50,000 will mark Srebrenica, but the bitterness still
endures
By Peter Popham in Srebrenica
Published: 11 July 2005

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article298332.ece

Thousands of people converge this morning on the
mining town of Srebrenica in the hills of eastern
Bosnia to commemorate the worst act of genocide in
Europe since the Second World War: the cold-blooded
killing of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by the army of
the Bosnian Serbs.

Remembering Srebrenica has now become a thriving
industry: this week there are conferences, there are
books, there are memorial stones in the field where
many were killed and where today almost 600 are
finally to be given a decent burial. The ceremony is a
way of committing theSrebrenica atrocities to the
past.

"May grief become hope, may revenge become justice,
may mothers' tears become prayers, that Srebrenica
never happens again," reads one of the stones.

Among the hundreds of flimsy wooden grave markers, the
Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, Serbia's President
Boris Tadic, Bosnia's high representative, Paddy
Ashdown, and many other dignitaries will bow their
heads today, assenting to the view that Srebrenica's
atrocities belong to history, as irrevocably as VE
Day.

But for many this is a story which lacks an ending.
Srebrenica is not in the past. It is still going on.

A few miles up the road from the memorial is the
village of Kravica. By the side of the main road is a
cluster of nondescript modern barns. There is nothing
to draw attention to them, no plaque or monument. Yet
if Srebrenica were truly in the past, there would be
some sort of memorial. The memory of the hundreds
killed here demands no less.

The Bosnian Serb guards ordered them into the barn,
writes David Rohde in Endgame, his Pulitzer
Prize-winning account of the massacre, "and it was a
relief for the prisoners to get out of the sun. But
having so many men crammed into one space was
claustrophobic. The men closest to the door were
probably puzzled when they saw the Serbs raise their
rifles ...

"The Serbs suddenly opened fire and then threw hand
grenades ... Chaos erupted ... After five minutes
there was a lull in the firing. Piles of corpses, or
what was left of them, lay strewn across the concrete
floor."

But today the barn is just a barn. Hay and horse
droppings lie on the concrete floor. The barn is
firmly in the territory of the Republika Srpska, the
Serbian entity for which the soldiers who committed
the atrocities were fighting, and whose legitimacy was
confirmed in the Dayton peace agreement that ended the
war. A few hundred yards down the road, the Serbs have
built a memorial to their own dead, a concrete cross
15 feet high surrounded by smaller crosses. It will be
inaugurated tomorrow, in a ceremony competing for
attention with today's.

"It's a memorial to the 3,500 Serb victims of the war,
"killed in every way," said a local man sitting with
his friends admiring the monument. "This was a
completely destroyed area. Reconciliation with the
Muslims? It'll never happen, because everyone blames
us for war crimes. Nobody cares about our own
victims."

Then he remembered something. "Al-Qa'ida came to
London, didn't they? Now let's see what nice things
you write about the Muslims!" He and his friends
laughed heartily.

The poison of Srebrenica has not been drained, the
boil has yet to be lanced. Survivors of the massacre
arriving in Srebrenica this morning will be acutely
aware that many of the people who executed their
kinsmen are still at large in these villages. Ratko
Mladic, the Serb general who ordered the executions,
"six feet tall, barrel-chested and overweight, his
face bright red and as wide as a shovel", is still at
liberty. The " justice" invoked on the memorial stone
is so far just a pious hope.

And it is not only the Bosnian Serbs who did the
killing who have cheated justice. The Serbs were free
to commit genocide because the UN peacekeepers in
charge of guarding the "safe area" meekly handed the
Muslims over to them.

Hasan Nuhanovic, who worked as an interpreter for the
Dutch peacekeepers for the three years in which the
town was under siege, believes that the Dutch soldiers
to blame should also be brought to justice. With a
Dutch legal firm he is pursuing the possibility of
prosecuting the officers who were in charge.
"Complicity in war crimes is what I would choose as
the charge," he says.

Ever since the massacre, debate has raged as to why
the outside world allowed it to happen and who or what
was to blame: the UN, the governments of Britain,
France, Germany and the US, or the weak and ambiguous
mandate under which the Dutch served.

But for Mr Nuhanovic, who saw the disaster unfold and
who lost his father, mother and brother, there is no
doubt about the culpability of the Dutch. He has
mustered his own memories, the accounts of
peacekeepers and officials, and the arguments that he
believes nail the Dutch, in a fat book entitled The
Role of International Factors in Srebrenica, published
here last Friday.

The Dutch, he maintains, had no excuse for not
realising what the Bosnian Serbs' intention because
the same thing had happened in this area three years
before. "In May 1992, Bosnian Serb forces rounded up
the Muslim population of Bratunac and villages around
and brought them to the football field," he writes.
Bratunac is five kilometres north of Srebrenica.

After the women and small children had been sent away,
he goes on, "in the nearby primary school the Bosnian
Serb forces tortured and executed up to 1,000 Bosnian
males. Their bodies were buried in mass graves ...
Many other villages had the same or similar fate
during the spring of 1992 ... The pattern of killings
showed that the main intention of the Bosnian Serb
authorities was the elimination and liquidation of the
entire Bosnian Muslim male population in the region."

Yet when Serb forces approached the town in July 1995,
the Dutch did not fire a single shot to try to deter
them. When the terrified population flocked to the
Dutch base, a disused battery factory north of the
town, the Dutch admitted 5,000, but prevented a
further 25,000 from entering because, they claimed,
the base was now overcrowded ­ "an outrageous
falsehood", Mr Nuhanovic says.

He blames the Dutch not for passivity but for active
complicity. "Not because the Dutch battalion did not
do enough, or because it did nothing, but because it
did a number of things that were wrong," he writes. "
We are speaking not of passive responsibility but of
active responsibility ... The conduct ranged from
common cowardice via lack of interest and concern, all
the way to complicity in the crime."

Mr Nuhanovic documents several cases in which the
Dutch saw and reported Muslims being killed in front
of their eyes near their camp. They forced the
refugees to leave, he says, "when the killings were
already going on ... The Dutch forcibly expelled 5,000
people into the hands of their executioners."

Right outside the camp's gate, the refugees were
separated by sex: women and children to be deported to
safety, the men to be killed. And to make it easier
for their executioners, he says, the Dutch frisked the
Muslims on the way to their deaths in, to make sure
they were not carrying knives.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Serbs turn their backs on their past

Ten years on, as the dead are finally buried, battles
still rage over Srebrenica

Ian Traynor in Srebrenica
Monday July 11, 2005
The Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1525572,00.html

As the convoy of lorries trundled through torrents and
thunderstorms over the hills of eastern Bosnia into
Srebrenica, Mando was puzzled by one thought.
"What's all the fuss about?" shrugged the young
Srebrenica Serb yesterday as the town swelled with
Bosnian mourners.

The lorries bore a distressing cargo - body parts and
corpses of some 600 victims of the massacre, finally
to be buried today 10 years to the week after they
were killed in the terrible denouement to the 1992-95
Bosnian war.

The coffins were unloaded and laid out in rows in the
vast hall of a disused car battery factory ready for
burial this morning. The green boxes were instantly
swamped by sobbing headscarved women seeking some form
of closure after a decade of praying for the recovery
of their loved ones.
"This is all just a publicity stunt," snorted Mando,
28. "Sure, people were killed, but why make all this
noise? There were 3,600 Serbs killed here. Some say
8,000 Muslims were killed, that it was genocide. But
the figures are exaggerated. No one knows the truth.
That's a game for kids. All this fuss just gives me a
sore head."

Like many of the Serbs of Srebrenica, Mando still
cannot face the truth about his small home town a
decade after the Serbs murdered up to 8,000 Bosnian
Muslim males within a week in what many see as the
gravest political massacre in Europe in the second
half of the 20th century.

Tens of thousands of mourners - relatives of the
victims, international dignitaries, local politicians,
and western charity workers - will gather in
Srebrenica today to mark the onset of the massacre on
a Tuesday in July 1995 when General Ratko Mladic, the
Bosnian Serb commander, swaggered into the Muslim
enclave and announced to more than 40,000 hungry
refugees that no one would be harmed.

They had been herded into the mountain enclave,
besieged, shelled and starved for almost three years.
Gen Mladic's forces then overran the pocket as Dutch
UN peacekeepers feebly stood aside.

The general handed out sweets to the children and then
launched a finely calibrated programme of mass murder,
for which he faces charges of genocide at the war
crimes tribunal in The Hague, although he remains a
fugitive from justice, a spectre haunting today's
ceremonies.

"He's our military leader. I have his picture on my
wall," said Dalibor Tanasijevic, 23, another
Srebrenica Serb. "There's not a single document to
show that Mladic ordered the killings."

In the run-up to today's anniversary ceremonies the
Serbian campaign of denial has moved into overdrive,
reaching to the very top of the democratically elected
government in Belgrade.

In what western diplomats in the Serbian capital
described as a disgrace, the Serbian parliament was
unable to agree on a statement condemning the crime.

Last week the government of prime minister Vojislav
Kostunica finally released a statement deploring war
crimes and equating the Srebrenica massacre with the
killings of Serbs in the region during the Bosnian
war.

The aim was not to excuse or justify Srebrenica, but
to relativise and belittle a crime which judges in The
Hague have classified as genocide, the sole such event
in the Yugoslav wars of the 90s to warrant that
category.

"Ach, genocide," snorts Mando. "Who knows?"

At the weekend in Belgrade thousands of Serbs gathered
in a conference hall to watch a film called The Truth
with a Wagner soundtrack and to claim that the Serbs
were the real victims. A Belgrade newspaper recently
published a 16-page supplement entitled The Book of
the Dead, listing 3,287 Serbs from the Srebrenica
region who died during the Bosnian war.

The guns may have long fallen silent in Bosnia. But
history, ancient and modern, remains a battlefield in
which statistics are potent weapons.

While Belgrade's committee for the Serbian victims of
the Yugoslav wars continues to contest the numbers for
the Srebrenica massacre, the village of Kravica
outside Srebrenica is to stage a commemoration
tomorrow, timed to compete with today's ceremonies.

A monumental concrete Orthodox cross has been built in
Kravica in memory of the Serbs who died there during
the war. Unmentioned is the fact that a farm warehouse
along the road in the same village was the venue for
the summary execution that week in July of up to 1,200
of the Muslim males rounded up after the fall of
Srebrenica.

"They should be deeply ashamed of themselves, before
their god, their families, everything," said Asim
Sehic, 65, a Srebrenica Muslim who now lives in
Sarajevo.

He returned to his native town this weekend to bury
his son, Mustafa, today among the green wooden stakes
and freshly dug graves of the special Potocari
cemetery opposite the disused car battery plant that
was the Dutch peacekeepers' base in 1995 and then the
stage for Gen Mladic's triumphant strutting.

Yesterday the cemetery was invaded by keening women
squatting by the open pits, whispering Koranic verse
and able at last to tend the graves of husbands,
brothers and sons among the 600 victims unearthed from
mass graves, identified through painstaking DNA
matching techniques.

"They just lie all the time, the Serbs. I don't know
how they can live with themselves," said one woman who
did not want to give her name.

Fadil Ikanovic, 47, who is among hundreds of Bosnian
Muslims who have returned to live in Srebrenica or
surrounding villages, lost a cousin and three brothers
in the massacre. A brother is to be buried this
morning.

He points up the hill into the thickly wooded slopes.

"My house is up there, totally destroyed. It's just
forest now. I'm living with a cousin.

"We don't talk to the Serbs, there's no relations. At
first they threatened us when we came back. Now we
just live our lives and they live theirs."

Massacred in safe area

· The massacre began on July 11 1995 when thousands of
Muslim men and boys were taken by Bosnian Serb troops
from the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica

· UN prosecutors say between 7,000 and 8,000 people
were killed, a Bosnian Serb government report put the
figure at at least 7,779, and the Bosnian Muslim
missing persons commission says it is more than 8,374

· 42 mass graves have been excavated. Experts estimate
there may be another 22 locations in the area around
Srebrenica

· So far, 2,070 victims have been identified. More
than 7,000 body bags with full or partial remains
await identification through DNA matching with
surviving relatives. Identification is hard: bodies
were broken up by excavators that bulldozed them into
mass graves. Bodies were also moved from the original
graves to secondary locations to conceal the crime

· The UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague has charged
19 people in connection with the massacre. Six have
been sentenced, 10 are being tried or await trial and
three are at large, including Bosnian Serb wartime
leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander,
Ratko Mladic
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Srebrenica Muslims bury the dead
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4670379.stm

Bosnia remembers massacre
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0711/p06s01-woeu.htm





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