The War is Dead, Long Live the War by Ed Vulliamy

Author:Ed Vulliamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Darkest Pages of History: Srebrenica, 2005

‘Nož Žica Srebrenica’

– chant by Serbian fans at football matches since the massacre of 1995: ‘Knife – wire Srebrenica’

The snow lay deep, the air still and seven degrees below zero. The accursed terrain was covered by a layer of virgin white, blanketing this hateful building, and the memories it held: a disused warehouse on the country road that ran through the village of Kravica, a few miles west of Srebrenica.

It was winter 2005, nearly ten years after some 1,200 men and boys were rounded up, packed into this place and annihilated by machine-gun fire and grenades tossed into the building. And Kravica was but one of a number of execution sites that made up the Srebrenica massacre. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically slaughtered by Serbian troops and paramilitaries within six days; it was the worst single massacre on European soil since the Third Reich. The brutality and scale of the killing knew no bounds: ‘These are truly scenes from hell,’ said Judge Fouad Ryad at The Hague, ‘written on the darkest pages of human history.’

Ten years on, the warehouse at Kravica had changed little. The cream-coloured external walls were riddled with bullet holes – pockmarks now filled with cement, a futile gesture concealing nothing. Bullet holes splattered the walls inside too; crates were piled up, industrial plant was stored and a canister of creosote bore the date 1992, the year that Srebrenica was surrounded. The crow of a cockerel echoed across the shallow valley. A dog barked. Washing hung from the balcony of a Serbian peasant holding across the byway, for which this warehouse was the view.

Further on up the road was the village of Glogova. Here, some houses remained in ruins. Others had been rebuilt – monuments to the remarkable but precarious return of Bosniaks to the area, to live among the executioners of their relatives. And just off the road at Glogova was another place, also snow-covered, where the bodies of those killed at Kravica were ploughed into the earth. A rusty car was the only skeleton above ground now, although bones – many of them shredded by bulldozers as buried bodies were unearthed and reburied for concealment – were still being patiently exhumed, as the remarkable effort continued to match them with the names of those who disappeared.

On 11 July 1995, General Mladić and his troops entered the silver mining town of Srebrenica (Srebro means silver). Terrified, its inhabitants moved en masse towards the Dutch military base at the outlying village of Potočari, seeking shelter with the United Nations Protection Force (my italics). On the way, the citizenry and remnants of their army split into two groups. Some 20,000 people distrusted the UN, and set out just before midnight into mountain forests, in a great column, hoping to run a gauntlet through Serbian territory and reach the safety of government-held Tuzla. Most of the Bosnian army fighters chose this option, leading a ragbag of civilians, children and farm animals along what would become known as the Road of Death.

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