The Story of the Man Who Filmed the Burning of the Vijećnica - Mulahuseinović: It's Hard to Talk About, the Fire Melted Stone!

(Patria) - Fahrudin Mulahuseinović, war cameraman for Hayat Television, who directly filmed the burning of the Vijećnica with phosphorus grenades from Borije, was a guest on Hayat Television's program.

„It is always very difficult for me to talk about it, because I am emotionally attached to the Vijećnica, I was born in its immediate vicinity, and this experience, even after 30 years, is not at all easy,“ Fahrudin Mulahuseinović says honestly at the very beginning.

„It is rare that a cameraman gets the opportunity to be in the right place at the right time. In this case, it cannot be called luck, but at that moment I found myself in three positions that defined my work. I filmed the Vijećnica burning, I filmed the first massacre at the market in February 1993, and I filmed the last massacre in 1995. It is hard to carry that within oneself, to think about it, but I cannot talk about that event without mentioning my late colleague Hakija Hadžalić. He was working for Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time and he also filmed the Vijećnica.

He was an exceptional man, and I cannot talk about this without mentioning him. I, and I believe it is still in the archives, filmed those three grenades that were fired at the Vijećnica that day, and they were already burning in the air, and with surgical precision they entered the dome and caused chaos. I witnessed how stone melts from that temperature. There was no electricity then, it was difficult to charge the camera batteries, I tried to film as much footage as possible, the firefighters arrived, but they had no water to put out the fire, and all the while we were being targeted by a sniper from Zlatište... It was very difficult,“ says Fahrudin Mulahuseinović, adding that at those moments he was not afraid for his own life.