In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

by Geert Mak

  The old village of Srebrenica was once an idyllic place which had grown up around a silver mine and was, from the nineteenth century, a fashionable spa. In fact, it was nothing more than a single long street at the end of a deep valley. There was a boulevard where the young people strolled, a café with a terrace where you were served by waiters in bow ties, the ‘Bosnia’ cinema, an excellent hospital and, at Hotel Guber, a world-famous spring ‘for healthy blood’. Around 1990 there were 6,000 people living there, a quarter of them Serbs, the rest Muslims.

  Srebrenica, however, lay in the middle of the area which the Serbs had claimed for themselves. And when they also began their campaign of ethnic cleansing here, a well organised local movement began offering strong resistance.

  One of the most important Muslim leaders was Naser Orić, a former bodyguard to Miložsević. Orić and his gang, in turn, began terrorising the surrounding Serbian villages. At first these Muslim militias did their best to conquer entire sections of countryside, and even to link up with the Muslim area around the city of Tuzla. But that did not work out. Around Srebrenica itself, however, a huge Muslim enclave soon arose in the middle of Serb territory. Orić became the local hero. In summer and autumn 1992 he attacked a large number of villages and farmhouses in the surroundings, murdering Serb families who had stayed behind and plundering their stores.

  In the course of time, these forays became vitally important. The Serbs had blocked all roads into the enclave, and as winter approached the food supply became a major problem. The inhabitants of Srebrenica were forced to live on feed corn, oats and dandelion salad. At night the town was plunged into total darkness: the only electricity was generated by a series of primitive waterwheels in the nearby stream. At a certain point the Muslims even proposed an exchange of prisoners: one live Serb for two fifty-kilo sacks of flour. During winter 1992–3, dozens of men, women and children in the enclave died of starvation.

  The Muslims, by the same token, had burned down at least thirty villages and seventy hamlets. Estimates are that somewhere around a thousand victims fell among the local Serb farming population, and the Serbs were furious. At the Yugoslavia Tribunal in the Hague, British negotiator David Owen later stated that Miložsević had warned him in early 1993 that if the Bosnian Serbs took the enclave, there would be a ‘bloodbath’ or a ‘massacre’. And, starting that winter, the Serbs actually began gaining ground in the area around Srebrenica. At last, all that remained was Srebrenica itself and a little fringe of land, a tiny island in Serbian Bosnia packed with Muslim refugees.

  The immediate threat to the enclave was countered thanks to the mediation of the United Nations. In March 1993, the French commander of the UN troops, General Philippe Morillon, appeared in Srebrenica. He addressed the townspeople: ‘Do not be afraid. As from now, you are protected by the troops of the United Nations. We will not abandon you.’ The UN flag was raised in the city with a great deal of ceremony. The elated municipal government made Morillon an honorary citizen.

  In early May, the UN announced that Srebrenica was now a demilitarised safe haven. Women and children were allowed to leave for Tuzla aboard UN trucks. All able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five were to remain behind. Once an estimated 23,000 women, children and elderly people had left Srebrenica, however, the Muslim leader, Orić, ordered a halt to the evacuation. Any greater exodus would leave his enclave too weak. Approximately 40,000 Muslims remained behind in the claustrophobic safe haven, held more or less prisoner in this Bosnian/UN ghetto.

  Later it became clear that, by that point, all parties involved had actually given up on the enclave. The half-heartedness of the Americans and Western Europeans can, in hindsight, be seen simply from the number of UN troops they allotted for peacekeeping forces throughout Bosnia: a total of 7,000 soldiers and officers, only a fifth of what was considered necessary. Dutchbat, the Dutch UN battalion which succeeded the Canadians as the protectors of Srebrenica in February 1994, consisted of some 3–400 lightly armed soldiers, with only 150 trained combat troops.

  The Bosnian government, too, ultimately withdrew its support from the enclave. In late April 1995, Naser Orić and his officers were transferred to Tuzla, supposedly to receive instructions in connection with the expected Serb attack. For whatever reason, Orić and his men never set foot in Srebrenica after that. From that moment, his paramilitary supporters were forced to do without his leadership.

  On 11 July, 1995, therefore, the Serbian troops led by General Ratko Mladić were able to enter the city virtually unchallenged. Under the circumstances, and after these events, their advance was entirely predictable. What no one had foreseen, however, was the drama that followed: the Muslim men were separated from the women and children, a number of them were able to escape through the mountains, and the rest were never seen alive again. In a cold-storage warehouse near Tuzla, in more than 4,000 white bags, many of those murdered are still waiting to be identified.

  Holbrookeland is a charming, mountainous area, with panoramas reminiscent of Switzerland or Austria. The higher parts of it are forested with pine, still higher up the greenery disappears beneath a heavy layer of snow. Then the first ruin looms up along the side of the road. The farmhouse looks as though God had stuck his thumb through the roof, all the way down to the cellar. A hundred metres further along is the second, half-incinerated ruin. Then a wrecked bus. Another two kilometres and there are only the skeletons of houses, scattered across the hillsides. Dužsko Tubić stops the car beside a muddy field. ‘This is where the first mass graves were found, in summer 1996. But don't hang around too long, this area can still be rather bad for your health.’ We drive past a dilapidated Dutch sentry post, then another wrecked car and a few hollow-eyed villas.

  The former health resort of Srebrenica looks desolate. The department store has been boarded up, roofs have collapsed, the town square has buckled and is covered in weeds. In the stream you can still see the remains of the home-made electrical turbines from the starvation winter of 1993. On a wall beside the entrance to the former battery plant, in faded letters, ‘Dutchba’. This is where the Dutch soldiers were quartered. Inside, on the walls, there is still some graffiti: ‘A mustache? Smel like shit? Bosnian girl!

  At the moment, the building is inhabited chiefly by Serbs who have fled Sarajevo. These urban families have a hard time surviving amid these mountains. The café has been renamed 071, the area code for Sarajevo. The hospital received electricity again only two days ago. It had been without lights for three weeks, until the doctors and nurses finally paid the bill themselves. The medical supervisor: ‘The economic situation in this city is disastrous. There are almost no jobs, everyone on my staff is underfed.’ The manager of Hotel Guber – he saved the lives of a few Muslims – pleads for outside investments. ‘Our image, that's what it's all about, and that will never be fixed.’

  In the café, a few rowdy men are drinking slivovitz. I end up next to the owner of the battery factory. His father was buried recently, the plant is bankrupt, none of the machines are working. His words roll out slowly, drunkenly. ‘Holland, ah, Holland, yes. They weren't bad, those Dutch. But so young. Just girls. Supposed to protect us. Made no difference. Waved goodbye to them. Thank you, all of you. So young …’

  Meanwhile, enough books have been written about the Srebrenica debacle to fill three bookshelves. About the taking hostage of the almost 400 UN soldiers, even before the attack, including the 70 or so Dutchbatters who were very publicly shackled to bridges and other objects; a Serb media show that actually did not last much longer than the time the TV producers needed, but which had far-reaching consequences. About the extreme caution exercised by the UN after that, so as not to endanger these men any further. About the ensuing lack of air support, even after Srebrenica had been rolled over and Dutchbat found itself in an extremely precarious position. About the so-called ‘blocking positions’ that the Dutch soldiers had to assume on orders from the Hague, a thin cordon of 50 soldiers and 6 lightly arm
ed armoured vehicles against 1,500 Serb infantrymen backed by tanks. About the inept Dutchbat commander Ton Karremans, who embarrassedly raised a glass with Ratko Mladić for Serbian television and, ten days later, still referred to the Serb general as ‘a professional who knows his stuff’. About the party the Dutch Army top brass threw afterwards for the Dutchbatters.

  When it was all over, the Dutch were accused of laziness and a lack of courage. French president Jacques Chirac felt that ‘l'honneur de la nation’ of the Netherlands had been besmirched, and UN commander Bernard Janvier later told a French parliamentary investigative committee that things probably would have gone quite differently had French soldiers, rather than Dutch, been stationed at Srebrenica: ‘In all honesty I can say that French soldiers would have fought, with all the risks that might have brought with it.’

  But Janvier knew, better than anyone else, that his Dutch blue helmets had been in a hopeless position right from the start. That, after all, was precisely why there were no French troops in Srebrenica: no other country was willing to burn its fingers on the problem. Only the Dutch government was naïve enough for that.

  Before me lie the Dutch newspapers of Monday, 24 July, 1995. ‘A toast to freedom,’ says the headline of the Telegraaf, above a photograph of twelve cheerful Dutch soldiers in Novi Sad, enjoying a post-hostageship meal with the compliments of the Serb government. Most of the other Dutchbatters were welcomed back to Zagreb by Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Prime Minister Wim Kok. In its commentary, the paper writes: ‘Their dedication shows once again how well equipped for its tasks the Dutch military is, when it comes right down to it.’ ‘For Dutchbatter, Serbs are now “the good guys”’, reports NRC Handelsblad. Commander Karremans speaks of an ‘excellently planned offensive’ by the Serbs, who had ‘outmanoeuvred’ the Dutch battalion in ‘spectacular’ fashion.

  In late 1995 – the courageous Catalan war correspondent Miguel Gil Moreno had meanwhile filmed dozens of corpses and mass graves, and Dužsko Tubić had already travelled with David Rhode of the Christian Science Monitor into the killing fields – Ton Karremans was promoted to the rank of colonel. A roll of film shot by a Dutch soldier, with photographs of the events in Srebrenica, had – uniquely in the history of military photography – been destroyed while it was being developed.

  Anyone studying the role of the Netherlands in the Srebrenica affair cannot help but be struck by its unworldliness. Not only during the final events, but even from the start, when parliament and cabinet – with the overweening pride of an all-knowing Western country – light-heartedly plunged the nation into this Eastern European debacle. The Netherlands is not accustomed to power politics, and also has a long non-militarist tradition. No one seems to have thought beforehand about the possibility of some very ferocious fighting around Srebrenica, no one seems to have anticipated that the whole thing could end up in a spree of rape and murder. Here too one finds traces of the compromising spirit of the polder: Dutch blue helmets are known around the world as excellent peacekeepers, better than anyone else at bringing calm to a population – but they are not fighters. The documents released afterwards show that the Dutch gave the highest priority to getting their own troops out safely. In the directives from the Hague given to Commander Karremans on 13 July for his negotiations with Mladić, there is absolutely no mention of protecting refugees: the demands had only to do with Dutch personnel and Dutch material, and with the evacuation of the few locals who worked for the UN.

  On 9 July, just before the fall of the enclave, when an American representative at NATO headquarters in Brussels proposed sending in air support for Srebrenica, the Dutch ambassador refused straightaway: to do that, he said, would be ‘counterproductive’ and ‘dangerous’. In his memoirs, Richard Holbrooke remarks: ‘The first line of opposition [to air strikes] was formed by the Dutch government, which refused even to consider air strikes until all its soldiers had been withdrawn from Bosnia … The Serbs knew that, and held hostage a considerable portion of the Dutch troops … until they had completed their dirty work in Srebrenica.’

  On the morning of 11 July, when the definitive attack on Srebrenica began, NATO planes finally dropped a few bombs on Serb troops around Srebrenica: one tank was probably hit. On behalf of the Serbs, one of the Dutch officers being held hostage immediately phoned his commander: if the air strikes were not stopped immediately, the Serbs would not only shell the refugees and the Dutch compound, but would also kill their Dutch hostages. Without any consultation with NATO or the high command of the UN peacekeeping forces, the Dutch defence minister, Joris Voorhoeve, then called the NATO base in Italy: ‘Stop, stop, stop!’

  The Dutch – with a few exceptions – therefore played a fairly uncourageous role at Srebrenica. The only question is whether, by that point, they could have done otherwise. After all, looked at in the cold, clear light of day, it would have been madness to send only 150 troops into a battle which 4–5,000 motivated and seasoned Muslim fighters no longer dared to enter. The Dutch government found itself trapped – partly by its own doing – in an almost unsolveable deadlock. The Dutch soldiers on the spot were desperate. Some of what happened was not pretty – the mentality was pronouncedly anti-Muslim, the Serbian troops were seen as fellow soldiers – but there is little else for which they can be blamed. During those last few days they helped hundreds of wounded people, and did their best to save what could still be saved.

  Furthermore, at the moment itself no one knew what it would all lead to: a massacre the likes of which Europe had not seen since 1945. The testimony of Serb officers present at Srebrenica, given later at the Yugoslavia Tribunal, showed that it was only after the enclave was taken that they hit upon the idea of killing all the men, in order to avoid the bother of guarding prisoners or dealing with guerrilla fighters. The orders for the massacre were given by Ratko Mladić himself.

  Many of the Muslims killed were not buried. When Dutch journalists Bart Rijs and Frank Westerman visited the area almost a year later, in May 1996, they found at least fifty skeletons, ‘like monstrous marionettes’, still wearing the clothes they had on, on a hillside close to the ruined Muslim village of Islamovici. The possessions of the murdered boys and men were still strewn out across the fields: ‘a rucksack made of flour bags sewn together, a plastic water bottle, an empty wallet, a school ledger full of notes on home economics, a pile of stuck-together colour photos … an identity card with the number BH04439001, registered to Nermin Husejnovic, born 9 June, 1971, in Srebrenica’.

  The three bookshelves full of reconstructions make one thing crystal clear: in summer 1995, all parties – with the exception of the local population – wanted to be shot of Srebrenica. No one was prepared to lift a finger to help. For the Serbs, it was a matter of prestige, an account to be settled, no matter the cost. The Dutch blue helmets wanted only one thing: to get home safely. The UN high command wanted nothing more than to put an end to the chaos surrounding the enclaves in eastern Bosnia. After the fall of Srebrenica – and, a little later, that of žZepa as well – their negotiators were finally able to draw up maps with clear and practicable lines of demarcation.

  The average Bosnian saw Srebrenica as a stronghold of brave resistance, but the Bosnian army command saw things quite differently. Srebrenica had absolutely no strategic value, it was merely a fly in the ointment, it kept troops out of action that were sorely needed elsewhere and it interfered with the formation of clearly defensible front lines. That was almost certainly the background to the ‘kidnapping’ of Naser Orić and the other paramilitary leaders, and to the withdrawal of a great part of the Bosnian troops, leaving the town virtually undefended in summer 1995.

  The fall of Srebrenica, in other words, came as a great relief even to the Bosnian strategists. But no one will ever hear about that.

  Chapter SIXTY-SIX

  Sarajevo

  IT IS SNOWING ON THE HILLS OF BOSNIA. IT SNOWS ON THE OLD trenches around Sarajevo, the blasted trees, the SFOR cars patrolling Pale, th
e little road up to the newly built villa of Radovan Karadžzić. I suggest that we drive past it. ‘No,’ Dužsko says grimly. ‘That would really be very unwise.’ At the entrance to the market sits the picturesque old woman who has appeared on every television screen in the world. ‘So there you are again,’ she shouts to Dužsko. ‘You haven't forgotten what I say, have you? Radovan Karadžzić is and will always remain our president!’ She makes no bones about it: he is her hero, her liberator from the Muslims of today and the fascists of the past; for her all wars have melted into one, and she is willing to protect him with her life.

  We wind our way carefully down the hill. The windscreen wipers sweep the snowflakes aside. On both sides of the border, taxis are huddling against the cold, thirty metres away from each other, strictly divided by descent and religion. No Serb taxi driver dares show his face in Sarajevo, no Muslim in Pale. Anyone who wants to go to the other side has to switch rides. In the middle of the pine forests, a desperate businessman from Belgrade asks us for directions to Sarajevo. The Serbs will only tell him the way to their Sarajevo, and that is Pale. The real city no longer exists for them.

  The snow covers everything: the shiny, rebuilt shopping streets, the ruins of the newspaper building and the antique library, the packed apartments on the outskirts, the street corner along Apple Quay where Gavrilo Princip fired his shots in 1914, the dome and the flashing illuminated minaret of the new mosque, the rusting trams, the fields with their thousands of graves, the shell-blackened flats along the big road – nicknamed Sniper Alley – to the airport. ‘I always had to drive like mad along this road,’ Dužsko says. ‘If you stopped to take a picture, you were safe for three seconds. A sniper needs one to two seconds to spot you, and another three seconds to get you in his sights. With three seconds, you were always okay.’