BALKAN JOURNEY:The young girl knows what this place is. She knows also how the dead came to be here. One of them is her grand-uncle whose body was found only recently in yet another of the mass graves still being discovered, writes Peter Murtagh.
JAMAL MUJANOVIC and his family are strolling casually through the mass of narrow, white vertical headstones in Srebrenica's memorial cemetery to the estimated 8,372 Muslims murdered here in 1995.
Jamal's daughter, nine-year-old Azra, a beautiful child with a lovely fresh face, stays with her father, breaking off occasionally to scamper through the rows of headstones, chasing two younger children, their giggles punctuating the air of this otherwise silent place.
"I try to explain to Azra," Jamal says but "it's very difficult."
The young girl knows what this place is. She knows also how the dead came to be here. One of them is her grand-uncle, Amir Mustafa Mujanovic, whose body was found only recently in yet another of the mass graves that are still being discovered in and around Srebrenica. Amir, who was 50 when he was killed, was reinterred here in recent days, the earth above him fresh and muddy, his headstone a temporary one.
Explaining to Azra the "why" behind this place is currently beyond her capacity to understand. But Jamal, a gentle thoughtful man who exudes no trace of anger or bitterness, will persist until all his children - he now lives with them in Switzerland - understand the Srebrenica genocide, officially the worst mass murder in Europe since the Holocaust.
Srebrenica today is a bruised, battered and subdued town which local people say is home to some 1,000 Muslims and 2,000 Serbs. In the early 1990s before Bosnia's war, between 12,000 and 15,000 people lived here, roughly 70 per cent of them Muslim, 30 per cent Serbian.
In July 1995, the town was jammed with 50,000 to 60,000 terrified Muslims and starvation had begun to take a grip. It was supposedly a UN "safe area" in which people were to be free from attack, but the Bosnian Serb army forces, commanded by Gen Ratko Mladic, operating under direct orders from Radovan Karadzic, ignored all international pleas and went ahead and captured the town.
Four hundred UN troops were there but, apart from negotiating the successful evacuation of some 25,000 women and children, they were totally ineffective in protecting the remaining people. Serb troops torched homes and haystacks as they entered the town and rampaged through it killing at will, including inside the UN compound. Terrified people fled as best they could.
But the Serb soldiers rounded up men and youths, stripped them naked, bound their hands with wire and began shooting them and burying them in mass graves. No one knows how many died but the memorial shows the figure 8,372. About 4,000 graves are there now and there's room for at least 4,000 more.
The valley in which the town nestles is deep sided. It straddles a stream, the Krizevica, which flows into the Drina, the river that defines much of the border northeast Bosnia shares with Serbia.
The sides of the valley are heavily wooded but in places, the trees are cleared and the slopes are peppered with graves, little clusters of Muslim headstones sticking out of the grass. Some of these graves, though not all say locals, are of people murdered during the siege and genocide, shot as they tried to scramble up the slopes to freedom.
Walking through the valley on a damp, misty day, the graves look down on you.
The valley is littered with empty, abandoned homes, some showing signs of having been burned, bombed or riddled with bullets. In the centre of the town, many houses and apartment blocks are also abandoned, as are shops and offices. About half of all property is derelict. Everywhere is broken windows, smashed walls, collapsed roofs - placed whose owners are either dead or have fled and are too frightened to return.
Srebrenica is not a ghost town because people do live, work and shop there and also drive cars through its streets. But it is an eerie place, despite some building, notably a spanking new supermarket in the town centre and a restored Orthodox church and rebuilt mosque. Local radio reports that the SDS, the political party founded by Karadzic has called for people to assemble in town centres at noon on Saturday and then walk to church to pray for him.
Fr Zeljko Teofilovic of St Mary's Serbian Orthodox church in the centre of the town has not heard the news but says he will not allow any such gathering. "No, no, no," he tells me firmly. "Church is only for peace."
Fr Teofilovic, aged 29, has been a priest in Srebrenica since 2000, five years after the mass murder. "Situation is bad in Srebrenica," he says, "but peoples have God and church. Church is life for Serb people."
Noon comes and there is no sign of any gathering in Srebrenica. Darko, a taxi driver says he will take us to Bratunac, 10kms down the road and the likely location of a pro-Karadzic demonstration.
And then something totally surreal happens. Darko puts on a Led Zeppelin CD and the strong, slow melody of Stairway To Heaven creeps into the car. At the precise moment we pass one of the larger clusters of headstones on the edge of the forest . . .
There's a feeling I get when I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking . . .
Drako's taxi speeds on, past the burnt out wrecked homes towards Bratunac.
And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forest will echo with laughter
The echo of laughter in the forest is just about the last thing one imagines in Srebrenica.
At the Orthodox Church in Bratunac, some 400 people have gathered to show their support for Karadzic. It is the same, apparently, across Republika Srpska.
"We Serbs have suffered for centuries, and this arrest brings a great shock and more sorrow to the Serb people," Reuters news agency quotes Miladin Ilic, aged 69, an ethnic Serb and former resident of Sarajevo who now lives in Pale, the wartime base of Karadzic.
The Bratunac protesters make their point quietly and, after a few perfunctory prayers, shuffle off home.
At the Srebrenica genocide memorial, Jamal Mujanovic, leads me to an exhibition hall. Together with Azra, we examine poster-sized photographs that record aspects of what happened.
There's one of a skull sticking out of the ground; another shows rings of twisted wire, the hands it bound long gone; yet another shows the latex medical gloves their wearer used while murdering and then dropping them into the grave . . .
It is all powerful, ugly, ghastly and very real.
"What would you like to happen to the people who did this? What would you like to happen to Karadzic?" I ask Jamal.
And for the first time in our conversation, he falls silent for what seems like a whole minute. He looks at the ground, thinking but initially apparently unable to answer.
Some people want to hang them from trees by their arms like they did to us and stone them, he says. Others want to cut them to pieces slowly, bit by bit, but this is against Islam. Some want them shot to end it quickly.
But Jamal does not indicate any preference himself. He just shakes his head slowly.
"I don't know. I don't know."
Read Peter Murtagh's blog as he travels through the Balkans on a motorbike at www.irishtimes.com/blogs