After decade, ethnic killings scar country

SREBRENICA, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- Maksida Hadzic wants her country to heal from the lingering wounds and bitter divisions of a brutal ethnic war. But whenever she meets a Serb man, she can't help but wonder whether he might be the one who killed her father.

Hadzic is one of thousands of Bosnian women who lost loved ones a decade ago when Serb paramilitary forces led by General Ratko Mladic turned the eastern mining town of Srebrenica into the epicenter of Europe's worst bloodbath since the days of Hitler's death camps.

After capturing the city, Serb soldiers rounded up and gunned down an estimated 7,800 men and boys in the most infamous part of their campaign of ''ethnic cleansing" against Bosniaks, as Bosnia's Muslims are officially called. Left behind in the carnage were wives without husbands, mothers without sons, sisters without brothers, and daughters without fathers. For these survivors, as well as for Bosniaks in general, July 11, 1995 will forever be a black day in history.

As Bosnia-Herzegovina prepares to mark the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre with a solemn ceremony tomorrow, survivors, officials, and ordinary Bosniaks say that despite marked progress over the past year in prodding Serb officials to acknowledge the scope of the atrocities, the country remains deeply divided, scarred by mistrust, and far from reconciliation.

''We need more time," Hadzic, 37, said at a sidewalk cafe outside Srebrenica's Civic Information Center, where she works. ''Every time I sit down with a Serb man, I am asking myself where he was and what he was doing in July 1995."

Bosniaks continuously -- and bitterly - point out that the masterminds of the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic and the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic, remain at-large. Both have been indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague.

''Unless Karadzic and Mladic are arrested, reconciliation is hypocrisy," said Sadic Ahmetvic, 36, one of 10 Bosniaks in the 83-seat Bosnian Serb parliament, who managed to escape from Srebrenica in July 1995 by trekking through the surrounding mountains.

The raw emotions accompanying the Srebrenica anniversary were fueled further early last month when a video showing a Serb paramilitary unit known as the Scorpions executing six Srebrenica captives was released by the UN war crimes tribunal and played repeatedly on television in Bosnia and in neighboring Serbia-Montenegro, the successor state of Yugoslavia.

The video shocked Serbs, many of whom had denied that the Srebrenica massacre had taken place, into recognizing the magnitude of the crime. It also prompted Serbian authorities to arrest eight former paramilitary troops in connection with the videotaped executions.

More than 200,000 people were killed in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995 when predominantly Orthodox Christian Serb and Roman Catholic Croat militias waged a brutal campaign of ''ethnic cleansing" against the nation's Muslim Bosniaks, who were the war's principal victims. The US-sponsored Dayton Peace Accord ended the war in 1995, dividing the country into two entities: a Serb Republic and a Bosniak-Croat Federation. The two were united under a weak central government.

Although the accord ended the slaughter, Bosniaks say the establishment of a Bosnian Serb Republic legitimized to a degree the results of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

''It would have been pretty nasty if the allies gave part of Germany back to the Nazis," Ahmetvic said.

Despite the skepticism of many Bosniaks, international officials say that over the past year remarkable progress has been made in getting Serbs to own up to Srebrenica -- which many say is a crucial first step in moving Bosnia toward some form of reconciliation and normalcy.

''Truth must come before reconciliation," High Representative Paddy Ashdown, the international official in charge of administering postwar Bosnia, said in an interview at his Sarajevo office. ''There were bleak and terrible deeds committed on all sides in the war, but Srebrenica was the worst."

Over the past year, Bosnian Serb authorities have been moving, albeit belatedly, toward recognizing the scale and scope of Srebrenica. In a televised address in June 2004, Dragan Cavic, the president of Bosnia's Serb Republic called the massacre ''a black page in the history of the Serb people."

After intense prodding from the international community, the Bosnian Serb Republic issued a report earlier this year to Ashdown's office listing 892 people allegedly involved in the massacre, although the list has not been made public. Since January, Bosnian Serb officials have also turned over nine indicted suspects to the international war crimes tribunal, officials said. And late last month, Bosnian Serb police arrested 11 people, including current and former law enforcement officers, for their alleged involvement in the crime.

Both Cavic and Serbia's President Boris Tadic will attend tomorrow's ceremony and Tadic is scheduled to speak. Ashdown calls their attendance ''an act of statesmanship and courage."

But many Bosniaks remain skeptical, saying they are acting out of political expediency rather than genuine remorse.

''We are far from seeing a Serb Willie Brandt, a person who will honestly say he is sorry from his heart and soul," said Amor Masovic, president of Bosnia's federal commission for missing persons, referring to the former West German chancellor who knelt down at the Warsaw Ghetto in 1970 in honor of the victims of the Holocaust.

Others are more optimistic. Fadila Malkic, a 23-year-old schoolteacher from Srebrenica who lost her father in the massacre, said that if Cavic and Tadic recognize ''the crime and genocide that happened in Srebrenica, it can have an effect on Serb minds . . . which will be good."

But even as Bosnian Serb officials acknowledge the crimes of Srebrenica, they are also waging a campaign to remind the public that Serbs also suffered in Bosnia's war. On Tuesday, the day after the Srebrenica memorial ceremony, Serbs in nearby Bratunac will unveil a monument to what they say are more than 3,000 Serb war victims in the area.

In tomorrow's ceremony, the remains of 610 victims will be reburied at the Srebrenica Memorial Cemetery, in the nearby village of Potocari. Some 1,372 victims are already buried in the cemetery, which was officially opened in September 2003.

Overall, the remains of 2,070 victims have been identified, Masovic said. Authorities also have more than 7,000 bags of remains, but since the killers had moved them to avoid detection it is not yet possible to know how many victims they encompass.

The massacre occurred in the final months of the war and after Srebrenica had been declared a United Nations ''safe area." Serb forces had overrun a thin force of Dutch peacekeepers to take the city. Serb television at the time showed Mladic giving candy to children and claimed that his forces had ''liberated" the city.

But Kada Hotic, 60, a Srebrenica survivor who lost five family members in the massacre, said she saw Mladic encouraging his troops, saying: ''Brother Serbs, this is a big opportunity for us, and we may not get another."

According to survivor accounts, Mladic's forces separated the men and boys from the women and girls. The females were put on buses bound for Bosniak-controlled Tuzla. The males were taken to a series of locations in eastern Bosnia -- soccer stadiums, sports complexes, abandoned factories, community centers, and open fields -- where over several days they were methodically executed.

''All conscience was asleep on that day," said Munira Subasic, 57, a representative of the Mothers of Srebrenica advocacy group. ''All possible human rights were violated. Nobody would help us, and we could not help ourselves."