Srebrenica
In the horror factory
Text Francesco Battistini - Photos Livio Senigalliesi for 'Sette' Corriere della Sera
Everything happened at the lower floors. In the abandoned factory, which at the time produced accumulators and it's nowadays a window on memory, a now adult orphan shows how it happened. The Serbians led by Ratko Mladic shut the city and stopped here. They gathered the men at the ground floor: in the entrance you can still find wrinkled shoes. In the offices of the first floor they raped the women, girls or old women, it didn't make any difference; on the walls you can still see delirious drawings, obviously huge penis on obviously satisfied women, with explanations such as: "No teeth? A moustache? Smell like shit? She's a Bosnian girl!"
And behind there were "the worst of all - the orphan says - the UN Blue Helmets, who left us in those beastly hands and informing no-one ran to Split discos to celebrate the end of the service into the army." At the check point, where an unknown hand has changed 'United Nations' into 'United Nothing', in the last ten years only young Wim, the photographer of the Dutch Blue Helmets contingent, has gone back to Srebrenica for forgiveness. July 1995: the biggest and cruellest massacre in Europe since Nazi time. A morning in spring with the snow outside. On the top floor of the factory some rooms are heated. In the biggest one there was the administrative board, two flights of stairs over the 'rape office'. Today it's full of women wearing black clothes and men smoking. It's a meeting for the decennial celebration. "Check the publications on Srebrenica - the journalist Salih Brkic remarks - they write lies! They're already saying that nothing happened here as they did with Auschwitz". "Let's call also the students from Belgrade - a student suggests - Let's show the world we will get a 'no' as answer".
Abdurahman Malkic, the Muslim mayor elected with the only possible slogan - let's carry on - in a city with more than seven thousand people massacred, would like to welcome all 'the great' of the world in Srebrenica, to remind everybody of the indifference of the past and to feel ashamed of the following dismissal: "We didn't even have back our dead: the graves are 1,376. And what about the others? There are still 34 common graves to dig around here. Nobody opens them." In Tuzla you can visit a huge refrigerator, the smell is unbearable: 4,000 bags, with pieces of human bodies inside, are still there after 10 years. In these months 200 were identified, to be buried on the Memorial Day next July. All the others will stay in the refrigerator, without being named. "Nobody talks about Srebrenica anymore - the mayor adds - after September 11th these dead Muslims are not interesting. And where's the international justice which could find Saddam Hussein in a few months and has never been able to catch the butcher Mladic and his instigator Karadzic?"
Everybody agrees in the room: this won't be an ordinary commemoration. There are many suggestions for the celebration: "UN and Dutch flags at half-mast"; "let's have a silent 'death march' from Srebrenica to Tuzla, with all the refugees who never came back"; "let's rename the streets with the victims names." … In the memorial cemetery built in front of the massacre factory there is space enough for no more than about 1,000 tombstones, because nobody believes that accounts with that tragic summer will ever be balanced. There's an equipped laboratory in Sarajevo, in the refrigerated cellars of the ICMP, the International Commission on Missing Persons, where DNA from skulls is compared with pieces of clothes exhumed everywhere in the Balkans.
The ICMP has worked also at Ground Zero, it's a group of 200 people who are rewriting the tragedies of the nineties, from Croatia to Kosovo: 25,146 desaparecidos, 67,292 blood samples, 13,499 pieces of bones, 10,923 DNA photographed, 9,415 compared and 6,861 identified. Srebrenica survivors claim the job is too slow. "They're right - says Kathryne Bomberger, the head of the mission - but it's slow because this was not a massacre like the others. The elimination of the bodies was meticulously carried out. The Serbians wanted to hide any evidence. We found the hand of a man here while one of his legs was found in Kosovo. Furthermore, the governments involved are barely cooperating. Nobody wants to talk about the common graves in the Balkans: the leaders of the wars at that time, Milosevic, Tudjman, Izetbegovic, have been in power until quite recently." But if the gravediggers are slow, the judges are very slow.
The main culprits are in hiding, many trials are still in course, the International Court Law in The Hague has sentenced a general, and prosecuted 14 militaries. Mladic and Karadzic are hidden in Serbia. Nobody denounces them, nobody arrests them. There are too many ghosts in these woods. And many truths are still to be told. The one told by Nasir Oric for example, the Bosnian official who was in charge of the defence of Srebrenica and a few months after the massacre was accused by his men to have abandoned his position. Oric defended himself, accusing even the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and a secret agreement to hand over Srebrenica to the Serbs in order to save other cities. Oric wrote in a book, which was immediately withdrawn from sale, that he brought away his soldiers to obey a higher order. Order by whom? Oric, who survived several attempts at his life, is no more considered a traitor but a hero in Bosnia. Since 2003 he has been in jail in The Hague charged with war crimes. And he doesn't accept to be interviewed. The holocaust in Srebrenica was the last drop of blood. It made utterly clear the UN incapacity, it made NATO intervene for the first time to bomb in Europe. It brought to Dayton agreements. The final act of Bosnian tragedy took place in this far country ten years ago: 43 months of war, 250,000 dead, 4,000 common graves, thousands of desaparecidos.
Maimed, orphans, displaced people who are still scattered around the Balkans. A hardly surviving peace. There were 37,000 Muslims in Srebrenica, there are a tenth now. One day in January Pasa Mustafic, an old lady who managed to send away the Serbs from her house, was killed by a bomb put in her garden. "This story is only frozen - says Svetlana Broz, Tito's grand-daughter who lives in this area - How could those people possibly forget if they haven't even buried their dead? Nobody's interested in celebrating 10 years from Dayton". Bosnia-Erzegovina is a Country forced to stay together only by the international community. You can breath the hatred, and the TV news from The Hague doesn't help. Milosevic pontificating, his men still conditioning the politics in Serbia. What would the Europeans have done after the second World War if Hitler had ended up into a comfortable jail, defending himself in a quiet trial, with his party still in power in Germany?"
In Srebrenica Europe will finance a museum dedicated to the massacre as in Nazi lagers. They will put heaps of shoes, piles of glasses, what is left from the people slaughtered. Also the picture of Ahmed "Blicko" Bajric, the only reporter who took the picture of the eyes of the children before the coup de grâce, of the woman hanged on a tree to escape rape. There's no need to furnish the memory: the memorial is everywhere in Srebrenica. There's no wall free from bullet holes. Beside the city hall the Energoinvest building is a burnt skull. On a house they didn't even delete the word "Ratko", left by Mladic kapò. Every week there are two women at the cemetery, Haira Catic and Nura Begovic, 62 and 48 years old. Their families don't exist anymore. The only grave they have is Nura's father in law's: "Every time there's a list of newly identified people - they say ironically - we look like those waiting for the lottery numbers". Nobody ever has the right numbers. Some weeks ago, in the house in Tuzla where the two women live, a letter arrived from the UN. They anxiously opened it: it was a collection of money for tsunami victims.
