Srebrenica: Haunted By 8,000 Ghosts

A decade after the worst European massacre since World War II, the lush valleys around this cursed town continue to spew out the dead.

Skeletons emerge from mass graves like grotesque perennials among wild flowers on verdant sunny slopes.

The latest crop of jumbled bones was found last week in the nearby village of Budak, where forensic experts believe the remains of 100 people are buried.

Ask any Bosnian Muslim in this sad town and they'll point to several directions where death is being uncovered with shovels and picks.

In Srebrenica, the July, 1995, massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims by ethnic Serbs hasn't yet passed into the buffered confines of memory.

It continues to be lived in the search for 6,000 victims still missing, through the daily sightings of war criminals walking the streets, and the recent TV broadcast of the first video evidence of the slaughter.

"I don't know why the world is making a big deal about the 10th anniversary of the massacre," says Hatidza Mehmedovic, 53, who hasn't seen her husband and two sons since Serb forces entered the town July 11, 1995.

"Maybe the world wants to commemorate its shame, the fact that it watched all these people vanish and did nothing.

"For us, our pain today is no less than our pain 10 years ago. Every day is sad and awful."

Mehmedovic stands tense with anger in the Potocari cemetery, where most of the massacred are buried once bones are identified through DNA.

Today, international dignitaries and thousands of survivors will attend a commemorative ceremony where the latest identified from mass graves — 610 victims, including Mehmedovic's nephew — will be buried.

So far, 2,079 Muslim victims have been identified. The green wooden markers on their graves rise like symbols of the town's "safe haven" status the United Nations failed to defend.

Little has changed here since the end of the 1992-1995 civil war, fought when Bosnian Serbs rejected the Muslim and Croat vote for an independent Bosnia.

The wartime "ethnic cleansing" of Muslims hasn't been significantly reversed, despite the international community exercising ultimate authority over the country through the Office of the High Representative and 7,000 European soldiers.

Before the war, some 37,000 people lived in the Srebrenica district, 75 per cent of them Muslims and 23 per cent Serbs. Today, 8,000 people live in the area, only 1,500 of them Muslim returnees.

Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic — wanted for genocide by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague — remain on the run.

Serb residents either flatly deny the massacre occurred, insist the number of dead is exaggerated, or seem to want to justify it by stressing earlier and much smaller killings of Serbs.

Last week, a news release from the Republika Srpska, a Bosnian Serb regional government whose territory includes Srebrenica, announced the inauguration of a monument tomorrow to Serbs killed by Muslims. It said nothing about the Srebrenica ceremony today.

"I don't know if there was a massacre," says Dragan Nikolic, 50, a Bosnian Serb municipal councillor in the nearby town of Bratunac.

"Maybe some individuals did something, but it wasn't organized revenge," says Nikolic, whose brother, Drago, is being tried in The Hague for his alleged role in the massacre.

Nikolic says Muslims and Serbs are living together in Bosnia only because the international community forces them to. "I'm worried that the worst is yet to come," he says.

If mass graves aren't convincing enough, a chilling video aired recently has made denial a far more difficult attitude for Serbs in both Bosnia and Serbia.

The video shows Serbian forces torturing and executing six Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica in July, 1995. The killers are members of a Serbian police unit and their "home movie" is being used to help prosecute former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague.

When the video was first broadcast June 2, Suada Salkic, 37, was sitting in her tidy living room on the outskirts of the capital Sarajevo. The frightened image of her 16-year-old brother, his hands bound behind his back, suddenly looked out at her from the evening news.

"I felt completely lost," says Salkic. "It's almost as though he was looking to be saved."

"He looked like he couldn't believe that anyone could do such a thing," says her husband, Osman, 39. "He was only a child."

In one scene, the victims are lying face down and Salkic's brother, Asmir Alispahic, is the second from the right. Later, he's the first to be shot several times in the back.

The day the massacre began, Salkic and her mother had joined 5,000 Muslims taking refuge at the Dutch UN base. When Mladic's forces entered Srebrenica, the Dutch surrendered their weapons and watched Serb soldiers separate the men from the women.

Osman and Asmir joined a column of 10,000 to 15,000 men hoping to march to safety through the forests. Some were Bosnian Muslim soldiers, but many were civilians. Fewer than 4,000 made it out alive.

Osman lost sight of Asmir July 12, when artillery shells and machinegun fire sliced through the trees and tore people to pieces, sending thousands scattering in a chaotic panic.

"The woods turned into a slaughterhouse," Osman says.

The shooting went on for days. Exhausted, hungry and desperate, some Muslims committed suicide. Others went mad and began killing other Bosnian Muslims, suspecting them of being Serbs in disguise.

Thousands walked out of the woods and surrendered. Many were killed immediately while others were herded into soccer stadiums, schools or warehouses. According to witnesses, they were then placed on trucks and taken to secluded sites to be shot and buried. The process was systematic and ruthless.

Osman got lucky. He was near the front of the column, where the most experienced Muslim soldiers were placed, and managed to reach the Muslim-held territory around Tuzla, north of Srebrenica, in seven days.

The next time he saw Asmir was in 2003, when the International Commission on Missing Persons called him to a morgue. They opened a body bag and showed him a few bones, three buttons from Asmir's jeans, and the wire used to bind his wrists.

"I feel guilty," Osman says. "I keep saying to myself, 'Maybe if I had held him closer to me, held onto him the whole time, he would still be alive.'"