Thirteen years ago the United States embarked on a long-delayed effort to stop the Bosnian war, which eventually killed at least a quarter of a million victims in three-sided hostilities that involved Serbs, Croats and Muslims. Finally the ghastly massacre of 6,000 to 7,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica forced the world to get involved.
The Srebrenica murders represented the largest slaughter of unarmed civilians in Europe since the end of World War II. Even today victims are still being unearthed in mass graves, some in small groups where they were captured, others in larger numbers where they evidently were bound, blindfolded, then mercilessly shot or even bludgeoned to death.
For years the Serbs tried to conceal the murders, in some cases throwing their victims into rivers or reburying them in deeper graves where they could not easily be found.
What was obviously a war crime began when Serbian Army regulars overwhelmed the 370 poorly armed Dutch peacekeepers charged with protecting Srebrenica, a pocket of 40,000 Bosnian Muslims. Some of the Serbs then took uniforms from the Dutch troops and pretended to be the Bosnians’ Dutch protectors. Wherever they found the Muslims, they sent their women and children away in buses, but kept the men and boys. They tied them up, executed them on the spot or transported them in trucks to buildings where they were eventually massacred, all in a period of four days. The murders in Srebrenica and its environs took place in an isolated front not far from Serbia itself. As a result of the massacre, 10,000 US troops and airmen, along with forces from many other countries, joined together to eventually bring an end to the war.
US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Agreement, sought to establish a framework for peace among Bosnian Muslim, Croatian and Serb communities, to ensure that all this bloodshed was not in vain. In one particularly poignant instance, three Americans on Holbrooke’s negotiating team were killed when the military vehicle in which they were riding slipped off an icy road and fell into a ravine.
Today Srebrenica is located within the Bosnian Serb republic, an entity in the northern part of the country established at the time of the Dayton accords. Ten years after the massacre there, some 500 Bosnian Muslim men re-enacted the “march of death” through the woods where the men and boys were killed. Afterward, 40,000 people assembled for a memorial service commemorating those who died in Srebrenica. Serbian President Boris Tadic attended the memorial, laying a wreath in memory of the victims.
This writer visited Bosnia on July 3, 1992, traveling from the Rhine-Main Airport in Frankfurt, Germany to observe the vast international airlift then under way to bring food and medical relief supplies to the war-ravaged people of Bosnia.
Breaking through the clouds and rain that seemed to be a permanent part of the Bosnian landscape, our US Air Force C-130 Hercules propeller-driven transport aircraft landed at the besieged capital of Sarajevo with pinpoint accuracy. Within two minutes, and with the motors of the huge cargo plane idling, the giant pallets of supplies were unloaded onto the runway. Two French load handlers released the pallets to the ground, where they were lifted onto large trucks. The third pallet stuck, and an American loadmaster helped the French crewmembers steady it to the ground. The fourth and fifth pallets were then removed and, with no fuss or muss, the cargo plane taxied down the runway for the take-off and vanished into the clouds.
The entire process took 12 minutes, but the American loadmaster was beside him, because the split-second timing of scheduled arrivals had allowed for only eight minutes apiece, and the next plane had already descended. This continued throughout the daylight hours. Vast quantities of supplies helped the mostly Muslim inhabitants of Sarajevo survive what turned out to be a Serb siege of more than a thousand days. Planes were arriving from Germany, Italy and other European countries — all with split-second efficiency. My plane next landed in Split, Croatia, where new cargo pallets had been assembled and the aircraft was refueled.
There is a growing awareness among the general Serb population, particularly, that their past leaders are guilty of at least some of the crimes of which they have been accused. The wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo left hundreds of thousands dead and more than a million homeless. According to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Serbs were responsible for 90 percent of all the atrocities committed in Bosnia.
The best known of the war criminals, former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, has been on trial for four years at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. Still being sought are Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, and his military counterpart, Gen. Ratko Mladic. Although both have been seen in Serbia, and along the border between Bosnia and Montenegro, they have yet to be apprehended. Karadzic’s wife recently made an impassioned televised appeal to her husband to turn himself in.
Under international pressure, Serbia and Bosnian Serb authorities lately have expanded their cooperation with The Hague tribunal. Several other war crimes suspects have turned themselves in. Failure to assist in the capture or surrender of the two most prominent indicted war criminals of the Bosnian war and turn them over to the international tribunal likely would slow down or even end Serbia and Bosnia’s hopes for EU membership.
Eight Serbian human rights groups have drafted a declaration on Srebrenica that would obligate the country’s government to confess to the massacre and to “expose and punish all ideological justification of crime.” Unfortunately, the Serbian daily newspaper Blik has reported, the majority of parties in Serbia’s Parliament have refused not only to endorse the declaration but also to debate it.
Summing up this period 10 years ago, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said at a commemoration event in July, “Srebrenica will forever haunt the world.”
— Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
