Sat, Jul 09, 2005 - Page 9 News List

Srebrenica still an emblem

Bosnia now is united, on paper, as a Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation but the failure to capture wartime leaders so that they can be tried for the Srebrenica massacre and other war crimes is preventing closure

AP , Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina

They show a forensic examiner holding a human arm, a child's smashed doll, coffins awaiting burial.

Too subtle, says Dragana Marinkovic, 60, a passerby.

"You need to shock Serbia to make it face the past," he says.

Muslims like Fejzic need no reminders.

A tiny woman with dark brown hair and a permanently sad face, she remembers losing sight of Saban, her husband, in the melee of Serb soldiers, crying children and wailing women who had gathered in the UN compound. She tried to hold on to her son with both arms when the Serbs started separating the men from the women.

She fell on her knees and begged the soldiers to take her instead. Then she pleaded with them to kill her.

She remembers Rijad's thin shoulders heaving with sobs as he watched his mother crawling after him on all fours, clutching his fanny pack.

The remains of her son and husband have never been identified.

Since the previous anniversary, another 600 victims of the massacre, aged 14 to 75 and found in 60 mass graves, have been identified and will be buried on Monday at the cemetery of Srebrenica Muslims killed by Serbs.

Of the 2,079 sets of remains that have been identified by name after exhaustive investigations including DNA matching, the cemetery holds 1,327.

From missing-persons reports filed by close relatives, authorities estimate 7,800 people were massacred in Srebrenica.

Many may be among the 5,000 corpses stored in Bosnia pending identification. Or they may have belonged to families slaughtered in their entirety, leaving no one alive to report them dead.

Ahead of the ceremony, at the Potocari Memorial Center, work crews were busy repairing the main road into Srebrenica and digging graves.

"It's the only time I get some work for a few days," said Mirsad Karahasanovic, a 24-year old Muslim and temporary gravedigger.

Before the post-communist rivalries that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was a place of ethnic coexistence and Srebrenica and the surrounding countryside were home to about 36,000 people, of whom 27,500 were Bosnian Muslim, the rest Serb and Croat.

Today, Srebrenica, whose name roughly means silver town, doesn't really come alive except for massacre anniversaries, when it fills with dignitaries, TV crews and massacre survivors.

Some 10,000 people are left, most of them Serbs. They are mostly shunned by the 1,000 Muslims who have returned to their old homes.

Not so the two 76-year-olds bantering and sipping coffee at a restaurant called Omer's, by a street sign from better days pointing to the Square of Brotherhood and Unity, surrounded by collapsed roofs and bullet-scarred walls. Bosko Obric is a Serb, his friend Edhem Delic a Muslim.

They talk about the supposed benefits of Srebrenica's waters -- enough to make an ugly person look good.

"It didn't work for you!" Delic says.

"Nor for you!" Obric retorts.

They erupt in hoots of laughter.

Fejzic, Rijad's mother, comes here for anniversaries, but otherwise avoids the town and her former Serb neighbors, who she says must share blame for the massacre because they were there, and in uniform.

"I will not return to Srebrenica while the perpetrators are still freely walking the streets and until I see Karadzic and Mladic in The Hague," she says.

"Only old people return here," says Obric, the Serb in the cafe. "Like elephants who come to die."

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