ILIJAS, Bosnia — In July 1995, Mevludin Oric lay for hours under a pile of corpses while Bosnian Serb soldiers killed thousands of his fellow Muslims in the fields around Srebrenica. Ten years after he narrowly escaped Europe’s worst massacre in 50 years, he is still waiting to see Bosnian Serb wartime military chief Ratko Mladic put on trial.
“How is it possible they still can’t arrest him? Ten years is a long time,” Oric said days before the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys on July 11.
Mladic and his political master Radovan Karadzic are indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague for genocide over the massacre and the 43-month siege of Sarajevo. Both men are still at large, believed to be protected by hard liners in Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia’s Serb Republic.
“Like Bosnia is as big as America and they can’t find him,” the skinny 35-year-old told Reuters, sitting on a hill above the town of Ilijas where he lives with his four children and mother on $75 welfare a month.
He left his village in the UN “safe area” of Srebrenica after the eastern enclave fell to Bosnian Serb hands on July 11. With his father, cousin and other relatives, he joined the men trying to escape through the woods.
His wife and children rushed to the UN compound near the town with thousands of panicked civilians, expecting protection from the Dutch peacekeepers.
In the woods, he dodged artillery shelling and sniper fire. He was caught by Serb troops two days later and was among 2,500 Muslims taken to a school in the eastern village of Grbavci. Oric says he saw the notorious Bosnian Serb general at the door of the school gym where the captives were crammed, moments before they were led away to be executed. “People whispered: Look, it’s Mladic. There he stood with his bodyguards, looking over the gym, laughing,” Oric recalls.
Oric thought Mladic came to arrange the exchange or transfer of prisoners. But after he left, soldiers blindfolded the detainees and started loading them on trucks. They drove them in groups to a nearby field and ordered them to line up.
“Then it was all clear to me. They waited for his order. After he left, they started killing,” Oric said. He told his cousin to stick with him and hold his hand.
“Just as I said they wouldn’t kill us, we heard machine-gun fire and my cousin fell. I also fell although I wasn’t shot.”
He lay beneath his cousin’s body for hours, while the soldiers brought new groups of captives and executed them.
“When I saw all those people killed, then I thought: I can die as well,” Oric said. Then he fainted. When he came round, he heard machines digging the mass grave. He was afraid he would be buried alive. But late at night, the soldiers left and Oric crawled out from a pile of dead bodies.
“When I got up, I saw hundreds of dead bodies piled up on top of each other,” Oric remembered. “I begun to scream and cry, I could not control myself anymore.”
A shadow of another survivor emerged in moonlight. The two of them ran into the woods and found Bosnian government army forces on July 21. Oric still has flash-backs every night. “The suffering is the only thing that is left. We suffered in Srebrenica, we suffer today,” said Oric, who is unemployed.
“I expect from Mladic, once he is in The Hague, to tell the truth, say where the mass graves are. My father is still missing.”
Other survivors also remember the massacre. Fadila Efendic knelt beside her husband’s grave, spread her palms in a prayer, and cried out loud: “Why did he have to die so brutally? Where is my dear son’s body so I can at least bury him?”
Efendic will be among thousands of Bosnian Muslim women who lost husbands, sons and brothers who will attend commemorations today marking the 10th anniversary of the Bosnian Serb onslaught on Srebrenica.
“My husband Hamed was buried without his head, meaning he was decapitated by the killers,” Efendic said, her voice trembling. “And I never found the body of my 15-year-old son who fled to the woods with him.”
Efendic, 54, recalls the harrowing events that started on July 11, 1995.
“It was complete chaos and panic among us,” Efendic said. “Most of the women fled from Srebrenica to this Dutch base” in the abandoned car battery factory in Potocari, a hamlet some 10 kilometers north of Srebrenica.
“Most of the men went to the woods and mountains,” Efendic said. “I told my son Fejzo, who although only 15 was big and strong like a real man, to come with me to Potocari. But, he said: ‘Mother, the Serbs will kill me there. I look like I’m mature enough to be a soldier.”’
She said Dutch troops, who were supposed to protect the UN-declared “safe zone,” did nothing to protect them in Potocari.
