Jasmina Tesanovic: A Burial in Srebenica

Burial Ceremony in Srebrenica, 11 July 2006
by Jasmina Tesanovic
photos by Biljana Rakocevic

Eleven years after the biggest European genocide since World War Two, little has changed in the Balkans. Eight thousand Muslim civilians were executed in Srebrenica by Serbian soldiers in a couple of days. Some fraction of the bodies have been excavated from mass graves in the passing years, then re-buried on the site with due honors.

I know a woman who lost seven male members of her family in 1995. She told me: during the first years after the pogrom, we were looking for our men. Now we hope to find a bone to bury.

She is smiling, her face has a compulsive yet sincere peace to it. She continues: there is nothing we can do now but wait and hope for peace and justice to reach us all. We don’t want revenge, says her older friend, who lost a 17 year old son in the massacre. I don’t hate Serbian people. I am not afraid of coming to Belgrade even, to follow the trial of those who did it. I was not afraid back then to go to the Serbian authorities in Bosnia and ask for my son. Why should I be afraid now when some of the killers are finally arrested?
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The last session in the special court for war crimes in Belgrade is an upheaval, from the six indicted Scorpions behind the bars and their nationalist defense-lawyers. Only ten days ago the Muslim leader Naser Orlic, who was presumed responsible for war crimes against the Serbs in Srebrenica, was set free by the Hague tribunal: NOT GUILTY. The Serbian paramilitary considered their own depredations to be vengeance against the likes of Orlic. So these Serbian nationalists, who never felt guilty at all, even though they committed the executions and documented it, now hunger for revenge against the acquitted Orlic.

Ratko Mladic, the general responsible for the Srebrenica genocide, has been in hiding for years. The international forces who looked the other way during the killings have not been held to account either. The international troops were not purged, and their own case will be re-opened soon. A new book published by a survivor witness, called From the Grave is demanding that all responsible parties should speak out.

Milosevic died in prison, but was never proved guilty. The American ambassador in Belgrade is asking the Serbian authorities for official indictments for American citizens killed during the '99 Milosevic raid against Albanians -- these emigres were members of the Albanian militia OVK in Kosovo. The Srebrenica mothers are refusing to speak to Carla Del Ponte because of her failure to arrest the Bosnian war criminals. On July 11, Srebrenica was commemorated once again, and the Women in Black, who had a public standing in Belgrade, were insulted as always but had more police protection than usual. The chief inheritors of the Balkan wars are the international network of war criminals, and their busy traffic in sex, weapons and drugs is strengthening in the region: the Globalization of Balkanization...

George Bush took note that paramilitary and terrorists around the world ignore the Geneva war convention, so he unilaterally decided that his national superpower would behave in just the same way.

As citizens of this balkanized globe, what are we waiting for? Do we expect a saviour on a white horse with a nuclear missile on his head? In Auschwitz, the German Catholic Pope asked for the presence of God. I believe that this world's common people could restore its common sense of justice. Srebrenica may be the right place: the valley has the captive beauty of a place of a crime, there where men have wronged the nature rebels.

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Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tesanovic on BoingBoing:

- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women 
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral