By the time the peace deal was reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, over 100,000 people had been killed, while more than two million were displaced in campaigns of organised ethnic cleansing.
Many would say that the Dayton deal came too late. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces had overrun the designated United Nations ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, killing some 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in massacres that multiple court rulings since have classified as genocide.
The deal also cemented the country in which Dzaferovic and Brasnjic live in today, with its complex system of ethnic-power sharing among Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs. It also created two autonomous entities, one predominantly Serb, the other shared by Bosniaks and Croats but itself divided into 10 cantons, each with its own government.
Dzaferovic says he is satisfied with his life today.
“My biggest wish was that my two daughters would graduate and be able to choose what kind of work they are going to do. They both have, and they are both working now,” he said.
“When it comes to that, I made it as a man after the war,” he added.
Nevertheless, he is angry at the politicians who did not manage to grant proper status to the victims of wartime torture, of which he is one; “angry at the state that doesn’t treat former fighters fairly”.
Dzaferovic and other former prisoners of war do not have any kind of special status in the legislation of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the entity in which he lives, despite what they suffered during the conflict.
“When the war started, I’d already made peace with the fact that I might die, just like many others have,” he said.
“But I was not expecting that, despite the fact that many lost their lives on the battlefield, we would still be looking for a way to be acknowledged three decades later,” he added.
For Brasnjic, the war still haunts the present too, in certain ways.
“My kid sometimes has questions about what happened during the war, and I try to explain it to him the best I can,” she said. She explained that her boy knows “what happened in Srebrenica and other places, in accordance with his age”.
However, she added: “What I try to do is to teach him not to hate, to not have prejudices or to say that any person is a bad person just because of their nationality.”