Sharing our humanity

On the road to Srebrenica we stopped in the village of Snagovo. In search of the memorial, we asked a man for directions who happened to have helped to exhume the mass grave. The graves in Bosnia are quite complicated. Toward the end of the conflict, the Serbs created several secondary graves – this is thought to be unique to the Bosnian conflict. This means that parts of the remains of a primary grave are relocated to a new site. This, of course, has led to incredible problems with the identification of the dead. In Snagovo thirty-six men were tortured and then shot in front of a garage.  Their bodies were then burned and thrown into a mass grave. The youngest was a one-year-old child. On the memorial it is written: These people were killed solely because they were Muslim.  A woman came out of her home and spoke to us. When Emina, our guide and translator from BILD, greeted her, she said, “How good that you live!”  Her husband had died in the killings. Her daughter, 22, now lives in Tuzla; she is still afraid to sleep alone.

The memorial at Potocari is very moving. Across the street stands the abandoned battery factory, where many of the men were tortured and then killed. This sits on the perimeter of the former Dutchbat base - the UN safe-haven for Srebrenica. The walls of the battery factory are stained with the blood of the victims. The memorial bears the names of the dead. There is also a cemetery where the dead continue to be buried as they are identified. This July, another 500 bodies will be buried.

We then crossed the street to visit the abandoned Dutchbat headquarters.  Inside we met about twenty people sitting and watching the documentary Srebrenica: A Cry from the Grave. When Mladic said, And now we will take our revenge against the Turks, there was a collective gasp. When people in the film gave testimony to what happened, people sighed aloud, and they wept.  And they wept.  It was incredibly painful - but it was a testimony to our need to have others share in our own suffering.  The men and women held each other - they touched each others shoulders - and no one was ashamed of his or her tears. 

Lastly, we visited Srebrenica. It has that eerie feeling of Terezin, where the past has a permanent presence. Since the memorial is in Potocari, we simply drove around the town and left.