RIZVANOVICI, Bosnia, August. 16, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – After having lost their husbands to the 1992-95 war, Bosnian Muslim women bury the backbreaking burden of making ends meet.

"Men from almost every house were killed. There is no one to help us," Faiza Svraka, 53, told Agence France Presse (AFP) Tuesday, August 16.

Muslim women in the tiny village of Rizvanovici are doing man's work from plowing land, cutting grass to rebuilding flattened houses.

"I've already cut firewood for winter. Women here do not have any other choice," Faiza said while cutting grass with her scythe.

Ten years after the end of the war, ruins in the village remain as a gloomy reminder of the horror practiced by the Serb forces.

The village, located outside the northwestern town of Prijedor, is only one of many places in Bosnia portraying the hell Muslims suffered at the hands of the Serbs.

As children in white stood among rows of coffins, survivors commemorated on Monday, July 11, the 10th anniversary of Srebrenica massacre, while the West regretted its failure to prevent Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.

At least 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in Srebrenica when Bosnian Serb forces and irregular Serbian police units backed by Belgrade overran the town, which was supposed to be a UN-protected "safe area".

The massacre, in the final months of a 43-month war that claimed 200,000 lives, aimed to ensure there were no Muslims to fight back or reclaim Serb-occupied land or homes in the future.

Returning to their devastated village, Muslim women, seeing no job prospects ahead, are building polythene greenhouses and growing vegetables just to earn living.

"There is no employment here. I do not have a choice, if there was no job at the greenhouse I do not know how I would be able to provide for the family," said Mina Velic, a mother of two, while dressed in a modest skirt and flower-dappled torn up shirt.

Returning home after work, the 46-year-old Mina still has to finish work on her recently rebuilt house.

"My husband was killed in the woods over there, and my father-in-law in front of the house," she said, holding their photos and showing a forest on the outskirts of the village.

Most of the female Muslim returnees working in the greenhouses are aged between 30 and 50.

But this does not bar old women from joining, forced by their hell-circumstance.

"My pension is very small and after I spend it I come here and work," said 74-year-old Nadja Harambasic.

"The worst was at the beginning when we did not have an irrigation system, then each woman had to carry in a 10-liter can up to 500 liters of water per day," she recalled.

The Muslim returnees are aware that it is going to take a lot of time before life returns to normal.

"Without these greenhouses there would be no sustainable return," Nasiha Svraka said.

"For many, many years this village and women here will be dependent on these greenhouses, as there is nowhere else they could look for a job."

Television scenes of starved people behind barbed wire in Prijedor's notorious Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje prison camps were a shock to the world in 1992, recalling memories of World War II.

According to Izvor, a local NGO, 3,227 non-Serbs, mostly Muslims, went missing from Prijedor at the outbreak of war, including 228 women and 123 children.

So far some 1,600 bodies have been exhumed, but only half of them have been identified.

"When they (Serb forces) attacked the village, (Muslim) men were taken out of houses and a number of them were immediately killed, and others were taken to prison camps of Omarska, Trnopolje and Keraterm," Nasiha Svraka, 35, recalled.