In the town of Srebrenica, marked by the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the summer of 1995, breakthroughs in living- together have emerged in recent years. But Genocide denial and angry rhetoric undermine the prospect of reconciliation.
The place takes on an idyllic look, at the top of the steep hill, with these agricultural plots scrolling below and the orange sky overlooking the valley. The town of Pobuđe, nestled on a hill, wraps itself in the coolness of the evening. A shepherd walks his animals on the winding road while, not far away, resounds the call to prayer emanating from a minaret. It feels like shelter from the hustle and bustle of the world. It is hard to imagine that the war came to break this peasant life when, in 1992, the Bosnian Serb forces supported by Belgrade landed in Pobuđe. War was breaking out in a Bosnia and Herzegovina that had just proclaimed its independence.
It was in this village in eastern Bosnia of barely 300 souls that Muhizin Omerović – Džile, for those close to him – settled in 2005. Or, rather, resettled. Because this four-year conflict which killed more than 100,000 people in the former Yugoslav Republic, this 48-year-old Bosnian lived it in part here. Here he comes, wearing rubber boots, wearing his broad smile. “Sorry for the delay, I was helping the neighbor next door!” says this bearded colossus with broad shoulders, setting foot on the lawn of his house, whose salmon facade displays a Bosnian star flag. When he evokes the war, his expressive gaze becomes fleeting; he lets out long sighs, chaining cigarette after cigarette.
Like other villagers, Džile had taken part in the defense of Pobuđe, thirty years ago, in the face of approaching looting and killings. “All the Bosnian villages that surrendered were then razed. My father said that if we were destined to die, it was better to choose how. In our unit of 120 people, we had 10 hunting rifles and 5 Kalashnikovs, that was all. This “peasant resistance” lasted barely a year. On March 12, 1993, a shell fell on the family home. His father died instantly, pierced by shrapnel. It is Džile himself who buries him, at nightfall, “in the company of some neighbours”. Today, his burial is in the Muslim cemetery of the hamlet, a little higher on the forest massif.
When Pobuđe fell into the hands of the Serbian forces, “three days after the death of dad”, the young Džile, at the dawn of his 18 years at the time, was one of the last resistants of the village. He takes refuge about twenty kilometers away, in the enclave of Srebrenica, center of the exodus of tens of thousands of displaced Bosnians. Surrounded by steep massifs and overflowing with wounded, this locality is the only one in the region that has not yet come under Serbian control. For two years, the enclave, declared a UN protection zone, held firm. Until the final assault in the summer of 1995.
On July 11 of that year, after relentlessly shelling it, Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić strutted into Srebrenica, defeated. It was then the beginning of the worst carnage perpetrated on the European continent since the Second World War: in the space of barely a week, more than 8,000 Bosnian men and teenagers, most of them unarmed, were massacred. Džile escaped what would be described, a few years later, as “genocide” by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. He is part of a column of more than ten thousand men who set off on foot in a desperate flight towards the Bosnian territory of Tuzla, 100 kilometers to the north.
A two-month ordeal begins for men like Džile, tracked by Serbian forces through mountains and forests riddled with mines. Two months of wandering feeding on leaves and mushrooms, watching men being killed on the spot, trapped in ambushes. “I didn’t want to surrender, for fear of being tortured, I preferred to die. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people managed to survive”, testifies the one who, each year, takes part in the organization of a march commemorating the escape of the survivors of Srebrenica. On September 11, 1995, he finally arrived in free territory, after several unsuccessful attempts. He is then believed to be dead. “The first survivors arrived after six days, I spent two months in the wild. »
Džile could have chosen to lead a peaceful existence in Switzerland, where he took refuge after the war. But his choice to return, seventeen years ago, was self-evident. He rebuilt his father’s house, where he lives with his four children and his wife, Emina, and raises a herd of goats on his ten hectares of garden. This is, for Džile, a way of defying the ethnic cleansing orchestrated by Belgrade, thirty years earlier, in the name of a “Greater Serbia” devoid of “Turks” – this is how the Chetnik ultra-nationalists designated Bosnian Muslims, Slavs converted to Islam at the turn of the 15th centurye century.
“Freed from the hatred of the Serbs”, which animated him for a time at the end of the war, Džile now works at the town hall of Srebrenica, and works in a personal capacity to rebuild bridges between Serbs and Bosnians. If there is one thing he wanted to rediscover, when he returned to Pobuđe, it was the feeling of “living again as before”, in this pre-war period when denominational affiliation was a matter of futility. In Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, Džile assures that in terms of intercommunity cohabitation, breakthroughs have emerged in recent years, despite the weight of the discourse of nationalist parties. In everyday life, at school and in the café, ethnic separation no longer exists, as it could have done fifteen years ago, and mixed marriages are gradually beginning to reappear, he rejoices.
But life in Srebrenica isn’t what it used to be. “The biggest open wound is the fact that many don’t recognize what happened here,” Džile says. The Serbian mayor of Srebrenica, Mladen Grujičić, is one of them. Emulator of Milorad Dodik, the president of the Republika Srpska, he denies the existence of a genocide in Srebrenica. A denial widespread in this “Serb Republic” of Bosnia, one of the two entities institutionalized in the wake of the peace agreements in 1995.
Twenty-seven years later, Srebrenica is today a transformed, disaster-stricken city. The municipality now has a third of its pre-war population, of 37,000 inhabitants in the past. The youth leave in droves for the foreigner, with the image of the country, and the economic activity turns flat. “There’s nothing to do here, it’s death,” says a middle-aged man sitting on the terrace of a smoky cafe in Srebrenica, the main attraction of the area, if not the shopping center old fashioned. The many houses that have been rebuilt stand alongside others that are sometimes gutted, often deserted. At night, the shy beam of the streetlights lends an ominous aspect to the ghost town. Police officers patrol the area; a lonely man stares out of his window. The locality being located in Republika Srspska, the Serbian tricolor, here, flies everywhere: Srebrenica, “liberated city” for some, martyr city for others.
Genocide denial
At the gates of Srebrenica, it is impossible to miss the vertiginous alignment of thousands of white stelae of the Potočari memorial. Opposite the cemetery commemorating the lives cut short in the summer of 1995, an imposing shed, disused and greyish, also retains its share of drama. It symbolizes the impotence of the Dutch blue helmets who, overwhelmed, had left the Serbian soldiers to “sort out” the Bosnian population shortly after the fall of the enclave. This is where women, old people and children were put on buses to be deported to “non-Serb” territory. As for the Bosnian men – fooled by the prospect of being the object of a prisoner exchange – they were separated, then taken by the hundreds to the surrounding hangars to be machine-gunned by General Mladić’s henchmen, the ” butcher of the Balkans”.
Šehida Abdurahmanović well remembers the uncertainty of that day in July 1995 when, looking haggard, she was told to sit in one of the buses. “We were told: ‘Women and children, you go up first, and the men will follow.’ Mothers were trying to hold back their 10 or 11 year old children, whom the Serbian soldiers were trying to forcibly integrate into the group of men, who were about to be shot. At 76, this Bosnian survivor returned to live in 2003 not far from the Potočari memorial, in the big house she rebuilt with her son. A member of the Association of Mothers of Srebrenica, she willingly assumes her role as guardian of memory, while calling for reconciliation. Except that cohabitation is not always easy when, in the neighborhood, live freely potential war criminals, “500 meters from here”, or when some are walled in pure and simple denial. “The other evening, while watching television, I recognized a doctor from here, appreciated by the population. And the sentences I heard coming out of his mouth, I couldn’t believe them…” Genocide denial, martyrization of the Serbian people, aggressive speech. “That night, I didn’t sleep, with this question that tormented me: who do we live with? The incomprehension torments her all the more when it comes to her brother, killed in 1995, whose bones have never been found. Šehida is convinced of this, several of her Serbian neighbors prevent her from mourning by opting for silence. They would know the location of the human remains. The effect of fear of reprisals? Confessions too painful? “What is certain is that the more time passes, the more hope dwindles. And if my brother was thrown into the river, there’s almost no chance of finding him. »
In Srebrenica, “outside of school or work, we live next to each other, but not together like before the war”, still regrets the widow with blond hair. “I have the feeling that it is always us, the victims, who have the desire to start a new life together. The fact that Bosnians like me came back to live here after the war bothers many. They imagined that here the air, the water and the leaves of the tree would be Serbian… But all that is asked is to recognize that the genocide was committed in their name. Simple forgiveness. And as long as they erect war criminals as heroes, relations will never be able to return to the way they were before. »
With Ermina Aljicevic
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-The duty.