THE memories of Srebrenica keep flooding back to haunt Ramiza Gurdic — the screams, the shots and, most unbearable of all, the terrified, pleading eyes of Mustafa, her son, who knows he is about to die.
As she braces herself to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the massacre in an emotional ceremony at the tragic little Bosnian town tomorrow, the horrors are consuming her.
But this year Gurdic, 48, has more than memories to make her shudder. At last, almost exactly 10 years to the day after he was murdered by Bosnian Serb forces, she is burying Mustafa.
The skeletal remains of her 20-year-old son were found by United Nations war crimes investigators in a mass grave in 1999. They were painstakingly lifted from the earth’s cold embrace to begin the complex and laborious process of identification.
This was carried out at a special facility run by the International Commission for Missing Persons in the Bosnian city of Tuzla, northwest of Srebrenica. Thousands of bodybags and sacks of pitiful personal remains gathered from grave sites across Bosnia are stacked there from floor to ceiling.
But because of their decomposed state and because the Bosnian Serbs had ploughed the victims of Srebrenica into mass graves, shredding them, only to unearth them and move them into secondary graves in a further attempt to conceal their crimes, it took until November last year for Mustafa’s remains to be identified by DNA testing.
“He was so gentle, so kind-hearted and so quiet,” said Gurdic, sitting disconsolately on the edge of her bed last week staring at a blurred picture of a smiling young man with tousled hair. The picture and a tobacco pouch found with his bones are all that she has to remember her dead boy by.
From the autopsy, Gurdic knows that her son was shot in the legs and beaten on the head.
“After 10 years I still go to bed with pain and wake up with sadness,” she said. “And every day I look out of the window hoping that someone will come home. But nobody comes.”
Gurdic is one of “the damned” — the mothers of Srebrenica whose 8,000 husbands and sons were rounded up and killed by Bosnian Serb forces in a carefully coordinated series of mass executions and ambushes after they overran the town on July 11, 1995.
It was the worst massacre on European soil since the second world war and one of the darkest days in the history of the UN. In 1993, early in Bosnia’s savage ethnic war, the UN Security Council had declared the former silver-mining town nestling in the hills of eastern Bosnia a UN-protected safe area for Muslims.
But in an area riven by ethnic cleansing it placed only a few hundred lightly armed Dutch troops in Srebrenica to protect the tens of thousands of Muslims who had crammed into it, seeking sanctuary.
When fighting intensified and the Bosnian Serbs attacked the town in mid-1995 with tanks and artillery, the UN refused to ask Nato to use airstrikes to stop them. It was a catastrophic failure of will that led directly to the massacres.
As well as Mustafa, Gurdic has lost Junuz, her 42-year-old husband, and Mehrudin, another son, aged 18. Their bodies have never been found so even now Gurdic clings to the hope that they are somehow alive. She has visited many of the massacre sites dotted across the fields and woods of eastern Bosnia, hoping to find even a button belonging to them. Her search has been in vain.
Today, the mothers of Srebrenica will symbolically retrace the “trail of tears” — the harrowing journey through the forests that their murdered loved ones made 10 years ago as the enclave fell in a desperate attempt to reach the safety of Muslim territory 40 miles away. Thousands were caught and murdered. The Bosnian Serb soldiers tricked some into surrendering by wearing Dutch UN uniforms.
Mustafa’s simple wooden coffin is one of 610 containing remains of identified massacre victims that will be buried tomorrow. They lie in neat rows in a battery factory two miles from Srebrenica, alongside the crumbling UN Dutch compound.
Across the road is the cemetery, shaped like a teardrop and already containing 1,300 graves. Forty-seven of those being buried tomorrow are boys. One of them is Hrelja Avdic, the 14-year-old son of Gurdic’s sister-in-law. His headless body was also identified recently by DNA.
Tonight, Gurdic will sleep on the factory floor. “I want to spend tonight close to my son,” she said. Tomorrow, in front of local and international dignitaries including Lord (Paddy) Ashdown, the international community’s high representative for Bosnia, she will place Mustafa’s coffin into the ground.
Overshadowing the ceremony will be the knowledge that General Ratko Mladic, the commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serb forces, and Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader — both indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity after Srebrenica — are still free.
By evading capture the two have been turned into Balkan Pimpernels. The mothers of Srebrenica blame the West for the failure to catch them. As a result, Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague, has decided to stay away.
The memory of the massacre hangs over Srebrenica like a shroud. It is a dismal, claustrophobic place whose buildings are still pockmarked with bullet holes and from which life has crumbled away. Only a few Muslims have had the courage to return.
The hellish echoes and images of the slaughter reverberate still. Who can forget the busloads of sobbing women and lost children who arrived from Srebrenica without their husbands and sons? Who can forget Ferida Osmanovic, the Muslim woman in a white dress and red cardigan who hanged herself from a tree with a noose made from her belt and her shawl? She killed herself out of despair at not being able to save her husband, leaving behind her two young children.
And who can forget the testimony of one survivor, hiding amid a pile of corpses, hearing shots and screaming, then hearing one of the Bosnian Serb killers happily declare, “That was a good hunt”? Weighed under by grief, Gurdic admits she has difficulty finding the strength to go on. She is now alone except for her daughter Samira, aged 17. Her last sight of Mustafa came as she was being driven from Srebrenica by bus.
She saw a cowering group of Muslim prisoners by the roadside under armed guard. They were part of the column of men and boys who had tried to escape through the woods.
As the bus passed, a Bosnian Serb soldier shouted out to the women: “Recognise your sons and husbands. This will be the last time you see them.”
“I looked up and saw one of them was Mustafa. We made eye contact,” Gurdic said. “Then he bowed his head. It was the last time I saw him alive.”
She does not know what happened to Mehrudin. But her husband Junuz was seen with a group of 1,000 captured men and boys who were herded into a warehouse and slaughtered.
When I first visited the warehouse at Kravica, traces of blood and hair still smeared the inside walls. Ten years on, the building lies abandoned, still riddled with bullet holes.
A huge concrete cross erected in the village in memory of the 3,500 “Serbian victims of the war” from the area will be inaugurated on Tuesday.
It is a statement of defiance. Ten years on, the truth of what happened in this sad corner of Bosnia is still fought over with bitterness.
