Why we can't bury the past

The Bosnian war raged from 1992 to 1995 as Yugoslavia crumbled. Under the communist rule of Tito, the Bosnian Muslims (known as Bosniaks) had co-existed in relative harmony with the predominantly Orthodox Christian Serbs and the mainly Catholic Croats. But as the region became increasingly unstable, ethnic tensions bubbled to the fore and war broke out between the three factions.

After Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991, all the signs were that Bosnia and Herzegovina would follow suit. Panicked, the Bosnian Serb minority held a referendum to express its support for remaining in union with Slobodan Milosevic’s rump state, which was now reduced to Serbia and Montenegro. When the Bosniak-led government declared independence in April 1992, the Bosnian Serbs proclaimed their own state, Republika Srpska, under the presidency of Radovan Karadzic. A bloody and brutal war was the inevitable outcome.

The conflict entered its gruesome endgame at Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, in July 1995, when more than 8000 Muslims were killed after the town fell to Serb forces. Nato responded with a three-week bombing campaign in August. Three months later the Dayton peace agreement ended the war. By then an estimated 100,000 civilians and soldiers had been killed and around 1.8 million refugees fled their homes, many of them victims of ethnic cleansing.

During the war, entire villages dotting the lush mountain landscape around Srebrenica were purged of their populations and reconstruction has been slow. Landmines are still scattered beneath the soil, as are the remains of thousands of men, slaughtered as they tried to flee. Many had been heading for Tuzla, the closest Bosnian-held town, 55km away across mountainous terrain, when Srebrenica was taken by General Ratko Mladic and his Bosnian Serb army on July 11, 1995.

Hasan Suljic is one of more than 50,000 of those dispossessed who fled to Srebrenica. When the town fell, Suljic and his Bosniak family joined the mass exodus snaking its way to a former battery factory in nearby Potocari, where Dutch UN forces had set up camp. Declared a UN “safe area”, it became the scene of the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War.

Suljic, a farmer who is now 73, was separated from his wife, daughter and two sons and taken to a village near Bijeljina where he stayed for two nights. “The Serb soldiers didn’t tell us where we were going,” he says. “They were shouting and swearing at us to get off the bus. They were tying people’s hands and then lining them up. Then they started shooting. When they had killed the first lot, they came back for the second lot on the truck.

“As soon as I heard the first shots I fell. I was lying there pretending I was dead. They asked if anyone was alive. Two people said, ‘I am alive,’ and they came and shot both of them. I didn’t say anything.”

Suljic waited for night to fall before making his escape. He estimates around 1500 people, including children and the elderly, were killed in the four days after July 11.

Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, trousers and black cap, Suljic shelters from the midday sun under a tree. His pale blue eyes are startling against a face scored by the sun and memories of what he has seen. His two sons were among those killed. “I witnessed people being tortured and I think about what my children must have gone through,” he says.

Four years ago, the remains of one of Suljic’s sons were found and he was buried at the memorial centre in Potocari. He buried his second son there a few weeks ago.

Suljic is now a refugee and, like thousands of others, is desperate to return to his own village near Srebrenica. “I really wanted to stay in Bosnia and die in Bosnia,” he says. “I want to tell people what really happened.”

The grinding process of bringing those responsible for the massacres to justice has in many instances conspired to prolong the suffering of families. While those killed in the war included Serb and Muslim soldiers, and civilians across Bosnia and Herzegovina, the majority were Muslims. What happened to the Muslims at Srebrenica has since been ruled as genocide by the International Court of Justice and the UN War Crimes Tribunal.

Karadzic and Mladic, the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serb separatist movement, were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague in July 1995 on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for their roles at Srebrenica. Karadzic was apprehended and transferred to The Hague by Serbian authorities on July 21, 2008. However, the continuing denials by the genocide’s perpetrators, and the continued evasion of justice by Mladic, add to the outrage that people here feel.

Much of the progress in identifying those responsible has come from video footage and witness statements. Footage taken by Serb soldiers and local camera crews shows disturbing scenes. For those trying to piece together the evidence, such recordings are vital but, for those whose loved ones are captured on film, finding out what became of their missing family member can be too much to bear.

One such woman is Hamifa Hejzovic. She sits on the grass outside her house, looking across the Drina river towards Serbia. “That’s where the soldiers came from,” she says.

When word spread that men were being taken and killed, Hejzovic’s husband and son tried to flee on foot while she and her daughter went to the UN camp at Potocari. “As we were leaving the camp the soldiers grabbed my daughter, who was 13,” recalls Hejzovic. “One soldier said, ‘She can stay, she is good-looking.’

“I told them I only had one child. I pleaded with them. They pushed her towards me. I fainted and found myself on the truck and was taken to the UN refugee camp at Tuzla.”

In the camp, Hejzovic and her daughter lived in cramped, insanitary conditions. After years as refugees, they were able to return to Srebrenica when a house was built for them by the Fund for Refugees, a charity established in 1992 by Lady Miloska Nott, the Slovenian-born wife of the former defence minister Lord John Nott. Hejzovic never saw her husband or son again, but word eventually filtered through that her son’s body had been found. “My daughter made coffee. She put a sedative pill in it and waited 15 minutes before she said, ‘Your little boy has been found.’ I started to cry. The next day we went for the identification. My daughter couldn’t sign the papers because his body was so badly burned.” Many bodies were burned after being shot; others were burned alive -- in large groups -- while locked in public buildings.

“We went to Potocari and buried what was left of him,” she says of her son. “Afterwards, I still believed the person I had buried was not my son; that he had managed to get away.”

Like many of Srebrenica’s women, Hejzovic wears a headscarf to signal that she has lost someone. She wrings her hands continually. “Later, I received a call from The Hague to come and talk,” she says. “They showed me pictures of a meadow with my son there.” The grainy image was a screen grab from a video showing the execution of a group of men who were lined up and shot one by one. “I saw that it was my son,” she recalls. “Paramilitary forces from Serbia had caught him. He was 16 years old.” She has a copy of the film which captures the final moments of her son’s life. Her friends and family have seen it but she cannot bring herself to watch it.

Despite everything that happened in the war, people are desperate to move back to their land in the mountain villages around Srebrenica. Over the past 17 years, the Fund for Refugees has raised over £3.5m and has built 101 homes, including Hejzovic’s, in the villages surrounding the town -- a feat that has allowed refugees to return from across Bosnia and Herzegovina where they had been living in refugee camps or provisional accommodation. The charity has a waiting list of thousands. The most recent of these homes was funded by Glasgow’s Muslim community and completed as part of Project Maja, a Conservative Party social action project which saw around 30 Conservative candidates and activists spend four days in the area recently. Other clusters of red-topped homes have been built by international organisations and charities.

For the returning refugees, it’s a home-coming marred with sadness. At the memorial centre in Potocari, the names of 8327 people are displayed. However, the remains of only 3500 have been reburied and the identification process continues.

Amra Begic, 31, buried her father just a few weeks ago. After 14 years his body was finally identified and she was able to lay him to rest in Potocari. While the moment offered a certain closure, the specifics of his death brought more pain to the family. Witnesses have described how, after shooting the victims, the perpetrators checked their bodies to see if they were dead. If not, they shot them with a single bullet to the head. Begic’s father had a gunshot wound in the centre of his forehead.

Her grandfather, who was 78, has still to be buried. “They found about 30 per cent of him in two separate mass graves,” she says. “One part was no longer than 5cm long. That’s why I say that the genocide is still going on, because we need to wait for the phone call from the International Commission on Missing Persons [ICPM] to say that they have found something else. Only when you have 70% of the body can you bury them at Potocari.”

At the ICPM centre in Tuzla, thousands of body bags contain remains awaiting identification using forensic technology. Those that can be verified are buried during an annual funeral service in Potocari held on July 11, the date on which the genocide began. This year a further 534 people were buried, the youngest a 14-year-old boy. This annual burying of the Muslim dead has become a flashpoint for ethnic tensions. In recent years, July 12, a traditional Serb holy day, has been turned into a celebration of Serbian war heroes -- the same people who stand accused of genocide.

While most of the bullet holes that once scarred buildings in Srebrenica have been filled, there are still pockets of desolate-looking empty houses sitting incongruously among brightly painted terraces which have been renovated since the war and are now festooned with window boxes -- a metaphor for an uneasy sort of normality.

It was not always this way in Srebrenica, a once prosperous silver-mining town. “We had a nice life here before the war, now I look around and it’s a dead town,” says Nermina Smajlovic, 49, a mother of three young sons, who used to work in newspaper advertising. “When people were leaving at the beginning of the war, my husband and brother said they wouldn’t leave because they hadn’t done anything. They said their relationship with their Serb friends was so good it was just impossible that anything could happen. We were like brothers and sisters. But it turned out another way.”

When Srebrenica fell, Smajlovic’s schoolteacher husband was killed as he tried to escape through the forest on the outskirts of the town. Unlike many refugees, Smajlovic, who returned in 2007, now has a roof over her head, but her tidy home is startlingly devoid of personal effects, as all her previous possessions were destroyed. The only image she has of her husband is a printed screen grab from a video taken by one of his pupils on a school trip.

She still greets her Serb neighbours, but no longer has Serb friends. “Even today, I feel like I am encircled. I live in fear that something could happen, not for my own life but for the lives of my sons.”

While about 75% of people in Srebrinica were Muslim before the war, today the town is predominantly Serb. A Serbian flag flies in the local police station. The economic situation is dire: unemployment in Srebrenica is at 70% and foreign companies are reluctant to invest here. Smajlovic’s family scrapes by on her husband’s pension of £175 a month. “I’m not optimistic,”she says. “There are no jobs. We have young people here but they’re not doing anything. How can you have a family if you haven’t got a job?”

Mersa Mehanovic, 15, the youngest of seven children, was only months old when Srebrenica fell. Her father Mehemed ran for the forest while her mother Tahira made her way to the UN camp at Potocari with their seven children. Tahira, 50, feared that her youngest wouldn’t survive. “At one point I thought she was dead,” she says. “While we were walking I said I was just going to leave her but my family said not to, that she was still alive. I was carrying her and she was so hungry and thirsty and I couldn’t give her anything.”

“I was stopped by a Serbian soldier who asked me why she was crying. He said, ‘Do you want me to feed her?” I ran away because I saw another woman whose baby was thirsty and crying and he’d said, ‘Give it to me and I’ll give her food.’ She gave him the baby and he cut the baby’s head off.”

The family sheltered as refugees in a village school where there were 20 people living in each classroom and where there was an outbreak of hepatitis. The children survived the ordeal, but they never saw their father again and his remains have yet to be found.

Mehanovic’s family are originally from the village of Posnanichi, near Srebrenica, and they come back periodically to tend their land. For the past four years they have been living with another family in Sarajevo, but they can only stay for another year. Like many who have no memory of the bloodshed that they were born into, the topic of ethnicity is far less contentious for Mehanovic.

One factor which has incensed the Bosniak community is the European Union’s new visa regime, which allows Serbian citizens to travel to EU countries without a visa but excludes citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. While Bosnian Serbs can apply for Serbian nationality, entitling them to the same freedom of movement, and Bosnian Croats can do the same through Croatia, the Bosniaks have no such option.

The spiritual leader of the Islamic community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Grand Mufti Dr Mustafa Ceric, denounces the EU’s decision as “a crime against humanity” when I speak to him in the Begova mosque in Sarajevo. “After the arms embargo [on Muslim troops during the Bosnian war], now an embargo on free movement,” he says. “We feel like we are in a concentration camp again.”

Ceric says he has always preached moderation and a strong message of “no revenge”, but feels this may be ignored as Bosniaks feel increasingly victimised and isolated from the rest of the world.

In London, two weeks later, shadow foreign secretary William Hague voices similar concerns. “The atmosphere that is being allowed to prevail could easily bring some kind of violence and some kind of really serious disputes again, whatever form they take,” he says. “If Bosnia gets riven with that, it won’t be able to make progress on joining the EU, and then you end up with a hole in the heart of Europe.”

Hague travelled to Srebrenica in July to visit a group of Conservative party activists and candidates, including Richard Cook, East Renfrewshire candidate for Westminster, who were taking part in one of three international social action projects organised by the party. Tasks included supplying a computer suite for the secondary school in Srebrenica, which teaches both Serb and Bosniak children, and creating a football pitch in one of the villages. “We are genuinely concerned about Bosnia sliding backwards,” says Hague. “Theres no evidence that things will succeed in Bosnia without some outside pressure.”

Not for the first time in its long history, this beautiful land at the heart of Europe is a powder keg of tensions. The country is divided into two political entities: Republika Srpska, a predominantly Serb area where Srebrenica lies, and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is predominantly Bosniak and Croat. This division is compounded by a three-way presidency (one Bosniak, one Croat and one Serb) which together serve a four-year term.

The aftershocks of a savage war which cast neighbours as enemies continue to reverberate with every body retrieved from a mass grave. The diminished Muslim population in Srebrenica grows ever more fearful as growing ethnic and nationalist tensions threaten to drag the country back towards the darkest chapter in its history. Everyone I speak to, from the widows clutching keepsakes to the Grand Mufti in Sarajevo, from the parents who have lost children to the young people desperate to start work, repeats the same refrain emphatically: please don’t forget Srebrenica.

Some names have been changed.

Project Maja is a social action project undertaken by the Conservative Party and led by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Shadow Minister for Social Action and Community Cohesion. For more information visit www.conservatives.com .