Bitter reflections in 'From the Frontline' on the twelfth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, by a journalist who has never ceased to bear witness to the truth of what happened in Bosnia during the war of 1992-95

There exists that constituency of people for whom the advent of July is less an occasion to relish summer than to cast the mind’s eye back to what Judge Fouad Riyad at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague called some of the ‘darkest pages in human history’- the bloodiest massacre on European soil since the Holocaust, at Srebrenica.

This month, they will assemble again for a 12th anniversary: the survivors and bereaved - many of them to bury the remains of their dead at the cemetery in Potočari, where, in 1995, Serbian death squads carried out the ‘selection’ between women and children and men and boys - so as to summarily execute the latter - while Dutch soldiers tasked to protect the UN-designated ‘Safe Area’ looked on.

Survivors will inter the skeletons of their loved ones, meticulously re-assembled from various ‘secondary’ mass graves into which the Serbs ploughed them, and given a name after matching up scattered pieces of the same human being and DNA testing of relatives (that operation in itself a miraculous entwinement of forensic science and human rights activism). A dear friend of mine, Hasan Nuhanović, will be among them, his father’s bones having been finally re-united this past year by the International Commission for Missing Persons. It was a grisly post-scriptum to the massacre: that the Serbs exhumed the dead they had bulldozed into fields around Srebrenica and transported them to these remote ‘secondary’ sites, that the evidence of their atrocity might be hidden, so that for months, the byways of Eastern Bosnia were heaving with trucks loaded with human remains, yet no one breathed a word. And this is central to the present discourse, which is about reckoning - of the lack of it - with the recent past in Bosnia.

It is time to confront a bitter reality: that the estimable and intense focus on Srebrenica, and the massacre’s iconographic centrality in the memory of the slaughter in Bosnia, is double-edged. The fact is that Srebrenica - both the brutality of the killing and calculated betrayal by the so-called ‘International Community’ - was a not an isolated event; it was the culmination of what had been happening, and was allowed to happen by the West, for more than three years before the massacre. Srebrenica involved the avoidable slaughter of 8,000 people over five days, after the equally avoidable mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of others over three years. Srebrenica is the emblem of those other massacres, concentration camps, savage ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a vast scale, organised mass rape, relentless shelling of civilians - women and children - and of hospitals - and the bloody siege of a great capital, Sarajevo, while the ‘international community’ either connived with the Serbs (as in the cases of Paris and London) or else looked on and dithered, forbidding the Bosnians to arm themselves and mount effective resistance to the Serbian juggernaut.

The focus on Srebrenica thus risks reaching a point at which the anniversary distracts from - rather than draws attention to - all those other atrocities that began with the hurricane of violence unleashed by the Bosnian Serbs (and imitated by Bosnian Croats) in 1992, right through to the massacre of 1995 - in some places whose names we know, and others we have never heard of. Some survivors and bereaved from Srebrenica even claim special status, with a protest camp beside the football stadium in Sarajevo - thus dividing the victim people into dichotomous emotions between respect for those from Srebrenica, and their own feelings about their own sufferings and losses elsewhere, which neither claim, nor will ever have, special status.

This dilemma over Srebrenica’s iconic status was most manifestly articulated during the 10th anniversary of the massacre, two years ago - an event which combined heart-wrenching grief among the bereaved and survivors with a bulimic pilgrimage by politicians and diplomats who converged to shed crocodile tears for the crime of inaction in 1995, and feign remorse before hurrying to their next engagement. Srebrenica became something of an international confession box: blurt your sins, and come away feeling absolved. Apart from the then High Representative Paddy Ashdown, whose tears at Potočari are real ones, I doubt any of those who paid their hollow tributes also paid much mind to what had happened across Bosnia for three years before the massacre.

I wonder how many reflected on Višegrad, down the road, where Milan Lukić is currently accused at the state court in Sarajevo of having locked hundreds of civilians - the elderly, children and babies - into houses and incinerated them alive, while also turning the lovely Ottoman bridge that spans the Drina into a human abattoir of bodies flung into the river, turning the turquoise current red with blood.

How many will have considered what happened at Foča, upriver, where - as elsewhere - women and girls, like the Nazi’s ‘Joy Divisions’, were raped all night and every night in a special camp, to the point of madness and sometimes suicide, by beasts enjoying a bit of gratification after a day’s killing and an evening’s drinking šljivovica plum brandy.

How many of these politicians bothered to turn up a month later, in August (I didn’t see any, nor any other year) to the annual commemoration we hold at Omarska, the concentration camp into which it was my accursed honour to stumble in 1992, with ITN - an inferno of random and often recreational mass killing, torture, mutilation and beating. Omarska, whose commander, Želko Mejakić, now stands trial in Sarajevo, was the kind of place where one prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off another, while pigeons were stuffed into his mouth to stifle his screams before he was killed. The guards watching this barbarity were described by one witness at The Hague as ‘like a crowd at a sporting match’. Omarska: where the Orthodox holiday of St. Peter was marked by a drunken orgy of killing - prisoners slashed to death, shot or tied to a pyre of burning tyres.

The list is endless: the slaughter in concentration camps at Keraterm, Luka and Sušica by Serbs and at Dretelj by Croats (and, indeed, at Čelebići by Muslims). The unrelenting sieges of Bihać and Goražde by the Serbs and of East Mostar by the Croats. Croats locking Muslim civilians into cellars in the village of Ahmići and setting them ablaze, after Serbs had done the same in and around Zvornik. The savagery in Bijeljina, Brčko, Bosanska Š amac, Ključ, Vlasenica ... and the razing of thousands of villages to the ground whose names we do not

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