In the summer of 1995, more than ten “secondary” mass graves were dug on the Čančari road, in Kamenica, a town in eastern Bosnia. The objective, to disguise the crimes committed during the Srebrenica massacre by moving the corpses, against a backdrop of growing international pressure. The duty went to the scene, which is nicknamed the “valley of mass graves”.
The extent of the carnage is measured by the faded green walls, studded with the impacts of automatic weapons. The small wooden theater stage, or at least what’s left of it, is also disfigured: this is where the men were forced to gather to slaughter them like cattle. It’s hard to imagine that children’s laughter burst out here, in a pre-war period when people came here to learn.
The cultural center of Pilica, not far from Zvornik, in the north-east of Bosnia-Herzegovina, stands as a gigantic crime scene, as others have been revealed since the end of the conflict which set fire to and blood in the former Yugoslav republic in the 1990s. It was one of several execution sites for the Srebrenica massacre, during which, in the space of four days in July 1995, more than 8,000 men and boys Bosnian Muslims were executed in what was later qualified as “genocide” by international justice.
A gloomy calm reigns within the walls of the cultural center. From the smashed ceiling hang rotting wooden planks. The ground is strewn with rubbish, and the raised windows through which the forces of the VRS (the Bosnian Serb army) may have fired are inundated with invasive plants. Here, on July 16, 1995, 500 Bosnian Muslims were summarily executed with shrapnel and grenades. Almost all of them had been taken prisoner as they tried to flee the enclave of Srebrenica, taken by storm by the Bosnian Serb forces.
“When the investigators force the door of the cultural center, they will discover obvious traces of the massacre and the conditions in which it was perpetrated: bullet holes, traces of explosives, bloodstains, remains of human remains, everywhere, until at the top of the walls”, concluded, in August 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
There were no survivors at the Pilica Cultural Center. Only a handful of survivors of other killings, notably in the Kravica hangar, about thirty minutes from Srebrenica, were able to witness similar horror. “The shots continued all night. They paused, then came back. Then they would stop and throw a series of hand grenades out the windows. […] I felt like I had embers under my stomach, the blood was so hot,” protected witness PW-111 told the ICTY hearing. That evening of July 17, 1995, in the Kravica warehouse, more than a thousand people were slaughtered.
Hide the evidence
Twenty-seven years later, this hangar with its white facade is being refurbished. There is no commemorative plaque on the premises. Nothing was put in place, either, in front of the cultural center of Pilica, to commemorate the tragedy, if not this graffiti displayed on a wall of the room in honor of General Ratko Mladić, one masterminds of the Srebrenica massacre, which is languishing today in a prison in The Hague.
The “butcher of the Balkans”, guilty of war crimes and genocide, is erected as a hero in the Serbian Republic of Bosnia, one of the two entities of the country set up in the wake of the peace agreements in December 1995. t a memorial duty, historical facts are disguised, rewritten, often denied. The busy convenience store that adjoins the Pilica Cultural Center gives a dismaying appearance of normality to the place.
Make up the crimes. The watchword was already the same at the time of the war. The day after the execution, the hundreds of corpses from the worship center were thrown not far away, into a mass grave at the Branjevo farm, where nearly 1,200 people had already been killed. But the remains were not buried there for long.
From August to November, throughout Bosnia, Serb forces start diggers and exhume bodies from several original graves to ultimately bury them in other places, more disparate and difficult to access. As if to hide the evidence better, in a rush. And this, at the very time when the pressure of the international community was growing following the tragedy of Srebrenica. “This transfer operation to secondary graves was a natural and foreseeable consequence of the executions and the initial plan for the burial of the bodies devised within the framework of the joint criminal enterprise”, concludes one of the indictments of the ICTY .
The Čančari path is one of those sites where countless remains were buried for a second time. To get there, you have to go along the Drina, then turn at the junction of a discreet entrance to the forest. Stuck in the hollow of the hills, the village of Kamenica appears while driving along the Čančari road, where 13 “secondary mass graves” have been detected by the scientific police. Thirteen pits over almost five kilometres, arranged sometimes in the courtyards of houses, in septic pits, along the road… Here, the place is nicknamed the “valley of mass graves”.
Live “among those who drove us out”
The sun breaks through the mist enveloping Kamenica and, in the distance, on the winding road, appears a teenager. His name is Muhamed, he lives in the house with the blue plaster wall, a little lower down, and must be one of the only boys his age to live in the village.
The youth, here as in Bosnia, is destined for exodus. The local population, of a few thousand before the war, has shrunk radically. Jobs are rare, if not absent. “My family is from here, where they were driven out by the war. She took refuge in Srebrenica for a while, before being chased out… But it’s my dad who will tell you all about it”, says Muhamed.
Here he is just arriving: Omer Hrnjić, looking affable, welcomes me to chat over a Bosnian coffee on the terrace of his home, bordered by a small farm. This survivor of the Srebrenica massacre remembers the “attacks all around” in his village when he fled in 1993. Four years after the peace, he returned to continue his life in Kamenica. He derives his livelihood from working the land, as evidenced by his sheep, the small cornfield and the vegetable garden that borders the home.
SH, his 54-year-old brother, who only prefers to give his initials to preserve his identity, philosophizes by pasteurizing his plum juice. “We want to stay up. We agreed to come back to live again among the same people who wanted to cut our throats, massacre us and chase us away at some point, because we want to live in a country, Bosnia, free of all ethnic separations,” the man says.
SH takes leave, work awaits him on his plot. It is Omer who imposes the continuation by being guide of his village. He wants to show where the various former mass graves that dot the neighborhood are located. Omer knows he or his brother could have ended up in one of them.
First stop: the “Čančari 2” mass grave, on the edge of the village of Kamenica, adjoining the river of the same name. A man lives opposite, in the white house which he himself rebuilt a few years after the war. Mevludin Memić returned to live in Kamenica, after taking refuge for a time in Western Europe. On his return, like most of the villagers of the valley of the mass graves, he made a macabre discovery: his land was full of skeletons. “It was strange, as if the earth had been turned over…” Shoes and pieces of clothing emerge. The excavations carried out in 2002 on the site, carried out among others by the Bosnian Institute for Missing Persons, made it possible to find 224 human remains, mostly victims of the Srebrenica genocide, including 114 identified.
The ground that once covered the pit is now embellished with a small garden next to a clothesline. A stele was affixed nearby, like others having been arranged on the initiative of local residents, like everywhere along the valley of the mass graves. Impossible, it seems, to live while disregarding a place so laden with suffering? “It crosses my mind sometimes, I just imagine the evils they experienced, especially in Pilica, that’s where they apparently came from… We moved the bodies. »
charred houses
The tour of the pits continues. “There is one up there, you can walk there,” says Omer. Called “Čančari 5”, it was there, in the field near the road. You can guess it from the vegetation that suddenly changes. The remains of 506 humans were exhumed in 2006; the identity of 372 individuals revealed. “There have been cases where parts of the same body have been found in four different graves,” says Omer. Behind, a large charred house overlooks the surroundings in the shade of a large pine. “The people who lived there never came back. Ours was like that when we came back, burnt down by the Serb forces. The grave, “Čančari 10”, located a little further, contained the most macabre toll: the remains of 1153 people.
Still on this same path, in the “Čančari 7” pit, less than half of the 200 individuals found could be identified by forensic scientists. Apple trees have grown at the exact spot of the mass grave, which was dug at the angle of a canary-yellow house. Its occupant only sets foot there “very rarely”.
The visit ends by passing by the imposing memorial at the end of the village which commemorates the mown lives of Kamenica. The surroundings are still marked by the violent campaign of ethnic cleansing orchestrated there by the Bosnian Serb forces against the Bosnians of Kamenica, like everywhere else in the country. The objective, to prevent any possible return, with, each time, an implacable logic: burning, looting, hunting. On the Čančari road parade charred, inert houses. Nature has regained its rights in certain places, such as on the second floor of this gutted building where a lime tree has taken up residence; in the grass nearby, an abandoned portcullis rusts in the afternoon sun.
But life, timidly, also resumes its course. The sound of goat bells, that of the hammer resonating in the meadow or the bleating of the cow below are the symbol of this. Residents like Omer have gradually returned there, rebuilding their lives stone by stone. The valley of mass graves is not all desolation. Above all, it offers an astonishing lesson in resilience.
With Ermina Aljicevic
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund. The duty .