Stripping Bare the Body by Mark Danner

Author:Mark Danner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Halfway through the baking afternoon, however, a silver-haired, bull-like figure in camouflage strode to the front of the crowd, which now numbered perhaps two thousand, and cupped his hands to his mouth. “You are welcome here,” shouted Ratko Mladic. “No one will harm you!”

You should have given yourselves up earlier. You shouldn’t have tried to go through the woods.

Look what your Alija has done to you. He destroyed you. You will be going to Bratunac and be spending the night there.

As he and his red command car visited each “interrogation and collection point” that afternoon and evening—and survivors have told of his speeches in virtually all of them—he gently rebuked the prisoners, established his godlike authority, then reassured them by offering a detail or two about their immediate futures. Mladic had crafted a psychological message that would keep alive what little hope the men may have had and thereby serve to ensure docile behavior. Hopelessness, after all, might bring desperation, and with it desperate acts. In this operation planning was extremely tight, deadlines unyielding; Mladic had no time for irritating little rebellions.

Now two sixty-foot-long trucks pulled up, and Serb troops packed aboard several hundred prisoners, shoulder to shoulder. After a short drive, the trucks stopped, and for several hours the men struggled to stay conscious in the suffocating darkness. At last the doors swung open, flashlight beams shone in, and the prisoners knew at once that Mladic had spoken the truth: They saw before them the faces of Serbs from Bratunac. These Serbs, most in civilian clothing, spoke kindly to any Muslims they knew and invited them to come down from the truck for a talk; they then began savagely beating them, and after a time they dragged their bodies away and the cowering prisoners heard shots. The Serbs returned, and the flashlight beams flickered among the faces again, searching for more.

Though they didn’t know it, a short while before General Mladic had made a second appearance before the surviving prisoners in the agricultural warehouse of Bratunac. By now, the Serbs with their knives and axes had killed an unknown number of men. General Mladic spoke to his officers and then supervised, hands on hips, as six buses pulled up to the warehouse and the troops loaded the surviving prisoners aboard.

Everywhere on the territory encircled by the “iron ring” that Mladic had built around Srebrenica there was great activity this night: Convoys of trucks and buses moved thousands according to precise timetables; officers consulted with one another, radioed orders, moved truckloads of men about. Drivers delivered earthmovers, bulldozers, heavy equipment of all sorts from site to site.

The Dutch troops, meanwhile, who had seen perhaps a thousand Muslim prisoners kneeling on the football field near Nova Kasaba, and whom Serb troops had now detained in the village “for their own safety,” heard “continuous shots from hand-held weapons . . . coming from the direction of the football pitch . . . for three-quarters of an hour to one hour.” The next morning, two Dutch UN soldiers “reported that they had seen between 500 and 700 bodies.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.