NEWS FEATURES:It is 14 years since the massacre of over 8,000 men at Srebrenica. This week, Mary Fitzgerald joined a group of women from Dublin as they returned home to bury and remember their fathers, sons and brothers
IT IS THE night of July 10th and Zejnija Delic is going through the same rituals she has performed every year on that date for the past 14 years. After carefully fastening her headscarf under her chin, she completes her ablutions before reciting the prayers for the dead. Later, after friends arrive at the house she rents for the summer in the hills above Sarajevo, the tears start to fall and Zejnija reaches for the cigarettes she smokes only when she returns to Bosnia.
The photographs she and her friends pass around show that what they mourn every July is no ordinary anniversary. Some are forensic lab shots of rotting pieces of clothing, stained with Bosnian soil and what looks like blood long darkened by time. The other photographs are precious family snapshots, treasured because they are the only surviving images of men who disappeared during six terrible summer days in 1995.
Zejnija is one of the women of Srebrenica who lost fathers, husbands, brothers and sons when Bosnian Serb troops overran the besieged Muslim town on July 11th, 1995, despite the fact the United Nations had declared the enclave a “safe area”. As former secretary general Kofi Annan put it in 2005, what unfolded in Srebrenica will forever haunt the UN. The poorly supported Dutch troops stationed there to protect a population swollen by thousands of refugees from nearby hamlets were swept aside.
The outnumbered Dutch never fired a shot, and looked on as the Serbs rounded up everyone in sight, separated the men from the women and children, and took them away to be killed. Those who tried to escape through the densely forested hills that rise steeply from Srebrenica’s narrow valley floor were hunted down.
For days, the picturesque valley echoed with the sound of gunfire, shelling and screaming. More than 8,100 Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered in fields, schools and warehouses. Among the countless unspeakable acts recounted at a later war crimes tribunal was the story of an elderly man who was skewered to a tree by a knife and forced to eat his grandson’s entrails. “Truly scenes from hell,” said the judge, “written on the darkest pages of human history.”
The horror did not end with the killings. The men’s bodies, bloated from the midsummer heat, were ploughed into mass graves. After the then US secretary of state Madeleine Albright produced satellite photos of mass graves at a Security Council meeting, the Serbs, desperate to hide evidence of war crimes, used bulldozers to unearth the corpses and dump them at other sites. Many of the decomposing bodies were ripped apart in the process, and today fragments of the same person can be strewn between several locations.
ZEJNIJA NOW LIVES IN DUBLIN, along with her mother Zejna Ademovic and two sisters, Sanela and Senada. The women moved to Ireland in the late 1990s, joining Zejnija's brother Mirsad who was one of the first Bosnian refugees to arrive in 1992.
Last Saturday, as the pre-dawn call to prayer rang across Sarajevo, Zejnija set out on her journey back to Srebrenica, the town she fled with her son Mohammed, then eight, and daughter Musa, then nine, as the Serbs laid waste to it 14 years ago.
Along the way, hundreds of women in white headscarves clustered by the side of the road waiting for buses to take them in the same direction. Some simply wanted to pay their respects on the anniversary of the first day of what would become known to the world as the Srebrenica massacre. Others, like Zejnija and her mother and sisters, were burying the skeletal remains of 534 local men killed during the days that followed. Their bodies, once scattered in mass graves across eastern Bosnia, had been identified over the past year through the world’s most ambitious DNA analysis project. The oldest victims interred last week- end were 75 in 1995, the two youngest just 14.
This year, Zejnija’s family buried her mother’s brother Hasim Gabeljic. It was not the first time Zejna Ademovic and her three daughters have gathered around an open grave at this vast cemetery some kilometres north of Srebrenica town, where thousands of slim white marble gravestones stretch into the distance. Nor will it be the last. In all, Zejnija says, more than 60 men from the extended Ademovic family perished during the massacre.
In 2005, the three sisters watched as a green-draped coffin containing the remains of their father, Suljo, the first of their relatives to be identified, was lowered into the ground. After that their brother Mesud was laid to rest. Last year, Zejnija and her younger sister Senada buried their husbands, Munib and Meho Delic, two brothers whose hands were still bound with wire when their bodies were exhumed.
One of those still to be buried is Senad, Zejnija’s youngest brother. He was 18 in 1995. In March this year, the family was informed that two legs and an arm belonging to Senad had been identified, plunging them into an agonising dilemma shared by many Srebrenica survivors – should they bury the incomplete remains of their loved ones or wait in hope that the other bones will be recovered?
“We don’t want to bury only half of my brother’s body,” says Sanela. “That just wouldn’t be right. It is better to wait, even if takes a long time.”
The last time Zejna Ademovic saw her teenage son Senad and her husband Suljo she was standing with them on the crest of one of the forested hills that circle Srebrenica. They had abandoned their farmhouse as Serb troops pressed closer to the town. A shell landed nearby and in the ensuing mayhem the small band scattered. Zejna and her young grandson Alan later made it to Srebrenica, where thousands of petrified women and children sheltered before being bussed out to Muslim-held territory. “I can remember the fear we felt that time as if it was yesterday,” she says. “We saw things nobody should ever have to witness.”
A few kilometres away, her daughters Zejnija and Senada had fled, along with their husbands and children – including Senada’s 18-month-old daughter Mediha – the hillside home they all shared with mother-in-law Tima. With Meho carrying Mediha on his back, and Zejnija making sure her two children kept up, they ran past burning farmsteads as shells and bullets rained down. “We met some other refugees who told us the Serbs were saying if we came to Potocari we would be safe,” remembers Zejnija. “I didn’t believe this. I was sure we would be killed if we went there.”
As the shelling around them intensified, the men decided the group should split. The women would head for the UN base and the men would chance their luck through the woods. Munib turned back twice to say farewell to Zejnija and the children. “He told me there was a chance they would not survive the journey, that they could be killed or captured by the Serbs,” she recalls, as tears redden her cheeks. “He told me to take good care of the children because he might not see them again. And then he walked away for the last time.”
Zejnija’s son Mohammed is now 22 and works as a warehouse operative in Dublin. He is the only male left in his family to bear the Delic name – everyone else was killed. Mohammed’s recollections of the terror and chaos of those days are fragmented. He remembers little of the frantic journey to Potocari but has vivid memories of the three days they spent there before they were put on a bus to the city of Tuzla. “What remains with me is the sense of being very afraid but at the same time not understanding what was going on,” he says. “I saw children being taken away from their mothers and people having their heads cut off.
“When the bus we got on was stopped by Serbs, they wanted to see if there were any males on board. My mother hid me under the seat of the bus for the whole journey so the Serbs wouldn’t find me.”
It is the sound of screaming that haunts Zejnija. “The Serbs would take people away for what they said was questioning. Soon after we would hear shots and screaming,” she says. “We were desperate for water and food, the children were crying all the time. When I asked one of the Serbs for a bit of bread and some water, he said there was no need, we were all going to die anyway.”
The Serbs taunted the women before the convoy left for Tuzla, telling them all their menfolk had been killed in the forest. Senada fainted when she heard this. As the buses drove through the surrounding countryside, Zejnija remembers seeing captured Bosnian Muslim men lined up in the fields. “Who knows what they suffered before they died,” she says. Burying his father last year was in many ways a relief, says Mohammed. “The worst part for us was not knowing where the body was. We now have a grave that we can go visit instead of thinking that his body could be anywhere.”
FOURTEEN YEARS AFTERthe massacre, the women of Srebrenica still struggle to come to terms with what happened that July. There are numerous stories of mothers and widows lost in a fog of memories, despair and heavy medication. Some, unable to cope, have taken their own lives.
The atomised population of the former silver mining town has found itself scattered throughout Europe and the US, though some survivors, including Zejnija’s hardy mother-in-law Tima, have returned in recent years to rebuild their burnt-out homes. The Srebrenica they knew is no more. Two-thirds Muslim before the war, the town now lies within Republika Srpska, an entity within Bosnia ceded to the Serbs by the Dayton Accord, and its population is mostly Serb.
The horror visited on the Ademovic and Delic families has followed them to Ireland in the form of recurring nightmares. Zejnija’s sister Sanela, who was living with her husband Mirsad in Germany when Srebrenica fell, says she often dreams that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and his military commander Ratko Mladic, are about to break down the door of her family’s home in Dublin.
“The war never goes away,” she says.
Like her sisters, Sanela has had to find words to explain to her two children, Alija (15) and Alma (8), the tragedy that befell their family. “Children will notice from an early age that there are so few men at family gatherings. And, of course, they will want to know why,” she says. “It is hard because how can you explain to anyone why this happened, let alone to a child?” Telling the story of 18-year-old Senad is particularly difficult. “I look at my Alija and I think Senad was only three years older than Alija is now. He was just a boy. It breaks my heart.”
The women of Srebrenica who have settled in Ireland constitute a fraction of the country’s 1,600-strong Bosnian population, says Zdenko Stanar of the Dublin-based Bosnian Community Development Project, but their experience as survivors of the worst atrocity of the war – indeed the worst in Europe since the second World War – sets them apart.
“When you talk to these women you realise that what happened at Srebrenica is always there for them. And the anniversary every July brings back memories of the war in general for the wider Bosnian community here,” Stanar explains.
Along with memories of the war comes the reminder that while Karadzic is currently standing trial at The Hague, Mladic, the man Zejnija remembers seeing on the streets of Srebrenica, patting children’s heads and telling people they were safe, remains at large. A recent video purportedly showed the former commander dancing at a party in Serbia.
“Of course we want to see Karadzic and Mladic brought to justice for what they did,” says Zejnija. “But even if everyone was captured and put on trial, it is not going to bring our family back. This is a scar that will never go away.”
Identifying the dead: ICMP and DNA
IN THE refrigerated chill of a vast morgue in Tuzla, thousands of Srebrenica’s dead still await identification and burial. All around are aisles of metal trays containing blue and white body bags. The trays, which stretch seven deep, hold more than 3,000 carefully marked bags, each of which contains a few bones of one or more of the 8,000-plus Bosnian Muslims killed after Serb troops overran the town in July 1995. Stacked above the trays are brown paper bags containing clothing recovered with the remains. Another room houses personal effects found with the bodies, including walking sticks, a Koran, a clock, handmade shoes and a faded photograph of smiling youths gathered around a café table.
This is the Podrinje Identification Project, one of several centres run by the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP).
Since its founding in 1996 at the instigation of former US president Bill Clinton, the ICMP has collected tens of thousands of blood samples from relatives of those reported missing after the fall of Srebrenica. After analysing the resulting DNA profiles, the ICMP began matching them with those extracted from bone samples exhumed from mass graves scattered across eastern Bosnia. It is a gargantuan and painstaking task, made all the more difficult by the fact that following the massacre, the Serbs used bulldozers to move the decomposing corpses between several sites in an attempt to conceal what they had done.
In one case, the remains of a victim were spread among four different mass graves, two of which were around 20 kilometres apart. When the ICMP first started its work, many doubted that the attempt to find, exhume, identify and reassemble the remains of tens of thousands reported missing during the war in Bosnia would succeed.
But the ICMP, which has now evolved into the worlds most extensive DNA-assisted identification programme, has so far helped identify 12,534 individuals in Bosnia. Of those, 6,189 are Srebrenica victims.
The scale and nature of what happened in Srebrenica 14 years ago mean identifying the dead constitutes the “biggest forensic puzzle in the world right now”, says the ICMP’s Sarajevo-based director Kathryne Bomberger.
“I don’t think the perpetrators ever imagined these people could ever be identified . . . and therefore could not have imagined the horror of this Frankenstein-like effort to put the pieces back together again.”
The newly identified dead are interred every July during a ceremony held on the anniversary of the day Serb troops first entered Srebrenica. Last weekend the remains of 534 men were laid to rest at the Potocari memorial cemetery on the outskirts of the town, bringing to more than 3,600 the number buried there. Tens of thousands of mourners looked on, many weeping, as the caskets were borne aloft towards freshly dug graves.
The partial remains of hundreds of other identified victims have yet to be buried, because their families prefer to wait and see whether any more other remains turn up.
“For those families it’s just a horrifying situation,” says Bomberger. “In some cases we can only identify one piece of a body. Where we’re going to find the remaining parts and when this is going to happen is an unknown element. So for the families to wait until this happens, if they choose to do so, is agonising.”
Not only does the identification of victims bring some peace to grieving families, it plays a vital role in uncovering the truth of what happened during Bosnia’s war. “The use of DNA has had a profound impact on demonstrating what really happened in this region, and demonstrating for a fact what happened in Srebrenica,” says Bomberger. “Those who deny these events now have very little ground to stand on.”