came to the fore following the death of dictator, Josef Tito, in 1980.
After a decade of matters simmering just beneath the surface, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence in 1991, despite the efforts of the Yugoslav government to prevent the country fragmenting and ruling the declarations as illegal.
War soon broke out between different ethnic groups, starting in 1991 and lasting for a decade, and it is estimated that 140,000 people lost their lives in the various conflicts in what was Europe’s bloodiest and deadliest conflict since WWII.
When Yugoslavia split up, Sanski Most was given to the Bosnian-Croat Federation, but it was occupied by Serb forces from 1992 to 1995, when it was freed by the Bosnian army.
Hundreds of people lost their lives in the town, and hundreds more were forced to flee with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
“Yes, I lost family members in the war, just like every family in Bosnia. My brother remembers a little bit about the war unfortunately. I am the youngest across the extended family, so everyone [in my family] remembers the war.
“I will always have that [his family’s history] with me, but life goes on, you have to fight for everything. Not everyone could escape, but a big part of the family moved to Sweden, and some moved to Germany. Some of my family did move back to Bosnia but not many, it is still a country that is affected by war, unfortunately there is still a bit of tension there.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.