Bosnian Muslims Return to Massacre Site--and Serb Hatred That Hasn’t Faded

POTOCARI, Bosnia-Herzegovina — About 3,000 Bosnian Muslims in a heavily guarded convoy of buses passed through jeering crowds of Serbs on Tuesday to pray here at the spot where thousands of men and boys were rounded up for slaughter five years ago.

A massive security operation prevented any serious violence as thousands of Bosnian Serb police officers worked alongside U.S. and other Western troops and United Nations police.

But the effort to protect Muslims returning to a region where they once lived showed how difficult it still is for many Bosnians to go home five years after the war’s end, despite foreign promises to reverse “ethnic cleansing.”

On the eve of Tuesday’s memorial service, someone burned down the house of a Bosnian Muslim planning to move back to Srebrenica, the town adjacent to this Bosnian village. Only three Muslim civilians have returned and stayed in an area where their ethnic group made up about 70% of the population before the 3 1/2-year war began in 1992.

Bosnian Serb forces massacred more than 7,000 Muslims in a few days following the fall of Srebrenica on July 11, 1995, after Dutch troops in the U.N. peacekeeping force surrendered what was supposed to be a “safe area” where the security of refugees was assured.

When Tuesday’s convoy of more than 60 buses carried Srebrenica survivors through the nearby town of Bratunac, a few hundred Bosnian Serbs gathered to wave their three-finger nationalist salute, shout curses and, in at least one case, throw stones.

The Muslims are “the same as in ‘95--the same old savages!” one Bosnian Serb shouted. “You’re going in vain. There’s no mosque there,” taunted another.

The Muslims on the buses simply stared back, or even smiled and waved. But when one man wagged his finger at the crowd, a young Bosnian Serb responded by drawing a single finger across his throat in a slashing motion.

“That is what’s waiting for you!” the Serb screamed at the passing bus.

Srebrenica’s survivors, and relatives of massacre victims, are pressing Bosnia’s foreign administrators to build a memorial here to Europe’s worst war crime since World War II. But most local Serbs refuse to admit that the killings occurred, let alone accept a permanent reminder that they did.

Danko Mirovic, an economist who runs Srebrenica’s youth employment center, is one of the area’s more moderate Serbian voices and says a monument that also honored Serbian victims of Muslim attacks probably would be accepted.

“We also want the truth to come out, but not a one-sided truth,” Mirovic, 38, said in an interview. “I don’t want my child blamed for something that happened during the war.”

To reach the outskirts of Srebrenica, the long convoy had to travel more than 40 miles through Republika Srpska, the Serbian entity that makes up almost 49% of Bosnia-Herzegovina. A loose federation of Muslims and Croats controls the rest.

Though joined by international peacekeepers, thousands of Bosnian Serb police officers were primarily responsible for security. The mourners included Alija Izetbegovic, the Bosnian Muslims’ hard-line leader, who is viewed by Serbs as a war criminal.

As the convoy wound its way past the burned shells of Muslim houses and mass graves where U.N. war crimes investigators have exhumed the bodies of hundreds of Muslims, there was at least one Bosnian Serb police officer standing guard every 100 yards.

In towns and villages, Bosnian Serb police stood at 20-yard intervals, watching apartment balconies and doorsteps to make sure no one hurled any rocks--or worse.

To the surprise of many, the convoy arrived unscathed at the parking lot of a car battery plant here in Potocari. The lot is the site where Bosnian Serb troops under the command of Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is now being sought to face war crimes charges in The Hague, separated Muslims by gender. Thousands of men and boys were transported to their deaths in buses and trucks.

“Did you see what those people in Bratunac did?” mourner Ekrema Salihovic shouted at Wolfgang Petritsch, the Austrian diplomat who helps run Bosnia as the international community’s high representative. “What would happen if we came alone? That’s impossible.”

“Better to kill us,” Meira Ibrahimovic joined in. “We have no more lives.”

After listening to several angry survivors, Petritsch told reporters that Bosnians must confront the terrible crimes committed during the war and begin talking to each other.

“We know from the European experience this is the only way to a better future, if you start talking to each other--if you start helping each other--to rebuild lives,” Petritsch said. “This is the secret of the success of Western Europe, where for hundreds and hundreds of years people were fighting each other.”

Petritsch has been much more aggressive than his predecessors in forcing Bosnian Muslim, Serb and Croat officials to allow refugees to return to their homes. In the first four months of this year, more than 12,500 refugees returned to areas where they are in the minority, a fourfold increase over the same period last year.

However, more than 1 million refugees, most of whom live in Bosnia, still don’t have safe access to their prewar homes, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

And large parts of Bosnia are still dominated by single ethnic groups, undermining the credibility of foreign commitments to a multiethnic and democratic nation.

Tuesday’s ceremony here began with a mournful call to prayer by a Muslim cleric, who spoke the sacred words allahu akbar, or “God is great,” in public for what was probably the first time in the Srebrenica area since the war.

As the words blared from the loudspeakers and echoed off the surrounding hills, Bosnian Serb villagers shouted curses down on the mourners.