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Twenty-five years ago, the isolated, besieged
Bosniak enclave of Zepa fell, concluding a three-week burst of human
expungement on a scale not seen in Europe since World War II.
I was in Zepa when it capitulated on July 25,
1995, one of the few international officials present during the
“genocidal enterprise”, as the Hague Tribunal ruled it, perpetrated
in Srebrenica and Zepa by the Bosnian Serb Army.
Responding to the pleas of central and local
Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) officials, I and my UN peacekeeping mission
colleagues were thrust into direct contact with convicted war
criminals General Ratko Mladic and his top lieutenant, General
Zdravko Tolimir.
The Bosnian Serb Army leadership detested the
Bosniak presence in Zepa, as in Srebrenica, and wasted no time
turning their sights on the hamlet. Only 13 miles from Srebrenica,
Zepa was the smaller, more isolated Bosniak enclave, nestled in a
deep, thickly-forested gorge.
As thousands of Bosniak men and boys from
Srebrenica lay dead in mass graves, and thousands more were moving
through forests at night, traversing minefields and enduring the
fire of pursuing Serb troops, the men of Zepa were Maldic’s next
target.
Unfortunately for Mladic, he underestimated the
pluck and courage of the Bosnian Army Commander, Colonel Avdo Palic.
Palic and his smattering of local fighters were already worn down by
siege and hopelessly outgunned. Both sides had already learned in
neighbouring Srebrenica that the UN would not use force to fulfill
its protection mandate, nor would it call on NATO. But Palic,
following orders from Sarajevo, stubbornly refused to surrender.
When I and my UN civil affairs colleague arrived
on July 19, 1995, Mladic had his troops and artillery deployed on
the hills overlooking the small town. Loudspeakers echoed with
morale-sapping messages, urging the inhabitants to ignore Palic and
give up.
Anticipating imminent capitulation, Mladic greeted
us with the same cocksure vanity that I had observed in ceasefire
meetings in Sarajevo. Suddenly, the thud of cannon fire blunted the
propaganda, as Serb forces relaunched their assault on the town.
Mladic’s mood shifted, and he angrily ordered us to leave.
Palic, whose own family was among the vulnerable
inhabitants, held out for another five days. Unknown to any of us,
that delay would prove to be the salvation for thousands of Zepa
men.
We returned to Zepa when it capitulated on July
25, to find Bosnian Serb Army forces hovering around the town
centre. We were startled to encounter Colonel Palic, a lone
uniformed Bosniak figure of authority who scrutinised the conduct of
the dicey evacuation.
Our UN objective had been reduced to minimising
the trauma of the evacuation of Zepa’s women and children, while
waiting for a potentially disastrous evacuation of the men, linked
to a potential prisoner exchange.
As talks proceeded in Sarajevo, Palic shrewdly
kept his men hidden in the thick forest on the far side of the
gorge, while he, along with the town’s young imam Mehmet Hajric, and
civil protection chief Amir Imamovic, remained behind.
The women and children were terrified, shrieking
whenever a Serb jeep would speed by with its flag resplendent. As
instructed by the UN refugee agency, I dutifully began asking the
women if they were leaving of their own volition. By rote, each
mother nodded her head, except for one who stated: “No, I want to
stay in my home, but who will protect me?”
With that, the woman burst into tears, along with
the rest. I immediately ceased the pointless questioning. Having
received traumatised women from Srebrenica two weeks prior to this,
my colleague and I focused on recording the names of families as
they boarded the bus, and alongside all present – Bosnian Serb Army
soldiers, Palic, and the limited UN military presence – tried to
maximise the negligible dignity and security available.
With the fate of the men of Zepa still in the
balance, I asked Mladic if he would actually allow the UN to
evacuate the Bosniak men across Serb lines to safety. His chilling
answer, I later learned, was the same he had given in Srebrenica:
“Yes, they can go – except for the war criminals.”
But Mladic’s designs were thwarted when he was
quickly forced to redeploy his main forces to the Western front
where the Croats were making a decisive advance. The Zepa men,
spared a direct assault, were tipped off by escapees from Srebrenica
and eventually crossed over into Serbia or managed to get across
Serb lines to Bosniak areas of control.
When Palic was seized from our compound, my
colleague and I gave chase and pressed Mladic about his whereabouts.
Reportedly, this highest-ranking Bosniak prisoner of war was
detained by Serbs forces until he was shot in September 1995, and
buried in a mass grave along with Imam Hajric and town leader
Imamovic.
After the war, I helped his widow, Esma, approach
international officials to press Republika Srpska leadership for
answers about Palic’s disappearance, and the location of his
remains. Palic’s corpse was belatedly located in 2009 and he was
reburied the same year at a central mosque in Sarajevo.
Denying the undeniable
I have testified twice at the Hague Tribunal for
former Yugoslavia as a witness. Along with several individual
genocide convictions at the Tribunal, the International Court of
Justice has also determined that genocide was perpetrated in eastern
Bosnia in July, 1995 – a fact that Serbia has steadfastly refused to
acknowledge.
While the mounting, systematic effort by Serb
officials and sympathisers to deny the Srebrenica genocide has drawn
widespread attention and condemnation, the question of why Belgrade
invests so much energy in denying the undeniable has been
overlooked.
Serb officials have, at times, gone far to
acknowledge the crimes underlying the finding of genocide – only to
backtrack. In 2010, the Serbian parliament narrowly approved a
resolution “severely condemning the crime committed against the
Bosniak population in Srebrenica in the manner established by the
ruling of the International Court of Justice”.
However, just three weeks later, the government of
Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity in Bosnia, began
revising downward a previous government report that had acknowledged
some 8,000 Bosniaks killed at Srebrenica.
The oscillation between embracing the crimes (if
not the genocide) and engaging in denial, corresponds to the wider
struggle among Serbs to define their place after the violent
collapse of Yugoslavia.
Serb officials typically find the courage to
accept the past when – goaded by some EU benchmark – they begin to
accept present-day reality. It was no coincidence that when Dragan
Cavic, then president of Republika Srpska, expressed contrition over
Srebrenica in 2004, Banja Luka was actively cooperating with
post-war Bosnia institutions.
In 2012, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic openly
declared that “there was no genocide in Srebrenica.” The following
year, Nikolic apologised (even asking “for forgiveness for the crime
committed”) – just days after Serbia had concluded a breakthrough
normalisation agreement with Kosovo.
The converse – denial of the past leading to
intransigence – is also true. Cavic’s successor, Bosnian Serb leader
Milorad Dodik, has paired his incendiary rhetoric on Srebrenica,
which he has called “a fabricated myth”, with equally provocative
steps toward secession from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Dodik has advanced the secession bid by imputing a
false parallel to Kosovo’s independence. Belgrade also posits this
linkage. Earlier this month, Serb members of the Kosovo Parliament –
all affiliates of current Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s
ruling party – walked out of a moment of silence for Srebrenica’s
victims.
Vucic himself owns one of the most sinister, and
tragically prophetic remarks of the war. In the very month of the
Srebrenica slaughter, then member of parliament Vucic declared that
“if you kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims”. Vucic, too,
has since zig-zagged between conciliatory statement and radical
veneration of Mladic.
The point is that revision of the Srebrenica
genocide is part and parcel of the continuing assertion of Serb
nationalist territorial objectives in Bosnia and in Kosovo.
“Suffering of Serbs” is built into the name of a commission that
Dodik has set up to relativise the barbarity in Srebrenica as well
as Sarajevo.
Ironically, this same claim – putative Serb
victimisation at the hands of Bosniaks – was employed by the
architects of the genocide, Mladic and Tolimir, to rationalise the
assault and cover its true objective: to rid Republika Srpska of the
Muslim presence in Eastern Bosnia. Dodik’s reprising of the same
grievance narrative advances his own latter-day territorial
objectives in Bosnia.
The controversial idea of a Kosovo-Serbia ‘land
swap’ (code for partition) as part of a final deal to normalise
relations is another by-product of Serbia’s misleading narrative of
victimisation.
Vucic this week invoked the narrative as the chief
argument for Kosovo’s partition: “They [opponents of partition]
wanted Serbia to get nothing, forever. I asked for this one thing
[territory from Kosovo] because so many Serbs suffered.” [author’s
italics]
The Serbian president has ignored determined
efforts by the US and EU to see to it that Serb victims of war
crimes attain justice through the courts, not territory. The very
week that Vucic’s party affiliates in Kosovo walked out on the
Kosovo parliament’s Srebrenica moment of silence, the highest
official in the country, Kosovo President Hashim Thaci, was
undergoing four days of grilling by the prosecutor at the Hague
court that Washington and Brussels created. Thaci has been indicted
for, among other things, his role in committing over 100 murders,
including of Kosovo Serbs.
The whipsaw between occasional contrition and more
frequent revisionism of the past also shapes and reflects Serbia’s
strategic ambivalence. Vucic insists that Serbia will continue to
“balance” its ties between East and West. But that balance has
tipped sharply in favor of Russia and China as Vucic has grown more
authoritarian and more rejecting of Serbian responsibility for the
violent way that Yugoslavia dissolved. Unsurprisingly, Russia
continues to stand in the way of a UN resolution condemning the
Srebrenica genocide.
In short, wilful distortion of the past is a
serious obstacle to stability. Along with condemnation, the most
important step that can be taken to combat it is to vigorously,
consistently, and publicly challenge the relativising and
revisionism.
Much of it stems from the war time allegations
that Mladic and his staff repeatedly made to my UN colleagues about
Bosniak raids on neighbouring Serb villages outside the UN-declared
Srebrenica and Zepa ‘safe areas’. According to the UN’s own
investigative report, based largely on contemporaneous reporting by
the UNPROFOR peacekeeping mission, the charges were specious.
Following a UN-brokered arrangement in April-May
of 1993, “the military situation around Srebrenica was generally
calm”. The UN’s own military estimation – backed up by a Serb
interlocutor – was that the weak, poorly trained and under-armed
Bosniak army in the enclaves “posed no significant military threat”.
Most damning to the revisionists, the Serbs
refused to allow the Dutch UN battalion in Srebrenica to investigate
Serb allegations of Bosniak attacks. As for suffering, the UN report
describes the long-term strangulation, deprivation and danger meted
out to the inhabitants of Srebrenica and Zepa by Bosnian Serb forces
over years.
Dodik’s review commissions will have to explain
how alleged attacks by the Bosniaks after April, 1993 escaped the
reports of a UN apparatus that was not just willing, but eager to
convey them. The UNPROFOR political mission often downplayed Serb
transgressions and hyped Bosniak ones in order to fend off American
demands for NATO air strikes.
The other critical area to challenge is the
veneration of war criminals like Mladic and Bosnian Serb political
leader Radovan Karadzic. The rehabilitation of these odious figures
is an exercise in self-demonisation by Serb leaders like Dodik.
The whole idea of war crimes tribunals is to
individualise the guilt for crimes done in the name of Serbs, by
Serb forces, but not by ‘the Serbs’. Unlike perhaps Dodik, I
witnessed General Mladic, General Tolimir and other senior members
of the Bosnian Serb Army in Zepa and I know that their story is
hardly honourable.
The story of what happened in Zepa reflects the
reality of a war in which one side enjoyed most of the advantages
and the others endured most of the cruelty.
The annals of the Hague Tribunal are filled with
consistent, graphic testimony – including by perpetrators themselves
– of the horrors enacted at Srebrenica and the forced demise of
Zepa, together comprising the eastern Bosnia genocide.
Those who deny this reality only protract the pain
of the Bosniak victims, and extend the burden of the Serb people
whose full emergence from the Yugoslav wars depends on finally
accepting the truth.
Edward P. Joseph served for a dozen years in
the Balkans, including six years in Bosnia and Herzegovina, three of
which were during the war. He teaches Conflict Management at Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
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